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Category: Folk Horror

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Is The Forest Dark The Real Forest Behind The Trees?

An outstanding novel as a model

Fiona Barnett’s excellent novel “The Dark Between the Trees” presents a fascinating idea within a compelling modern story of Forest Horror.

A doomed expedition gets caught in a mysterious, otherworldly forest that is superimposed over the normal forest they enter at the beginning of the story. A huge oak tree disappears overnight, and another realm breaks into the ordinary reality with flickering and shimmering perceptions that appear like hallucinations in the first place and then become a brutal reality.

It’s a fascinating concept since it gives the well-known ideas of the power of places and the zones of the supernatural a new dimension.

The book, which stands in the best tradition of Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen, shows convincingly how a hidden dimension breaks through the fabric of normal reality: 

“There were two forests, and one of them kept flickering into sight – not even on the edge of her vision now – but sometimes right in the middle of it.” (From Fiona Barnett’s book)

Even though it is fiction, it provides a promising premise for real investigations into the unknown.

The zones of the paranormal

The otherworld as an (normally) invisible landscape behind the ordinary makes sense: If we go through the different phenomena of the supernatural, from mysterious light orbs, UFOs, to ghostly apparitions, the lowest common denominator is location:

Again and again, it is certain hotspots: notorious haunted forests, zones where Ufos are seen, bewitched fields – landscapes where things happen.

Local legends and witness accounts “draw” maps over time: There are clusters of mysterious disappearances or places where “lights” are seen more often: Hessdalen in Norway is a prominent place, or the Brown Mountain Lights in the US. Somehow, the otherworldly “landscape” is connected to our landscape. Or is it vice versa? Are our landscapes the “normal”, “visible” part of a larger unknown dimension?

These unknown dimensions might manifest in many ways, and it is the dark forest behind the visible world.  It is the layer between the trees.  A layer where orbs, beasts, and ghostly apparitions can occur. At night. Mostly. And it is indeed, like in the novel, the impression that something gets superimposed over the normal reality. A layer that is active under certain circumstances.

Another interesting concept in the book is the overlapping of different times, which allows one to go missing and still be alive after centuries (no more info here to avoid spoilers). 

It is interesting because we see a common thread that runs through fiction, folklore, and eyewitness accounts of real experiences: It’s always certain places where the veil between ordinary reality and an unknown dimension is thin. Time seems to run different and the motive of getting lost and trapped in a realm where time is different pops up again and again. We see typical motives from the fairy lore here, which then appear again in UFO-stories of close encounters and abductions.

But does it have some real relevance?

Our media is full of replicated content or even KI-created stories. We need to look out for the real stuff: Original field research, original interviews with witnesses, and verified stories. Then it would be interesting to see how much real events reflect this common thread. 

A great discovery is researcher Paul Sinclair, who made the documentary WOLF LANDS, wrote books (Night People and the Truth Proof), and is the creator of a YouTube channel. His channel TRUTH PROOF and work are pure gold in the flood of “automated content”. His expeditions and talks with witnesses often lead to the fascinating forests and landscapes of Yorkshire, which has a reputation for the paranormal. He and his friends and family do what everybody should do who has a serious interest in phenomena: Talk to the people, visit the locations, and – important – analyse. Its a pleasure to have someone who combines open-mindedness and critical thinking, and it is interesting to hear the conclusions of such an experienced researcher. Things shouldn’t be taken too literally.

In one of his best videos, “Something haunts the woods,” he concludes: “Do certain locations guard secret knowledge? Is Danes Dyke ( a forest in Yorkshire) one of those rare places where reality frays at the edges? Here, ancient earthworks stand watch over centuries of whispered tales… To some, Danes Dyke is just a relic of a forgotten age. but to those who know its secrets…it’s a gateway to something far stranger” (Taken from the video description). 

What we see again and again is that there is a convergence here. Fiction and researchers paint a similar picture, and also that researchers, authors, and scientists coming from different perspectives and different backgrounds often present similar conclusions after years of thinking and working on these themes.

Many insights from Paul’s videos find confirmation in the writings of Patrick Harpur and Jacques Vallée. Again, the common denominator is the power of place; it is location. The best of fiction, such as Fiona Barnett’s “The Dark Between The Trees” or the classics from Algernon Blackwood (The Willows, The Wendigo), takes these insights further and is also a way to deepen our understanding of an otherworld which might be right next door. Another world, which indeed is a Forest Dark.

T

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Liminal Spaces In The Forest – Do they exist?

Peter Engelmann, November 24, 2025

What do we mean by liminal spaces?

Over the past decade, the term’ liminal spaces’ has gained popularity. The reason is the modern use of “liminal” within the internet culture. The most prominent example is the backrooms, which originated in the creepy pasta subculture.

The Backrooms are mostly abandoned spaces that exist in an intermediate realm between our world and another dimension, but are also sometimes claimed to be real. They emerged more like an urban legend rather than an actual discovery, and were visualized by filmmaker Kane Parsons on YouTube with his channel Kane Pixels. The foundation was the original backroom picture posted on 4chan, which depicts an abandoned office space with fluorescent light, green-yellowish walls, and old carpets. The picture and the videos present an unparalleled eeriness and become a setting for many follow-up horror stories with the labyrinthine and endless office spaces increasingly populated by monsters and other creatures. Meanwhile, the A24 studio is preparing a Backrooms movie.

The backrooms concept is particularly interesting because of the otherworldly concept: Entering the backrooms is based on the premise that one enters the backrooms by “no-clipping“, which means slipping from our normal reality into the backrooms. This term stems from gaming language but represents an old idea in connection with the otherworld: you could slip through reality into another realm and be caught there.

Folklore is full of such stories, where people went off the way and ended up in fairyland. Sometimes, as in the Rip Van Winkle Story, time runs differently than in ordinary reality, and the protagonist spends ages there.

The similarity between the Otherworld in folklore and liminal spaces was also identified by Ethan Sabatella in Senchas Claideb: “The concept of liminality in storytelling is nothing new and has motifs in folk traditions spanning back for centuries”.

The no-clipping concept is one fascinating example of how an old concept of the otherworld reemerges into the modern digital world. The whole liminal spaces phenomenon proves that the otherworld always finds a backdoor to slip into our modern consciousness.

It’s not surprising that these transition spaces between the ordinary world and the intelligible higher (spiritual world) take the shape of abandoned malls or empty labyrinthine office spaces. Imagination is at work here, and otherworldly or daimonic visionary worlds often take shape, which makes sense for the individual experiencing it. An abandoned office space makes more sense in our mechanistic, technological-dominated world as a cave inmidst the woods where fairies or dragons reside.

However, there is more to these liminal spaces. They are at the same time familiar and not familiar; they are like lost places, but seem less defined, more out of touch with ordinary reality.

The strong impact the images and videos on the web have lies with their representation of the uncanny. The uncanny is always at the core of horror and has a much stronger effect than any monster that might occur later in the videos.

The basic principle of the uncanny is that something that should be normal becomes unsettling.

This is where liminal spaces become interesting: it’s often the most normal, even boring places that become unsettling just because one or two things are changed:

An airport stripped of passengers, an empty mall where usually shoppers fill shops, or an endless office space where people work.

It’s maybe not a surprise that these liminal spaces became popular at the time when the pandemic happened.

During the corona crisis, a lot of normal places became temporarily similar liminal spaces: streets without pedestrians or train stations without people.

That uncanny feeling is not so much an intellectual experience, but rather an emotional one or something which comes from deep inside: The fear that our normal world is fragile, that in truth everything can fall apart at any time.

Furthermore, it is the anxiety that goes on in these rooms and the idea of being trapped without escape. However, it is not only anxiety; it is the typical ambiguous feeling in horror of being attracted to something and being repulsed at the same time. Attracted because the room might represent something of the past we are longing for and repulsed because of the nightmarish scenario of being imprisoned in an otherworldly realm that is just bleak, cold, and merciless.

Is the forest a good candidate for a liminal space?

We find different opinions about this question. At first sight, the forest might be something completely different, because it is a natural world – the fear in the forest is created by other factors, like getting lost or paranormal phenomena, and it is not related to these more technological liminal spaces which dominate the liminal spaces subculture on the web.

In a more traditional sense, the forest is full of liminal spaces: There are many areas where the mysterious and the familiar merge as secret groves or edges of the forest. The core idea of the liminal spaces is their transitional nature; it is about potent places, and they can change the visitor fundamentally.

If we dig further into the definition of liminality, it has a double meaning. It can be both spatial and non-physical states, such a rites of passage.

The forest as a setting for rites of passage is nearly a stereotype, which perhaps makes the extreme opposite – urban areas, lost industrial places – attractive for subculture to be different.

However, that is not what we mean by liminal spaces in the forest when it comes to the Otherworld, because the forest is not just a metaphor or setting; here, the forest is a daimonic entity itself. It is full of soul and can be as shapeshifting as the industrial liminal spaces.

In many stories and accounts, the familiar forest becomes uncanny. A wanderer gets lost because landmarks are suddenly not there, animal noises disappear, and lighting becomes more unnatural, even though it was daylight a few minutes ago.

Then we find ourselves often lost, cut off from civilization, and unable to navigate a dense and confusing environment. This leads to paranoia and a breakdown of sanity.

We see some obvious similarities between modern liminal spaces and the dark forests of this world.

However, the much more interesting similarity is grounded in the very fabric of reality as described by Patrick Harpur as daimonic reality, in which the Otherworld is defined “as a subtle, intermediate realm of existence, also referred to as Daimonic Reality, that is neither purely objective (physical) nor purely subjective (psychological)“. 

Most important here is the definition of the Otherworld as an intermediate realm:

Intermediary Realm: The Otherworld sits “in between” the spiritual/intelligible world and our familiar material, sensory world. It is this “middle realm” that allows for communication and mediation between human beings and “the gods” or the divine.

In Harpur’s definition, the Otherworld is a liminal space, per se. The modern liminal spaces are excellent representations of the old idea of the Otherworld in a new form. Their constant shape shifting and ambiguity, real/not real, meet exactly the long tradition of descriptions of the otherworld.

In this sense, the question is not if the forest is a liminal space because certain dark forests and modern liminal spaces as the backrooms, are both manifestations of the Otherworld.

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Why do motives in Folk Horror feel familiar?

What is Folk Horror?

Folk Horror is a subgenre of horror—often literary or cinematic—that draws on rural settings, archaic beliefs, rituals, and pagan traditions. It emphasizes the persistence of older, often pre-Christian ways of life that exist beneath or alongside modern civilization.

However, Folk Horror wouldn’t work if its stories didn’t feel familiar or ring true, if they were a mere invention of novelists and screenwriters. Folk horror is largely about something “ancient” that has survived: an ancient cult, an ancient force, or an ancient ritual. When movies or folk-horror-themed books were written, the writers could already rely on an existing foundation. Part of that foundation is landscape as a mysterious and living entity with magical forces.

Power Of Place

The power of place, which might not sound very credible in our rational, scientific world, is nevertheless a well-known, familiar concept. It works for the subgenre of folk horror as for its relatives, cosmic horror and forest horror. The idea that landscape is more than mere soil, more than hills and valleys, is a well-known concept.

In Folk Horror, the landscape itself is a living entity with intentions. It can change the mood of characters immediately. It can trigger fear, panic, dread, or even a deep sadness. In folk horror, the idea of psycho-geography is alive. It might be the mere shape of the landscape, but often mountains, forests, or a lake hold magical power. They are the seat of the elder gods or work as a storage where memories of battles and horrific events are stored. The power of place is responsible for mysterious disappearances or unusual crime rates.

Clues in Literature

Let’s start with the obvious. This influential book reads like a foundation for Folk Horror:

James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (first published in 1890, expanded through 1915) is a monumental work of comparative anthropology and mythology. It investigates ancient religious rituals, magic, fertility cults, and mythic archetypes—particularly focusing on the dying and reviving god.

And here is another one: The Witch-Cult in Western Europe is a 1921 anthropological book by Margaret Murray, published at the height of the success of Frazer’s Golden Bough.[1] Certain university circles subsequently celebrated Margaret Murray as the expert on Western witchcraft, though her theories were widely discredited. Over the period 1929-1968, she wrote the “Witchcraft” article in successive editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

Both books may have been outdated or, in some aspects, even refuted by modern science, but they are still an excellent reference for models and images that exist in the collective consciousness. They are part of our imagination.

Without these foundations, Folk Horror and often Forest Horror as well wouldn’t work. We accept the (weird) idea that the land is character and can even have its own intention, yes, that the forest itself can drive us into insanity because there is an existing framework. Underneath the bleak and technological surface of our modern world, magic and ancient belief systems have survived. These belief systems took on many shapes and were sometimes incorporated by modern religion, for example, Thanksgiving.

But it needs more than tradition or repeating patterns in movies and literature to do the trick – what happens in a movie like The Ritual must feel true, we must feel the ominous power of the land like in The Witch. One explanation is that our rational mind might deny the supernatural force of a landscape, but our instincts tell us another story. We don’t believe in the secret cult behind the mountains in the remote village, but we suspect it exists.

A famous case happened once on the Danish Island of Anholt when a few findings of ritualistic items led to the wildest speculations about a “satanic-cult“. Even murder was suspected. It was a professor of Folklore Studies from Regensburg, Bavaria, Christoph Daxelmueller, who shed light on an interesting phenomenon: There was never any convincing evidence for rituals or the existence of a cult on the island of Anholt. Instead, it was an existing construct in people’s minds that led to misleading conclusions. He assumes that magical thinking endured over the centuries and even the scientific revolution. As he said in his book “Aberglaube, Hexenzauber, Höllenängste”, “As a system of thought, magic draws on the idea of the sympathetic structures of the cosmos. The interweaving of macrocosm and microcosm enables a network of communication between humans and gods or demons, with magical rituals representing pictorial and symbolic acts for the mediumistic beings performing them” (translated). And this heritage played a pivotal role in the speculations about the ritualistic items found on Anhold.

Imagination Is Key

The heritage of magical thinking is essential for folk horror to be effective. But it is not just a cultural construct conveyed by books, stories, and films that matters. It is about what we feel about these stories. Even the rational mind remains skeptical; instinct often tells us a different story. And our imagination:

It is not necessary to play a true or not-true game, but folk horror stories and forest horror give us a glimpse of a deeper truth, of a hidden world behind our everyday reality where unseen forces shape destinies and form our lives in secret ways.

To create or properly understand this genre, we need to embrace the concept of imagination as William Blake did: a storehouse of images and collective memories, and a way to see the world with a deeper vision or double vision, as Blake said.

Folk horror motives feel familiar because we learned about them through cultural tradition, but also because they are part of our imagination, where archetypal images are stored like (sometimes) forgotten memories.

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Connection Between Paranormal Activity and Crime?

A strong connection between paranormal activity and crimes is one of the most common motives in fiction, but also in lore and in so-called true stories. There are a number of stories where the paranormal activity is considered the cause of the crime. This applies especially to hotspots like the Bridgewater triangle.

Is this a cheap excuse for criminals? Of psychopaths who want to evade persecution? Or is there more to this? Fact is that haunted landscapes are often related to a higher number of extraordinary crimes, among them shocking crimes, satanic rituals, abductions, or mysterious disappearances.

There are many arguments against paranormal influence triggering malevolent human behaviour. We are fully responsible for our actions. Claims of “a voice told me to do this” are either cheap excuses or the result of conditions like Schizophrenia. But there are perhaps natural and less natural trigger effects that can play a role.

In the case of the Bridgewater triangle, where all sorts of crimes happened as animal mutilation or vandalism, but also serious crimes as murders, copycatting might play a role. Groups of people were attracted to the reputation of the place and started their own nonsense.

There should also be other sets of circumstances considered when it comes to hotspots for crimes in forests, mysterious mountain regions, swamps, and other areas. These include remote, abandoned regions that are less densely populated, which have served as a refuge for drug dealers and other criminals. Alternatively, there may be little law enforcement in a certain region.

There is also the question of what happened in the first place

A murder and an unsolved crime are the most common reasons for later paranormal activity.

A ghost of the victim of a murderer seeking revenge. Or the crime is unsolved, and the ghost haunts the place in order to bring the murderer to justice. The brutal crime left a residue, like a memory stored at the place it happened. Many hauntings in houses or special places are connected with crimes.

Sometimes it is said that the original crime leads to paranormal activity, which causes further crimes. A house or a place, or a forest is cursed.

This is the case with the Bridgewater triangle and the Freetown Fall River Forest: The brutal murder of Indian American king Philip and the slaughter of the American indian tribes there is one reason for the curse of the Bridgewater triangle, according to some believers.

However, this is a prominent example of how it works both ways.

People also say that the massacres and the betrayal that happened there are the result of ancient, old, darker forces. That’s hard to believe, as indigenous people were slaughtered nearly everywhere in the New World.

Another reason why we may attribute crimes and other events to paranormal activity is our own mindset. Everybody knows the “local legend” concept used in countless movies and stories. The lore of haunted places goes way back to the times of the Old Testament. This creates two effects: We attribute certain traces, events, and types of crimes as ritualistic, even if there might be no occult background here. Often, it is conspiracy theories that have a life of their own in our world, which create a certain interpretation. The second effect is that we see the paranormal at work even in cases where there is no evidence for this, but there is a long and strong tradition of storytelling shaping our thinking.

Nevertheless, the “power of place” is a concept well known around the world, and there are things that cannot easily be explained away.

What is the power of place?

We are talking about a less comprehensible force and a much more mysterious force, rather than a curse or a haunting. The power of place might also be something much more complex than a vortex or a portal. And not something which is the main cause of a specific event.

It is the “something” in the trees, in the fields, in the earth, that we can never comprehend. We can feel it, it is the subtle force shaping things at certain places, not a voice but an ancient influence.

It would be naive to attribute certain events or even crimes to that force, but perhaps there is a tendency in certain places to make things more likely to happen here as in other places. Mysterious disappearances are a prominent example – conditions of a landscape, like a wilderness, can only partly explain the statistics.

The key characteristics of paranormal zones remind us that we have to abandon the normal ways of thinking in our everyday world if we want to get a sense of the unknown. Things are more paradoxical than logical. The otherworldly realm even demands we accept contradictions.

Any of these zones, like the Bridgewater Triangle, the Alaska Triangle, or the Bennington Triangle, are hotspots of countless bizarre phenomena which are not simple UFOs or hauntings. They appear to shape human history in mysterious ways over longer, eternal periods, and not as a sort of intervention that causes an individual to do a certain thing.

Why is that?

If we look at the Bridgewater Triangle, we have reports of all kinds of phenomena: Thunderbirds, UFOS, Bigfoot, little people, giant cats, orbs, experiences of being watched, a sense of sylvan dread, a mysterious hitchhiker, a trucker pursuing drivers on a lonely road, mysterious disappearances, satanic rituals, briefly the whole set of strange phenomena. This is odd. The popularity of such places might trigger hoaxes or people invent things, but it is still remarkable. Things that can’t be explained away happen. And there is a blurred line between normal reality and the otherworldly here. The phenomena are real but not literally real. This is the biggest challenge for the human mind. But it explains why there is no simple connection between crime and paranormal activity.

One of the researchers of the Bridgewater triangle said that whatever resides there is an old soul. This is a good image. Something that works in large periods and something that doesn’t relate to humankind in a way we understand. It is more something that exerts a hidden influence upon us.

What does this force want?

Of course, there is no simple answer to this. Perhaps it is the transformative power of nature. William P. Simmons writes in Lost in the Wildwood: Sylvan Dread in Weird Fiction: In the confused paths of our minds, the forest is always there, ready for us to enter, ready to enter and transform us. For centuries, our imaginations have populated the forest with mythical beasts and beings, ancient powers that inspire delight and dread. Old Gods flourish in Oak trees and rivers, Elemental spirit walk borderlands of soul and soil. The Earth itself, imbued with a secret sacred sentience, hints of vast possibilities that we cannot define.” He speaks of a “cosmic intelligence beyond our logic and science, facts and spreadsheets. A secret soul both malevolent and nourishing”.

What exactly this force does, we don’t know. What we do know is that extreme circumstances bring out the best but also the worst in men. A famine, isolation, and starvation can awaken barbaric impulses. Civilisation is always a thin layer, barbarism is never far away. But the cause of horrific actions or crimes is never a power of place, or nature, it is what already exists in humankind.