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Category: Forest Horror

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Ancient Sites In The Forest

The secret cult in a remote town is a common element in many folk horror stories and movies. In weird tales, particularly in the genre of cosmic horror, there is another dominant motive: The pagan temple or shrine deep in the forest. Some stories use it as a backdrop or the setting where the secret cult meets in the middle of the night but there is more to it.

The pagan shrine in the forest is often a prerequisite. The old powers are still there. It is a place of power, a place of transformation and often a gate to the otherworld. The place is the center of the story. It is more important as it appears at first sight.

Arthur Machen’s short story The White People published 1904 is a good example to approach this subject. H.P. Lovecraft appreciated this extraordinary storyteller and named him one of the four modern masters of the weird tale. Arthur Machen stands in the tradition of other British writers as Algernoon Blackwood and M.R. James.

Arthur Machen, a Welsh writer, was born March 1863 and died December 1947. He is best known for “The Great God Pan”. Machen influenced the writings of many other writers in the genre.

The White People is also considered as an outstanding example of the supernatural fiction genre. The premise is pretty much what the genre is essentially about Michael Dirda, a book critic for the Washington post, wrote: “If I were to list the greatest supernatural short stories of all time, I would start with Arthur Machen’s ‘The White People,’ about a young girl’s unknowing initiation into an ancient, otherworldly cult”.

One interesting thing here is the epilogue. In the end this girl is dead. They find the girl in the woods near a Roman statue. This relict is a crucial element even it appears only as a detail in the story and it is not a big temple. But it is the ancient site in the forest which makes things happen (in the story there are of course other elements as a nurse as a guide-character, too.) The statue is obliterated in the end.

Influence

Machen grew up in Caerleon on Usk, in the county of Gwent, South Wales. This region is full of ancient sites from the Roman-British era and provided a lot of inspiration. In the 1870s archaeologists dug up Roman sculptures and inscripted stones in the area.

The Friends Of Arthur Machen write on their website: “Machen’s grandfather had found Roman inscriptions and carvings in his own Caerleon churchyard, and the boy’s imagination was captured early by the sense that the ground itself was haunted with a tangible and pagan strangeness”

And the Wales Arts Review emphases the otherworldliness of this extraordinary landscape: “He (Arthur Machen) also possessed a singularly strange vision of Gwent – regarding the landscape, with his birthplace of Caerleon at its spiritual centre, as some form of portal in which all time could be collapsed and all concepts of space exploded”. 

Furthermore Machen regarded the landscape of Gwent in a way which is at the bottom of the whole genre of cosmic horror: “.. a means by which the universe beyond the obscuring veil of our perceived ‘real’ world might be glimpsed – one in which Keats’ notion that ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ was an objective and eternal law.”

The ancient sites are the symbol of a haunted landscape. And it seems they are generators where otherworldly energies concentrate. We find this concept in literature, film, for example the pagan statue in Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth and in reality itself. Janet and Colin Bord wrote a whole series of books about these places, for example Ancient Mysteries Of Britain. They give not only an impressing overview about this unparalleled heritage of mysterious sites but write also about experiments to grasp the so-called earth energies as the dragon project 1979.

The ancient sites seem a place where the elder gods still reside. Arthur Machen also referred to Nodens, a celtic God in his influential “The Great God Pan“. Again there is a “reference” in the British Landscape, the Lyney Park Roman Park (close to The Forest Of Dean). A Roman-British temple is dedicated to Nodens there. J.R.R. Tolkien did some research here. We can be sure that this work deeply impressed Tolkien.

History

Of course, there is a much deeper dimension when it comes to these ancient shrines and their reputation as power places and gates to the otherworld. One author which created the idea of the cult site in the forest is certainly Tacitus.

Tacitus delivers the connection to the woods which becomes a stable premise for many writers, artists and historians. Tacitus writes: “The Germans do not think it in keeping with the divine majesty to confine gods within walls or to portray them in the likeness of any human countenance. Their holy places are woods and groves, and they apply the names of deities to that hidden presence which is seen only by the eye of reverence”.

Historians later find everywhere impressing remains of the old religion. An example is the Gamla Uppsala, a pagan site where there was a temple was dedicated to Thor, Odin and Freys. The difference to ancient Roman and Greek culture is obvious: Often the greek temples were inside the cities and close to civilisation.

In the northern latitudes it is a different story. Here, the lonely forested landscapes with huge mountains and the cult site within become an echanchted and often haunted landscape. The elder gods still roam these forests and the ritual sites are the place to meet them.

Gothic literature and painters make plenty use of this heritage. See the ruins in Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings or the setting in the literature of European romanticism (for example: Der Runenberg, Ludwig Tieck). Of course, it has not always a pagan temple. Friedrich’s paintings depict ruins of a cloister. Churches and cloisters are often placed at former pagan cult sites.

Subsequently there was already a long tradition there which the masters of the modern supernatural story made plenty use of.

Arcane Rituals

The cult site in the forest is a place for secret gatherings. The White People for example contains some detailed descriptions of these playful and dionysian rituals. There are very obvious parallels with beltane festivities and we see that connection between an ancient temple or a ruin in the forest very often also in movies, as the folk horror classic Blood On Satan’s Claw. It is indeed more or less an essential part in these stories.

The Place Is Alive

Gatherings in the forest might be a very common motive. However, after a somewhat dry philosophical prologue, The White People offers a unique visionary experience at a big bare place in the mountain forest, which is not only interesting as an extraordinary supernatural tale. From a modern point of view this an archetypical encounter with the otherworld.

Any words of the protagonist, a thirteen-fourteen year old, that describes a journey into an otherworldly realm, are far from any folklore or fairytale. She labels her live-changing experiences in the “green book” (an old book which serves as a sort of diary) as the white day. On one afternoon the girl walks into an unknown forest landscape where an incredible adventure awaits her. She follows narrow trails and ends up on a big bare place.

Machen does not describe the place as an ancient temple or cult site in an explicit way but we get that impression. The visionary experience that follows bears similarities of reports of alien-abductees or shamanic journeys. Already the journey to that places has the typical qualities of a transition from the ordinary into an otherworldly realm. The girls crosses a forest dark, where the woods are an ominous threatening place:  “I looked out from them and saw the country, but it was strange. It was winter time, and there were black terrible woods hanging from the hills all round; it was like seeing a large room hung with black curtains, and the shape of the trees seemed quite different from any I had ever seen before”. Nothing seems like an ordinary forest here.

Machen now describes something which is similar to people who went missing and were found later and then told rescuers an unbelievable story: “Then I sat down on the stone in the middle, and looked all round about. I felt I had come such a long, long way, just as if I were a hundred miles from home, or in some other country, or in one of the strange places I had read about in the “Tales of the Genie” and the “Arabian Nights,” or as if I had gone across the sea, far away, for years and I had found another world that nobody had ever seen or heard of before, or as if I had somehow flown through the sky and fallen on one of the stars I had read about where everything is dead and cold and grey, and there is no air, and the wind doesn’t blow”. Note the mention of “another world” which is obviously on another plane of reality.

We don’t know if what happens belong to the imagination of the storyteller or if it is real. First, she sees something, which could be a sort of a cult-site: “… I could see nothing all around but the grey rocks on the ground. I couldn’t make out their shapes any more, but I could see them on and on for a long way, and I looked at them, and they seemed as if they had been arranged into patterns, and shapes, and figures.”

A moment later it happens. The place becomes alive and what happens is somewhere between the supernatural and a psychedelic trip: “I got quite dizzy and queer in the head, and everything began to be hazy and not clear, and I saw little sparks of blue light, and the stones looked as if they were springing and dancing and twisting as they went round and round and round. I was frightened again, and I cried out loud, and jumped up from the stone I was sitting on, and fell down”.

This weird experience serves as a call to adventure for the girl which doesn’t end well. She is found dead under mysterious circumstances.

Another remarkable element in the story is the White people and other inhabitants of the forests. We think immediately about the parallel with Referent Kirk’s The Secret Commonwealth about the fairy kingdom, and from a modern point of view, there is something alien about these creatures. The encounter with the White People bears many similarities with stories of encounters with the little greys from the Ufo-folklore.

From a modern point of view there might be some critical points about this classic story of Arthur Machen. One of the subplots transport cliches about witches and (maybe unintentionally) it sounds like there is a misogynist tendency here. But, nevertheless we find that one specific quality here which makes a true story of cosmic horror compelling. It is a story which feels strangely familiar.

Ancient sites as temples in the woods or ritual sites seem to have an important place in our minds in many aspects. Perhaps it is a cultural heritage, perhaps the secret place in the woods is indeed a common archetypical image.  But the ancient place is also not only connected with arcane rituals but as a point of transition into the otherworld and where men encounters the phenomenon of the others (the elves, the white people, the little greys) which does accompany us from the very beginnings. It is also a theme in The Forest Dark movie project where  there is also an ancient plays which become an important setting in the story.

There was an interesting moment in regard of The White People. I wondered if I had read Arthur Machen’s short story perhaps a long time ago, because it felt so familiar. But I am sure this is not the case. It felt more like we come automatically across the same building blocks for stories if it comes to otherworldly journeys. Sure, we read all the same genre books and see the same movies, but there seems more to it. It is like connecting to the Otherworld itself, which in a sense is a storehouse of images. From time to time writers enter that storehouse of images and borough valuable images from there.

Peter Engelmann, 11.29.2022

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The Memory Of The Forest

by Peter Engelmann,  June 25, 2021

The forest never forgets. The forest is like a storehouse of the past. Writers and filmmakers use the forest regularly as the place where the hero faces the past. Sometimes it’s the hero’s own past. Sometimes it is related to the location. Secrets and old legends get revealed in the darkness of the forest.

However the forest is more than a metaphor where someone gets confronted with his own past. In a very literal sense the forests of our Earth store information about the past. Scientists learn from old trees about historical events like climate change or the outbreak of a volcano. A tree’s annual rings are like a chronology of the past.

A forest is a place of constant change. During the summer the forest is full of life. In winter there is death. Nevertheless information never gets lost in the forest. The whole network of plant life saves information about the things which happened in the past.

There are not only traces of natural events like wildfires in the forest. In the forest sometimes things appear which had been buried for centuries. The relicts of battles of the past as the ancient battles of the Romans against the Barbarians in the German forest are still there. Archeologists visit the forest regularly.

Traces From The Past

Some say there is more to this. The ghosts of fallen soldiers of long forgotten battles still roaming the woods. In some nights the lonely souls of victims of crimes can be seen and heard. And of course there is the witch which was banned from the community hundreds of years ago. What if events and the traces of entities from the early days of Earth are also stored up here? Something which is still alive in a sense? The forest as a whole might be a storage medium for many things.

But people going into the forest and discovering their own past? That might work in a psychological sense if you are alone for a longer time memories might come up. What if you find something in the forest which is connected to your own past? Something which was lost and suddenly lies there in front of you. If this happens in a fictional story it sounds like the typical intervention of the writer.

It’s another story if the person has the same places visited before or has lived in a certain place. Then a trip into the forest can be an experience where memories which were suppressed for a long time come back. In these cases the forest might be sort a catalyst. Perhaps it works in the sense of synchronicity – something from the inner life gets materialised in the outside world.

Driftwood In The Forest

The forest is a place where things disappear and return. And here is the strange thing. Sometimes it’s like at a beach where the sea returns something which was swallowed for a long time. Now its flotsam. We know about incredibly strange missing 411 cases: Search and rescue diligently searching the same area several times and finding nothing. Then, sometimes many years later lost items or even a person resurfaces.

There might be even more to this if we think of the intermingling of dimensions or distorted timelines. We are used to think in linear timelines. Some experiences suggest that we could get into places where timelines are somehow distorted or different. Future and past is not what we think it is. Or lets say its something we should explore deeper.

Time

Of course there is a lot of speculation here. However it is interesting how many people which had a strange experience in the woods reports weird things about the perception of time too. Sometimes its missing time. Sometimes present and past intermingle. Memories can get lost or somebody remembers things and has no idea where that information did come from. If we remember the saying “the forest is what’s between the trees” it might open up many ideas. Maybe its some people who are wired to higher dimensions which have that kind of experience. They can connect to the subspace or alternate stream of reality. If there is sort of a subspace out there it might be something similar to our world wide web: a neural network where memories and information is stored.

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Portals

Portals are very common in science-fiction and fantasy. There is even a preset in a compositing software for an interdimensional portal. They are a popular explanation for paranormal phenomena. Portals can be many things. Popular examples are wormholes connecting distant places. They are doors into the unknown. Most of all they question our idea of reality. Portals suggest that reality is not what it seems.

For a long time portals were only an idea both in fiction and scientific theories. Then NASA found them – in some way. NASA discovered so-called X-points connecting Earth directly with the upper atmosphere of the sun. According to NASA, they are “Mingling lines of magnetic force from the sun and Earth criss-cross and join to create the openings. “X-points” are where the criss-cross takes place. The sudden joining of magnetic fields can propel jets of charged particles from the X-point, creating an “electron diffusion region.” But what do these portals? What are the effects? The scientists say that portals can heat the upper atmosphere or create impressing auroras.




The X points of NASA are electromagnetic portals which still exist in our known realm of science. If they exist there is a good chance that there are other portals out there as shortcuts or opening to other dimensions. If we think of the portal to explain unknown phenomena like the Bennington triangle we can use the known portals like the X points as a model.

The effect of interdimensional portals

Thus, we should think again what a portal does? It is a door, but also a gateway. It has a certain effect. Subsequently, a traveller from another place could visit our place, our neighbourhood, our dimension. Vice versa somebody entering a portal from our side could travel to another place, another dimension, perhaps a different time. Portals are often mentioned in connection with mysterious vanishings. Some people think portals could be an explanation for the missing 411 cases.

Portals as displays

Portals are not only shortcuts and “black holes” where something can vanish without a trace. They seem to appear as reality shifters. Portals seem to change the normal world in certain places. They might be behind certain Ufo-sightings and supernatural phenomena. We know about many areas where not only people disappear or there are sightings but where everything seems “wrong”. There is something wrong with time, there are disturbances in gravity and any kind of spooky things happen. Skinwalker Ranch is an example as a place where many weird things happen at the same time. The same applies obviously to Glastenbury. This is also what the forest dark is: In these haunted areas everything is different. Here, our ordinary reality is a mask and some uncanny otherworld is the real face. This suggests that portals could work as a kind of display, like a TV-screen showing us glimpses of another world. However, unlike our TV-set the other world is not really separated. It is a display which connects directly with our realm. Maybe it is more like a holo-deck. Of course, it is difficult to prove this kind of portals. The problem at the bottom is our ability to understand portals. It is a bit like cat and dogs watching TV. They do actually watch TV. Obviously they only have a different interpretation of the display. Cats sometimes look at what is behind the TV-set.

The zones are the portals

We often hear that there are portals within the well-known zones like the Bridgewater Triangle (Free-Town Fall River State Forest). For example, a witness in the excellent documentary based on David Paulides 411 missing cases of hunters said that he even heard something like a giant steel-trap. Thus, there is a tendency to think that this might be hidden doors in a certain place. However, if we look at the whole picture we see that we have certain places or regions which appear somehow disconnected from ordinary reality in some way. We hear about the same constellation of phenomena. Often there are light orbs, sightings of monsters and mysterious vanishings. This is like one giant glitch in the matrix. Perhaps it is more accurate to think of these zones as the portal. We don’t need to search for the portal in a zone because the zone itself is the portal. Of course, this is a theory – perhaps fiction. But if we remember the definition of the NASA discovery of the X point portal this idea makes some sense: The portal creates a tunnel where particles from the sun have an effect (heating up the upper atmosphere, geo storms etc.). Now, what if we have portals opening a gate for other particles or even entities? They could create any kind of effect – something which we see as a supernatural phenomenon or even influence human behaviour. We know that the Free-Town Fall River State Forest has a sad history of crime. Even it is wild speculation, it is worth to think why certain places have such a high crime rate. Maybe one day we will discover an influence we haven’t thought of in our wildest dreams. There is an interesting observation in the collection of the missing 411 cases about mysterious vanishings in the forest: It happened in places where there is no wildlife. Animals, as we know, have a very good instinct.

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Forest Survival And Strange Missing Cases

Forest Horror is often about strange disappearances. It is about survival. People die because they are scared to death. Some stories claim that they are based on true events. But is there a real background? According to many sources, it is and what happens goes sometimes beyond our imagination.

Survival in the forest can mean a couple of different situations. A survival situation develops very quickly. People get lost. People lose orientation or get hurt. People get sick. Wild animals could pose a serious threat, even this is not the wilderness of former days with many bears or mountain lions. (Statistically, the most dangerous animals in our times are ticks as carriers of diseases). Of course, in a tropical forest, there are still deadly snakes. In the Northern hemisphere encounters with bears could still go wrong. Wolf attacks are very rare but they exist too.

Throughout history, there are numberless accounts of alleged supernatural attacks. Are they real? There is probably a very thin line between fear, self-deception and hallucination and real unexplainable events. If we leave civilisation and if we are alone in an unfamiliar environment our mind can easily trick us but sometimes the danger is very real. Several missing person cases lead to disturbing conclusions.

Surviving a supernatural attack means not only physical survival. Dion Fortune described in her book “Psychic Self-Defense” different types of psychic attacks. These attacks do not automatically pose a life-threatening situation. However, people could become sick. Many people have psychological problems. This applies particularly to close encounters. Survival means not to lose your wits. If we look at the mysterious circumstances of some cases of missing persons or people returned and appeared changed, these circumstances suggest some form of psychic attacks.

Lost in the woods

A survival situation is always about real problems in the first place. One of the biggest problems is dehydration. People need water. You can longer survive for some time without food but water is essential (in a warm and dry environment you wouldn’t last more than a few days without water but theoretically three weeks without food). Lucky survivors collected in some cases rainwater.

If you find a stream or a spring it is important to know if the water isn’t polluted. There are ways to get some food: Most of the time of the year there are wild berries and plants in the forest. Knowledge is important since there are numerous poisonous plants like belladonna or yew trees. It happens sometimes even to experienced bushcrafters that they mix something up and get sick. Many plants look very similar.

Exhaustion is another reason why people die in the forest. The sheer experience of losing orientation leads to physical and psychical stress. People wandering around in a panic, desperately seeking a way out. We are used to mobile phones helping us to find a street in the city but what if there is no signal? Using digital maps or GPS needs some experience. Surviving in an unknown forest territory means to have some skills. If the sun is shining it helps to navigate. In a clear night, the stars are helpful if you know how to find for example the North Star. In the northern hemisphere moss mostly grows on the north side of trees. Sometimes you can follow a stream or spruce. With a little sense of orientation, a wanderer will find the way back to civilization.

Even then a situation can get quickly out of control.
Weather conditions can change quickly particularly in mountain forests. Nights are getting very cold. It could rain for days. It doesn’t take much and you are suffering from hypothermia. It requires some experience to find or to build a shelter. The same applies to make fire. Forest terrain often poses dangers because there are ditches, roots or sharp branches. Cuts, broken legs or other injuries have fatal consequences. Dramatic situations not only happen in the vast and endless wilderness of Alaska or Siberia. Accidents in the forest or people getting lost happen everywhere but with significant differences. According to unofficial accounts, about 1600 people have gone missing in the U.S. in national and state parks. There are clusters with more people gone missing. A lot of people getting lost in the woods return safely, but there is a real mystery out there.
It is a mix of missing person behaviour, tragic circumstances (like falling off a cliff or a sudden weather change) and indeed unknown mysterious reasons, which makes us wonder. There is a lot of high-tech available today but there is still this number of unsolved cases.

Getting lost in the woods can happen easily: First you don’t see a trail marker for some time and suddenly the trail thins out. Even experienced hikers get fooled. It is sometimes an intersection of trails, which leads you in the wrong direction or a short moment of disorientation. One reason why tourists or visitors of national parks get lost is probably their inability to distinguish between an urban environment and the wilderness. This is an experience which mountain search and rescue teams in the Austrian or German alps often tell: Hikers get in a dangerous situation because of their ignorance. They don’t understand that this not a playground and that there is a real danger out there. Sometimes a helicopter rescue mission is necessary because people climb a mountain in light summer clothes. When a sudden change in weather surprises them (in the Alps you can have snowfall in August) they are in deep trouble.

Survival depends strongly on the first decisions after getting lost. Indeed, responders find most persons gone missing in the woods within 24 hours. But then, there are types of cases where something terrible must have gone wrong. In some cases, the investigation suggests that people must have vanished immediately and were found later in “phenomenal distances” or in “incredible places” (as David Paulides said in an interview). Nobody can explain how they got there.




Unexplained disappearances


There is still a lot of mindboggling cases where either lost persons were never found, or there are unexplainable circumstances like a body appearing at a place where searchers have looked a dozen times. Sometimes a simple explanation occurs by coincidence. But then there are mysteries like the one in the forest dark feature film project, which provoke other ideas. There are many real stories about forest survival. In these stories, the researchers must confront the unknown.

One example is real cases based on fact book series and a documentary called Missing 411 about strange disappearances. They match in an amazing way with ideas expressed in the forest dark feature film project. The writer and researcher David Paulides, a former police detective, did extremely valuable and reliable research about highly unusual cases in North America and beyond. He researched a high number of unsolved cases where victims disappeared in unusual circumstances. In some cases, he found strange commonalities: If a body was found it was in an impossible location which was impossible for the vanished person to reach. K9 dogs or cadaver dogs weren’t able to find any trace. The reason for death is not clear. Sometimes it was declared they were “scared to death”. Interestingly Paulides identified 28 clusters with a high number of cases in the U. S. National parks. There is an interesting tendency that the map shows more cases in territories where water isn’t far as rivers or lakes. This is a very valuable insight even it might sound very strange for some people. However, again and again, in all mysterious forest stories a certain topography plays a vital part. There must be zones, areas, places and sites which are somehow connected to another world.

In interviews, Paulides emphasises that he has no theory about what happened. It looks like he identified a phenomenon which has very strong similarities with previously on this website described phenomena like the “black fire” and close encounters. In an interview, he spoke of an “overreaching intelligence, that is far beyond our comprehension”. This a very good expression since most of the unexplainable experiences in forests point into that direction.

There is a particularly interesting field of research here which deals with the disappearance of hunters. Hunters are usually experienced people and not likely to put themselves in dangers. Instead many of the strange circumstances match the excellent research done by Jacques Vallée in his book “Confrontations”. In South America, there are several cases of sometimes deadly encounters with so-called “Chupas'”: Chupas are objects which emitting strong beams of light. Some hunters were hit by these strange lights near the city of Parnarama in Brasil and five people died. The cause of their death remains a mystery. It even looked like some vampirism was at work here, since the bodies appeared bloodless. This story is similar to the “elf-stroke” in medieval times.

Even in some cases, a mundane explanation seems possible there, is strong evidence for the unknown phenomenon described in previous posts in the forest dark. There is one thing where there is a strong similarity between the Missing 411 cases and the alleged close encounters: People were found in different locations and there is no explanation of how they got there in the first place. We know many UFO-cases where it appears that some sort of “Teleportation” happened. This happened also in Ezechiel’s story.

The long tradition of cases

There is indeed a long tradition for this type of missing person cases and strange forest survival stories. The modern cases have similarities with stories from medieval times where people vanished or were abducted by fairies. A good description of these historical cases was written by Reverend Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth, who became himself a mysterious case in the end.

Forest horror stories deal with survival and unexplainable elements. They are often about the mysterious and the supernatural. If we look at the many real cases it seems there is often a lot of realism in forest horror.