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Category: Ritual

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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.

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A Secret Character In Folk Horror Stories

There is an interesting question about some popular folk horror movies. Are they supernatural stories or not? The threat in these stories comes from men, not from some monster, ghost, or supernatural entity. Nevertheless, the basic premise of traditional folk horror films and novels is often a secret cult worshipping a (pagan) deity in a remote town.

That deity, demigod, demon, he who walks behind the rows, is an important character in the story. As we know, he is usually not a friendly guy. He demands sacrifices. Human sacrifices. He messes up people’s minds. In some stories, he seems to be like the Old Testament god. Brutal. Merciless. Demanding. He manipulates the people.

But do the people in the remote town or the wilderness believe, or do they only pretend to believe? Is it just their leader who uses the cult to manifest his power? Does the writer believe in these invisible powers? Does the filmmaker believe in the pagan gods or the telluric forces? It’s hard to say. You can write such a story without believing in anything. The cult can work as a convention. Maybe the original religious purpose is lost. A cult is a belief system to impose power and rules upon people. 

It’s the land

In many cases, there is an assumption that supernatural powers are a reality even if there are no supernatural beings occurring in the story. What is the god or the supernatural power? It is the land itself, this dark spiritual power of the land. The magic forces and the gods manifest themselves in the landscape. It’s in the woods, or is the forest itself? There is one obvious connection between the worshippers and the deity. In THE WICKER MAN, the cult is a fertility cult. That is the case for many of these stories. It’s obvious in Shirley Jackson’s classic, The Lottery: “Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon”. Even the ritual in the story is forgotten and there is no worshipping of some deity, the magical thinking is apparent. 

Here is the big difference between folk horror and backwood drama and horror. In folk horror, it seems there is, at last, some sort of higher entity, a kind of energy, a god which is in all things or a presence. The opposite is backwood dramas like STRAW DOGS. There is no god in Straw Dogs. No magic of the land.

The Ancient Gods

The gods in Folk Horror are great old ones. There is often a connection with the past, with remnants of an era long gone. Ancient symbols are an expression of presence. There is something here which has been here before men arrived and will perhaps be here when men have left.

But there is another interesting thing here: The gods are local gods. Their cult is mostly a local cult. The entity is tied to the land. The deity is often connected to a certain thing in the land. In The Children Of The Corn, it is a Corn god. The worshippers are often a secretive community. They are obviously not traveling a lot.

Mostly it is a stranger, not aware of the cult in the first place, which is confronted with the local cult and sometimes with the powers of place. In IN THE EARTH, the entity in the forest seems to create hallucinogenic visions. That’s a common thing. The stranger is of course often the victim. He can become the sacrifice as in The Wicker Man.

Communication

Another interesting question is if there is any communication with the gods or the energies of a place. It depends. If it is a story that is closer to cosmic horror, then these forces appear sometimes oblivious towards men. They are not evil nor benign in a human sense as the mysterious higher forces in the classic weird tale “The Willows” from Algernon Blackwood. There is no communication. These powers don’t care about humans. 

In other cases, this is what the characters hope. They hope for insights into the deeper order of things and perform rituals to get an answer from the gods. The wish to communicate and ” to see” is a driving force. It’s no wonder that the ritual is often a drug party, for example, Beltane. People want to look into the otherworld.

Gifts From The Gods

Wisdom is one gift from the god’s ritualist hope. But it is not only wisdom and a rich harvest. There are even stories where the dead should come back, like the Irish horror movie WAKE WOOD. Here, the forest is again a secret character.

The secret cult is empowered by the gods living in the Earth, on the mountain or in the forest. The community in these places is a special one. Even though we don’t see the secret character in these stories, he is always there. He is steering their lives in many ways.

It is worth thinking about this ominous presence in the land, in the forest, in the earth. In stories and in the real world.

Peyton Robinson raises some interesting points in the article The Harrowing and Hypocritical Humanity of Folk Horror in Filmschool Rejects. One of them: What lies in the terrain we’ve built our whole lives on, and who holds the power?

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THE DAMNED FORESTS

by Peter Engelmann, August 27, 2022

Folk horror is often about a cursed landscape. Somehow the place where the story takes place is bewitched. We don’t see the ghost, the witch, the demon. The Folk horror genre is much about landscape shaping our minds. It’s about the elder gods which are still here, somewhere. Playing tricks with our mind. Demand a human sacrifice. In a remote town a secret cult is still worshipping the old deities. The most notorious places are the woods, these damned forests. Movies such as In The Earth or Midsommar pick up these traditions. However, some contemporary folk horror seems more like a revival of genre movies as The Stone Tape and books from the last century, instead of taking primarily inspiration from the real world.

It would be very interesting to know when we started to rely more on previous writings and creative products rather than taking the inspiration from the “original” ( a place we visited, an experience we had). Or is it a mix of inspiration from the real world and former movies and novels?

True Stories

Horror movies or forest horror movies sometimes claim to be based on a true story. Or they are mockumentaries as Blairwitch. However, as N.E. Genre pointed out in Beyond Blair Witch, the story of the Blair Witch benefits from a rich cultural heritage. An example is the stickmen, a well-established motive long before Blairwitch. Most of the stories we experience in books or films are more rooted in previous works or collective consciousness rather than any actual existing rituals or events. That doesn’t mean that magic belief, folk traditions, and even the idea of a landscape as a magical spiritual character isn’t pretty much alive. Thanksgiving is a good example. Many pagan Earth-God rites had been absorbed by Christianity. Christian practices are sometimes the same thing under a different label. But this is not the primary marketplace where most fiction takes inspiration from and starts off.

Movies like Wicker Man or The Stone Tape are from the 60ties and 70ties. It was a time of changes in society. There is often some subtext about undercurrents in society. But even then, at that time there was a strong tradition of literature. The ideas were not new. So, where are the real roots of folk horror and today’s stories in the woods?

Landscape And Imagination

The landscape was always a factor: The folk tales connected shapes in the landscape to mythical stories. For example, the devil created a block of boulders in a mountain forest. Or he created a canyon which spurred a new local legend. A mountain top with frequent wild weather is the witches’ dance place. We still find the remnants of ancient rituals in the fields and the forests. There are monuments. Neolithic stones, druid stones, and hill graves are reminders of a mysterious past. The remarkable works of modern fiction came much later.

Another background is tradition, folklore, practices in rural regions, symbols, and the rumors and remnants about pagans and their sacrifices. And to be clear: If it seems that modern folk horror in movies such as Wicker Man is connected to earlier works in literature, this is about the premise, the basic models for stories, and not the world of the film. The writers and moviemakers did a lot of research. They used “original” motives such as the Green Man or that “wicker man” sacrifice, which is rooted back in Julius Caesar’s descriptions of the Gallic War.

But again, our modern movies and folk horror stories usually don’t refer to this ancient connection between men and landscape or the “local legend“. The most influential stories were written at a time, when the connection between men and nature was already lost. These works, often novellas, were written in the late 19th/early 20th century. It is the period H.P. Lovecraft describes as the modern era of horror in his essay Supernatural horror in literature. Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, and M.R. James are among the most prominent writers of the weird fiction genre. Algernon Blackwood established modern forest horror with supernatural stories such as The Wendigo and The Willows. John Buchan, a Scottish writer, wrote Witch Wood (1927) about the existence of a witch sabbath in the Caledonian forest. The Place called Dagon from the same time period deals with a secret cult. Fiction writers in turn were in some cases inspired by anthropological research, for example, The Witch Cult In Western Europe by Margaret Murray. These stories attribute a lot to the modern idea of the damned forests and the world of folk horror stories. I can fairly admit that my Forest Dark Movie project is also inspired by the weird tales.

Lovecraft writes that ” Serious weird stories are either made realistically intense by close consistency and perfect fidelity to Nature except in the one supernatural direction which the author allows himself or else cast altogether in the realm of phantasy, with atmosphere cunningly adapted to the visualization of a delicately exotic world of unreality beyond space and time, in which almost anything may happen if it but happen in true accord with certain types of imagination and illusion normal to the sensitive human brain”. This may not so much about the later so-called sub-genre “folk horror” but he describes the modern conception of a genre which emancipated itself from romanticism and the patterns of gothic literature.

Of course, Lovecraft adds a lot to the genesis of the modern weird tales with his writings. Strange rituals in the woods and cosmic fear are a constant theme in H.P. Lovecraft’s writings. And we find many traces of this early 20th tradition in modern literature, as in “The Ritual” by Adam Nevill, which became a successful movie. “The Ritual” is one of the most convincing examples of a book and a movie, which explore both genre traditions but is also rich in a unique first-hand experience of the wilderness.

It is interesting that the modern weird tale, which is in some ways a foundation of folk horror and forest horror stories, emerges in the times of modern industrialization. Usually we wouldn’t associate the fin de siecle with a “back to the roots” or “a back to nature” (even though movements existed). But isn’t it, that there was a disenfranchisement from nature in modern times? Maybe this is the reason for the rise of haunted landscapes and damned forests in fiction in the first place. That kind of precursor of the folk horror weird tale and movie was less popular after the war. Science fiction was popular, and this was less about Lovecraft’s cosmic fear of alien visitors or invaders.

However, the landscape is a crucial element in Stephen King’s writings. Perhaps, “The Children Of The Corn” could be seen as folk horror. And most prominently, there is “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. These stories also center around a central premise in folk horror: The remote town with a secret (pagan) cult and human sacrifice. There is a continuous tradition here, even if it wasn’t labeled as a subgenre.

Researchers have spent a lot of time exploring the roots of folk horror and the dynamic in the genre’s development. An excellent source for further information is the Eldritch Archives on YT. There is a hint, for example, about the role of the Salem Witch Trials in the genesis and development of American folk horror. 

There are times when curiosity arises about the mysteries of the landscapes and the forests. Janet and Colin Bord are writers and researchers and published books such as “Ancient Mysteries Of Britain” in the Eighties and Nineties. Everywhere that old heritage became popular again. Meanwhile, there are endless books about monuments, secret old places, old rites, ritual sites, and mysterious places. There is a new interest in the land.

Future Damned Forests

What are the best strategies for folk horror and forest horror? We should be aware of an obvious question. Do we still take the ideas of haunted landscapes, cursed places, and the influence of the landscape seriously? Do we believe that landscape, the dark forest, or the holy mountains are more than a shape, a mass of stone, or an arrangement of trees? What about psycho-geography? Does that mean that places have psychological influence, or is there more to it? Are the elder gods still here?

We don’t need to believe in dragons, but the mere stability of the genre suggests there is more to its central motives than we think. The most convincing stories and movies will sell “the idea of an unreal world constantly pressing upon ours” (H.P. Lovecraft) in a fresh manner, and will tap deep into realities which haven’t been told yet. 

It is also clear that if the folk horror genre and forest horror want to succeed continuously in the future, they will become less revival and more fresh and original. “The Ritual” or “The Reddening” are some excellent examples.

They represent a curiosity about the eerie landscapes and mysterious monuments surrounding in our everyday world.

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Lords Of The Forest

A deity or a local god plays often an important role in forest horror stories. In Christian tradition, these original pagan gods become sometimes the devil. But forest deities as the Green Man survived. They even exist in churches as paintings or sculptures. There is a deep respect for these deities as they represent archaic forces of natures. Are they a product of human imagination or do they indeed represent the otherworldly side of nature?

Storytellers like the lord of the forest as a sinister deity since it makes a great mystery or even a murderous antagonist. H.P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen and many others made use of the long tradition of deities. Some of the forest deities are the same or resemble ancient gods of the greek, roman or Celtic tradition.

A prominent example is The Great God Pan. Horned gods appear often as lords of the forest. Both Herne the hunter and the Celtic god Cernunnos are horned gods like Pan. Cernunnos, sometimes also a fertility god, has a frightening appearance. He is present in rituals, in folk stories and made a career in horror. Sometimes he is more seen as a devil or demonic figure. Recently he appeared in the outstanding forest horror series Black Spot (Zone Blanche) by Netflix and France 2.

It makes sense to have Cernunnos and Herne in the European tradition of folk horror since there is indeed a Celtic tradition. The tradition was later borrowed by modern witch-covens. The horned god plays an important role in Margaret Murray’s Witch-Cult hypothesis. These lords of the forest are often connected with sacrifice and magic powers. People worshipping the gods hope to get something in return. In more modern traditions the lords of the forest are also connected with the seasons and rituals related to fertility. One example is the Beltane tradition on April 30.




In winter the lords of the forest are related to the wild hunt. Herne is sometimes mentioned and this – of course – mostly presents the darker aspects of the forest deities. They are often hunters and it’s not always animals they are after.

The lords of the forest are often local deities. Even it seems easy for a god to travel wherever he wants to these deities often represent the genius loci. It is a spirit residing in an exceptional tree or a mountain top. There is no evidence for this, but the idea of the lords of the forest represents more an earthbound entity rather than a cosmic force as in my story.

However, it isn’t necessarily either one thing or the other. If there is one thing that “true stories”, folklore stories, witness accounts of supernatural phenomena or horror fiction tells us then it is the fact that the gods exhibit many faces of themselves. It might be the same phenomenon which appears in different disguises. The important thing about forest deities is that nature itself is an expression of these gods. The giant old tree or the impenetrable forest itself is only a cover. There is an invisible world behind this. Ancient folks had a sense about it. Forest deities as the horned god make it more simple to grasp these feeling because if something has a face or a form it is easier to handle.