The witches meet on April 30 on top of the mountain and there are whole pagan cults and secret societies gathering deep in the woods for weird rituals. True or wrong?
If there is one thing which makes it nearly impossible to distinct if it was fiction in the first place or fiction which was inspired by real events then it is secret cults in the forest.
Today it seems that there have been some cases which look from a skeptical point-of-view like inventions of the modern time. In 1939 a British occultist named Gerald Gardner was supposedly initiated into a witch-coven and founded later the “Wicca” movement. “According to the beliefs held by coven members, the faith which they followed was the continuation of the “Witch-Cult”, a pre-Christian religion”(Wikipedia) However researchers came to the conclusion that the New Forest coven had never existed and that it was simply a fictional invention.
The ideas of that time were inspired by Margaret Murray’s “Witchcraft In Western Europe”. Murray, an anthropologist, propagated the theory “that until the 17th century there was a religion, much older than Christianity, which all over Western Europe had supporters both among ordinary people and the ruling classes” (Wikipedia). This “Cult of Dianus” was the ancient religion described in detail in the Golden Bough”.
Scientists in our days are very skeptical about the ideas of Margaret Murray and her theories which also shed a strange light on the origins on the witch-craze. It is more likely that the cultist and so called pagan activities in the woods were an invention by the witch-hunters who wanted to set up paranoia in the minds of people.
However we have many reports of some form of cults and secret meetings which took place in certain forests even in our days.
Particularly haunted forests are very likely to house secret cults. Some of the scariest stories happened in “Freetown-Fall River State Forest”, Massachusetts in the US. Brent Swancer, Mysteriousuniverserse.org describes the The Cursed Forest Of Massachusetts:
“There seem to be places in this world to which strangeness seems to gravitate. Whether it is their geography, topography, or some inexplicable, unseen forces, these locations possess what can only be described as a certain disconnect from reality as we know it. They are imbued with some sort of undercurrent of mystery, strangeness, and sometimes even terror”.
The Freetown-Fall River State Forest is a paranormal hotspot with a history of crimes and mysteries: in 1978 a teenager-cheerleader was found murdered and over the years there have been murders and other crimes with alleged satanic or cult activity. The cultist activities were mentioned in two murder trials. Nevertheless there is a lot of speculation here and once a place has a certain “reputation” there could be also imitations or wrong-leads.
A very good lead for secret activities in the woods is the European “Beltane” or Walpurgis-Night on April 30. It seems there is a history for secret meetings particularly on top of some mountains, which were called “Blocksberg” (Blocksberg was a reference not only for a certain mountain but for different mountains were the witches danced). The “Walpurgis-Night” on the “Blocksberg” became famous when it was used by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in “Faust”. It is well known that Goethe did a lot of historical research, thus the central scene with the witches deep in the forest on top of the mountain wasn’t just only a fantasy but somehow inspired by a real motive. It might not what Mrs Murray thought about a Witch-Cult but some kind of folklorist tradition.
The motives stem from the European tradition of magic. There is a deep tradition in Europe for magic, demonology and superstition and even we mostly have never seen a magic ritual we know what it is. In 1972-73 there were were headlines in newspapers about a black mass or cultist activity on the small Danish Island of Anholt. The case included interviews with an actress Hannes Smyrner who gave the theory of cultist activity some credit. However there was never some real evidence but it was the traces which triggered the rumors. People somehow remembered the concept of magic rituals. The “secret cult” is like an image we all know but we can’t remember where we have seen it or where we heard about it in the first place.
In the end we have a strange feeling about most of these cases of alleged cultist activity – they are often pure inventions but on the other hand we feel there is some sort of truth here. When H.P. Lovecraft murmurs in his stories about the unspeakable cults in the forest he sounds convincingly; like an expert, like someone who has really seen these things.
It looks like modern cultists doing some kind of “reenactment” of some old tradition which seems to exist on another plane of reality. Maybe all the cases of alleged cult activity have been sort of reenactment of something we don’t know where it ever existed.
And the most astonishing fact is that it’s not the band of teenagers or former hippies who are acting out some strange play in the woods – it’s powerful men like the politicians and leaders who meet in the “Bohemian Grove” in California every year.
The case of the Freetown-Fall River State Forest becomes even more mysterious if we think of all the phenomena which were reported in this so-called Bridgewater triangle: we have alleged cult activity but also some sort of little monsters, restless Indian spirits, light orbs and – of course – big UFO sightings. This sounds like from a bad script of a B-movie: a typical case of too-many-motives. Not very believable.
However the wild mix of very different paranormal and other occult phenomena is typical not only for the Freetown-Fall River State Forest but for most of the “haunted forests of this world“. Since there is not much evidence – I would at least expect in our days a 4kvideo taken with an I-phone of the beast of the forest with so many researchers roaming these forests – the witness accounts sound not very credible at first sight. However if we look it from another angle the mix of phenomena with the alleged cults seems to be more like one piece of a kind of symbols of one big phenomena we don’t understand. It is one piece of a big jigsaw-puzzle and we still see these pieces but never the whole picture. The haunted forest and its secret cults are kind of an archetype. The paradox of archetypes is that they are very real but obviously exist on another plane of reality which is not exactly ours but very close to our plane of existence.
When I was 11 I remember missing my bus home from school, it was roughly 4:30p.m. and no one was basically around but a heavy set teacher who kept looking at me for some odd reason, so I decided to start walking home witch is about a quarter a mile long, seem 20 when you are a kid, anyhow there was this old covered bridge crossing a stream in Bangor Maine you know the Home of Steven King, well the bridge was made from the mid 1800’s i suppose and it all wood and I have crossed it a few times with my parents to go fishing in the stream below, but we never wandered off the wooded trail that once was a dirt road that eventually leads to the housing project where I lived.
That road has always been on my mind and finally I am going to do the unthinkable and take that trail only because its a short cut and I can avoid the heavy traffic.
It was odd after passing the bridge to the other side I got this spooky cool feeling, not sure why because the sun is out full and no clouds in the sky and I am not quite in the trees yet and I am finding myself to be a bit scared now but I have no choice because it’s getting nearly 5P.M. and i will get a serious whipping for missing my bus and not being home on time, dad enjoyed using his belt often and I knew if i don’t hurry and get home before he gets home from work I will feel that belt or sometimes a branch on a bush which he makes me cut for him to use on me.
Anyhow as I started to walk quickly into the trees I started to smell smoke from ahead, I was worried it be drunk hermits camping in the trees because i hear stories they attack kids, not sure if it was true or not so I decided to take a different direction into the wood hoping I can avoid the hermits.
Than I started to smell the smoke even more as if i am getting closer to it and eventually I started to hear voices, but not like talking but like soft singing or something like that and so I am curious now and slowly crept up against an old big tree and looked over and noticed about 6 to 7 men all in black robes around a pit fire and one guy was wearing all red with weird writing in black on his cape. I had no clue what i was seeing and the guy raised a cup up at the sky and said strange words which I never heard before, so i really started to be afraid and slowly sneaked backwards and tried to find a way around them as well, when i stepped back I stepped on a branch and the men looked over and yelled at me to stop or they will kill me and so i ran fast, i seen a small opening in the trees and ran towards that and slipped on the sand and cut my knee a bit, so i reached over to a tree to help myself up and my hand was full of blood, i looked all over me to see where i was bleeding and I found no injuries but a small cut on my knee, I started to hear the men get closer and it seemed they were all around me and just before I started to run I noticed a dead cat nailed to the tree through his throat and his guts were hanging out and than i seen many trees with dead cats and I ran so fast and eventually made it to the tar road not far from my home when a guy grabbed me from behind and shoved me down into the pit and the man with the red cape came up to me and kicked me and asked me what was I doing and I told him the truth that i missed the bus and walked home, he grabbed my arm and pulled me next to a tree with the dead cats and shoved my face into his guts full of slime and blood and told me if I ever say anything to anyone I will be the next thing to be nailed to the tree, than he shoved me and told me go home and never come back here again.
I think I ran the fastest ever and not even looked back.
A few days has passed and i was walking home from my friends house from playing Atari games and I seen a group of punks come up to me and they grabbed me and pulled me inside of a garage and there was this old car very rusty parked inside and they pushed me to the front of the car and there was this wooden cross setting upside down and they put me on it and tied my hands with ropes and my feet and than one of the guys urinated on my face and they laughed at me as I started to cry, I kept saying let me go I want to go home, and they just mocked me pretending to cry and than a guy came up to me in his red robe the same guy from the pits.
He asked me where is his two friends? I said who? He said stop lying and than pulled my shirt up and said tell me or I will whip you with this power cord and I was crying hard and begging to let me go that I knew nothing and than he whipped me 3 or 4 times and it hurt so bad and I started to cry, after about 5 questions and being hit by the cord they turned the cross upside down with my head facing the floor and the other guy said its time to die and he took out of a bucket a wet shirt and he twisted it and snapped me a few times and still i told them i know nothing I promise, many times they yell liar to me and after he snapped me really hard with the cloth I passed out, the next thing I knew a lady and a man were trying to wake me up and was wiping my face off and untied me from the cross, they said they were so sorry for their son to treat me like this, he will be punished for a long time for his actions, they lifted me up and took me inside their house and gave me lemonade and some cookies and talked to me and the boy yelled down and said if i say anything I will die, at that moment his father ran upstairs and he was yelling at him and the boy was very mean, when he came back down he said he has had enough of his sons troubles and he will go to a reform school now, I felt relieved and than the father and mother took me to my home and they explained to my mom what had happened to me and mom was very upset but kept calm, she thanked the parents for helping me and told them they best take care of their son before he does it to someone else, they said they are planning on it. I
A few hours later we seen police at their house and the boy was arrested and i felt safe now but it was not me why they had arrested him but he had murdered his mother,father and little sister with a kitchen knife and carved 666 on his dads chest, when the police arrived they found him in the bathroom crying and screaming in the shower when he noticed he killed his own family.. I never knew the end results of what they did with him nor we ever told the police what he did to me..
After that incident I had nasty nightmares that haunted me for few years until I went through some hypnosis to end my dream and it really work.. I will never forget that moment it was the worse day in my life. So I just wanted to share my feelings about the incident which I think the boy was badly cursed and went mad because of his satanic rituals in the forest.
Thanks for sharing your story!