Haunted Woods From Around The World

[00:00:00] You get up. You've made a mistake leaving the path. You turn around and you start to run as best as you can. The trees all look the same. Did the path move? It's too late. The forest will never let you go.

[00:00:15] Get ready for a campfire story. I'm Edwin. I'm Michelle, and we'll share spooky stories with playful banter that'll keep you up at night. So throw some wood on the fire and put a wiener on a stick. We're telling you a campfire story tonight.

[00:00:35] Are you ready for a campfire story? That was my owl. That means yes. I guess so, yeah, it means yes. Because I'm out here in the woods with you, so obviously it means yes, I'm ready. Here we go. Haunted Forests

[00:00:53] So a long time ago there was an English nobleman who was the administrator and financial agent of King Henry VII. His name was Edmund Dudley. While the king was sick, it was said that

[00:01:06] Dudley ordered his friends to get ready and assemble in arms in case the king died. It's assemble in army. So like be ready to take over? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what I imagined.

[00:01:20] Anyway, that was the crime he was charged with and he was imprisoned in the Tower of London for constructive treason. But the real reason though is that they didn't like the way that he handled the money. Plus he got super rich for managing money. Politicians today,

[00:01:35] they do that too and yet they still have their heads on. Unfortunately he was beheaded. From his descendants, supposedly because of this thing, legend says the rest of the family was cursed because of that. The descendants of Edmund Dudley crossed the ocean and settled in America,

[00:01:54] bringing along that curse with them. Where they settled it was named Dudley Town in Connecticut. Dudley Town isn't really a town or a city. Like it's actually just like a little village that's like private area and it's part of Cornwall, Connecticut. But that place had crops that failed,

[00:02:12] people that went pretty insane and violent deaths. You see the family had gotten a hold of this book in order to get rid of that curse. However, things just got worse because of it.

[00:02:23] They opened the gates of hell so the town didn't give them anything back. No business could thrive, again no crops worked. It was just bad. In this article that I found, the curse came quickly to those people that moved into that mountain town.

[00:02:39] And one of the very very first victims was Nathaniel Carter. This is like 1760-ish when he was on a business trip his wife and infant child were brutally murdered by Native Americans. Shortly after he was murdered. Another one of the Dudleys who had owned the property

[00:02:58] purchased in Dudley Town, his name was Abel Abiel Abiel Abiel Abiel. Just call him Abel. That works for me. Abiel himself ended up getting dementia due to his old age and died

[00:03:16] in the town at 90 years old which sounds like a pretty good life. I mean you lived up to 90. But then one of their friends, his name was Gershyn Hollister, he fell to his death while he was

[00:03:27] building a barn. People there talked about demons and ghosts and everything including this guy William Tanner. Tanner went insane and claimed that this strange animal from the forest had actually killed Gershyn. All these rumors of demons, ghosts and everything were common along the people

[00:03:48] that lived there. Another thing that happened in that town was that this woman, Sarah, was struck by lightning in front of her home in 1804. After she heard the news the husband who was a general

[00:04:02] war hero, Herman Swift from the Revolutionary War also went insane. He was just kind of like not there for the rest of the time. But also another incident that happened was Mary Cheney, wife of presidential nominee Horace Greeley. She killed herself a week before the election of 1872

[00:04:20] and then Greeley lost his bid to Grant and the curse was blamed in all these cases. I mean it's a high concentration of weird things happening because the town is so small. There's like 26 families, yeah. That's a lot of tragedy to happen in like

[00:04:37] a very small part of a population. That's what they say, it was a curse and I don't know if you believe in curses but I kind of do. I mean I think it might be a curse that

[00:04:47] whether you're cursed to believe it and you yourself rationalize it and then it's true because it's you know, or it's external and like yeah you have very little control over all these other things that are just happening. As this town entered the 20th century the curse

[00:05:04] still continued. One of them was John Patrick Broffy, one of the final residents of the town. There was almost no one there at this point. There was no business, nothing that could happen there. You couldn't grow things, just nothing worked. Anyway his wife died of tuberculosis and then

[00:05:22] two of his children wandered off into the woods and never returned and then he also went into the woods and was never seen again. He's okay. And their house later burned to the ground in a mysterious fire.

[00:05:37] Oh my god. It's just like gone, like you're gone, like not even your belongings made it. That is so tragic, it's funny. I mean that is so cursed. However historians can actually find a

[00:05:51] link to this first migration of the curse from the Dudleys and they just consider this an internet rumor. Nothing's really there, the place isn't haunted but the real story is pretty creepy.

[00:06:03] Again let's go back right. So let's go back to the 1740s. Thomas Griff's Gideon Dudley and then other members of the family started settling in this area we know as Dudley Town. Again,

[00:06:14] not an actual official city or town. 200 years later the land is still kept as a private land trust but there are still traces of that original village and people that started visiting the

[00:06:26] town in the 80s actually just to check it out because it's really creepy. They call it the dark entry forest. So now enter the Clark family. Dr. William Clark who was a doctor of like a cancer

[00:06:42] studies person bought a house there when he visited with his wife and fell in love with dark entry forest. They were from New York so they wanted that piece. So him and his wife

[00:06:52] were at the cabin they had built out there and he had to go do something in New York but when he got back his wife wasn't anywhere to be seen like she just wasn't there and he was like that's weird

[00:07:05] but then as he's coming closer to the cabin he hears screams and laughter and like just weird something's happening. Like somebody's laughing as they're being really loud. He goes up sees her his wife had lost it. She was freaking out screaming saying that there were

[00:07:24] strange creatures in the woods. She killed herself not long after that. Dr. Clark stayed around he actually got remarried but then he died in 1943 but before that he actually founded the dark entry forest association and it was made to preserve the forest areas around there.

[00:07:44] Michelle do you remember the Blair Witch project? I do yeah it's been making news lately. Yeah I wonder why like well it's because the actors never got paid. Oh that was one of the top 30 I

[00:07:54] think for highest grossing movies. Did that whole thing where they pretended it was real and so the contracts weren't right. Dude also yeah they made a mistake too when I was looking into

[00:08:05] it they sold distribution rights for 1.1 million which sounds like a lot. No it's not a lot for that how much that movie grossed. Yeah it grossed a lot but also like if you made a movie for

[00:08:16] however little they made it for and then you're like what somebody wants this you immediately do it. For those who may not remember what it's about right like so it's the story of three film

[00:08:25] students that they go into the woods and then they get lost and then the footage that they actually managed to record is what's found and what's being played and people are drawing their own conclusions on it. The story was made so that you think that it was real

[00:08:38] you would find interviews, newspaper articles like even in the credits they said that the actors were dead or whatever or like never found or something. Yeah never found. I remember I was kind of believing it I was like yeah this is very creepy stuff. That specific story

[00:08:53] since it takes place out in the haunted forest drew a lot of attention to Dudley Town because they said that oh it's a similar thing, revive we should go there so people started going there late 90s but before then in 1993 through an interview in very reputable Playboy magazine

[00:09:11] they had this interview with Dan Akroyd and said that this place Dudley Town was the most haunted place on earth. He grew up as a spiritualist in Canada. Like again I don't keep up with this

[00:09:23] like Michelle does. It's not like well known that he's a spiritualist but his dad is like written books on spiritualism and stuff like that. You know spiritualism is where you communicate with spirits via Ouija board or whatever that's like a whole religion so he grew up in that.

[00:09:39] Interesting but because of this interview people started going there vandalizing the place and but that this was made worse by the Blair Witch project because the interview happened first then the Blair Witch project came out and then it just like all hell broke loose

[00:09:53] people wanted this experience and by the way this is before smartphones right? Like this is maybe around the time the sidekick was out maybe I don't know. Interesting but I remember a time where like

[00:10:03] you would go somewhere just to go like not to film, not to take pictures, not YouTube, not to make TikToks. You would go somewhere just so you could tell your friends after that you went.

[00:10:12] Yeah you just went to go. Yeah and people found out about this place started going to Dudley Town so much that the association there were like no more like and they're not nice about it.

[00:10:22] You can't even park there like they're like not allowed you can't do this but they're having people that sneak in they say that they experience ghosts and they hear voices and they see

[00:10:32] weird yeah because of the curse of Dudley Town. How true is it scientifically? I'm not a scientist and I didn't even look this up but we're gonna throw something in the water or like you say

[00:10:43] a gas leak or like you know. I mean yes it could be a lot of things it could have just been the food contaminate like drinking water contamination maybe when I looked this up on Wikipedia there was a scientist's little short statement about it.

[00:11:00] Turned out the records actually do show that this place was originally occupied by the Mohawk Nation as sacred ground however the village's decline has been attributed to the distance from clean drinking water and unsuitable soil for cultivation and yeah

[00:11:19] avoid those woods at all cost. My campfire story has a trigger warning if you're sensitive to suicide you know if that bothers you tune in next week. Edwin you are hiking in Japan you ignore what looks like a bunch of warning signs all around the trailhead

[00:11:41] you're experienced and that means they clearly don't apply to you. You've heard that there's a great view of Mount Fuji from this trail and as you hike you notice the forest is silent no birds no insects as you walk even the sound of your feet

[00:11:59] crunching on leaves seems muffled there's no phone service but you saw a TikTok post a while ago about a shortcut and you decide to leave the trail the trees get thicker and the forest gets darker as you walk you begin to notice people's belongings scattered along the ground

[00:12:21] different shoes a hat an old backpack just scattered throughout the woods some are dirty and look like they've been there for years some are more recent you've been walking off trail for quite a while now that's when you hear it

[00:12:40] a scream where did it come from you head towards it you hear it again someone needs help you trip and when you look up you are face to face with the rotten corpse it had been there for some time

[00:12:56] you hear the scream again this time it's all around you definitely you get up you've made a mistake leaving the path you turn around and you start to run as best as you can the trees all

[00:13:08] look the same did the path move it's too late the forest will never let you go there's a forest in japan that's home to ghosts the trees have grown so closely together that visitors will spend much of their time in semi-darkness the gloom is relieved only by the

[00:13:31] occasional stream of sunlight that gaps through the treetops what people remember the most about this forest is the silence beneath the fallen branches and decaying leaves of the forest is volcanic rock in the year 864 mount fuji experienced a violent six month eruption

[00:13:51] that buried entire villages and left behind a massive field of hardened lava the stone is hard and porous and full of tiny holes that eat all noise this forest's official name is ahokigara

[00:14:06] but most japanese call it jukai which means sea of trees oh that's beautiful see of trees but we know it by its unfortunate common name the suicide forest i remember first hearing about this

[00:14:23] through um paul's oh that's yeah he went there and then found somebody who died and filmed it oh and then he published it that was dumb yeah it was very weird disrespectful yeah uh logan paul

[00:14:38] went to the forest and actually found a victim of suicide hanging from a tree and uh medical responders came and they filmed the whole thing and then he put it online and it's like laughing in the video

[00:14:53] yeah it's really not good the suicide forest has become really popular on social media it's in movies it's in the media it has like this mysterious reputation but there are legends

[00:15:06] around it and it is kind of considered a sacred place but one of the legends that has haunted this forest is that in feudal times when food was scarce and the situation was desperate a family might take

[00:15:18] a dependent elderly relative typically a woman to a remote location and leave her to die you know so they could save the food so they could feed the young yeah whether that happened or not

[00:15:31] there's not really a lot of proof that that happened that might be more of like a fictionalized folklore in japan that that happened a lot because it doesn't like scholars seem to dispute whether

[00:15:42] call it senocide was ever common in japanese culture they don't think it was so yeah it's s e n i c i d e but some believe that the ghosts or the yurei are the vengeful spirits of those old people

[00:16:03] that were abandoned to starvation and left to the mercy of the elements and they dedicate themselves to tormenting visitors and luring the sad and the lost off their paths you know like i was

[00:16:14] curious about how this forest became so associated with suicide mount fuji like other mountains in japan are considered a sacred space and the forests that surround them are considered a sacred space so for more than a thousand years buddhist monks have retreated to the forest to practice

[00:16:33] an extreme form of self-denial and meditation that ended in death according to one tradition monks would meditate in the forest for a thousand days subsisting on nothing more than leaves and bark then they would be quote unquote buried alive to continue meditating in an underground

[00:16:53] crypt the ultimate goal was to transform the body while still alive into a shukusu butsu a type of living mummy which is pretty crazy and there are 18 of these self mummified monks on display in japan still although scientists believe they were actually mummified after their deaths but the

[00:17:13] goal is to be alive and mummified so that was something that actually did go on there and then in the 60s there is an author named seisho matsumoto who published a short story called tower

[00:17:30] of waves which centers on starcross lovers you know they're they're kept apart out of their control you know and it ends with the woman in the story writing a farewell letter to her lover taking a bottle of pills and dramatically going into the hokigara forest and disappearing

[00:17:50] that became like a huge smash hit in the 60s there's tons of adaptations that still get made it's like you know the way romeo and juliet comes back into fashion over and over and over again

[00:18:02] in western cultures you know it goes out comes back in goes out so i kind of imagine that's what's happening there but this book put it on the map as a popular suicide destination but that wasn't the

[00:18:14] thing that really cemented it the thing that cemented it was that there's this infamous book published in the 90s called the complete suicide manual oh she's got chills i don't know why but yeah you should get chills because it's pretty demented the complete suicide manual it sold

[00:18:29] over one million copies it's never been translated into english it's only in japanese and it went out of its way to really romanticize the forest as the perfect place to die and bodies have literally been found with this book which japan actually does have a romanticized

[00:18:47] idea of suicide it does have one of the suicide highest suicide rates in the world yeah so like there's like less shame to it yeah i guess there's less shame or is also like they

[00:18:56] have that thing where like um samurai yeah you can fall on your sword and then kamikaze pilots you know like there's things like that the ahokigara forest sees more suicides than any other location

[00:19:08] on the world except for the golden gate bridge but yeah the internet is littered with disturbing images from the suicide forest from the abandoned personal effects and the undergrowth to human

[00:19:19] bones if you dare to venture into this legendary place do as the sign says and stay on the path dang the story about hearing the corpse scream or whatever that happened to somebody they were

[00:19:33] walking along and they heard screaming and they ran towards the screaming and it was actually just a dead body under a tree it's haunted but think about all that energy in that forest yeah

[00:19:45] the woods are a spooky scary place man whether they're in japan or whether they're in kinetica it's a dark place and if you're ever thinking about suicide call the suicide hotline talk to a friend the number is 988 that's a suicide crisis lifeline you can text them

[00:20:03] you can call them they're 24 hours english and spanish baby fanclaw or no you have a comment from the nightguard okay the question was know if someone who has had contact with aliens do you believe them the answer was i don't have someone who's seen

[00:20:24] aliens but my bible teacher claims to have seen a ghost and even has a photo of it well they should call in to tell me a ghost story then because i don't know why they're holding out on me

[00:20:35] geez but anyway thank you for commenting yeah thanks a lot and also we want to hear that story obviously yeah you gotta tell us also from the episode what do you know about the bermuda

[00:20:43] triangle question was does a bermuda triangle has supernatural stuff going on what do you think and then the answer was maybe depends on how people see it though because supernatural stuff has a different definition in each individual's mind okay okay that's a good point by the way

[00:21:00] big fan listen to all your podcast edwin and michelle oh that's nice yeah thank you send us your little comments and we'll read them on the air we love to hear from you i guess we'll

[00:21:10] put out the fire because we didn't start it dang it we've been in the dark this whole time all right guys well we'll see you next week for more tales around the fire campfire story is

[00:21:24] hosted by michelle newman and edwin covarubias this podcast was edited and sound designed by sarah warhees-wendel a vw sound