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. 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. Are you ready for
a campfire story? That was my owl? That means yes, I guess.
So yeah, that 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. So a long time ago, there was an English nobleman who
was the administrator and financial agent of King Read the seventh. His name was
Edmund Dudley. While the king was sick, it was said that Dudley ordered
his friends to get ready and assemble in arms in case the king died.
It's assemblant army. Ooh, so like be ready to take over? Yeah
yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what I imagine. Okay, okay,
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 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, bringing along that curse with him. Where they settled,
it was named Dudley Town, 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, 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. They opened the
gates of hell. So the town didn't give them anything back. No business
could thrive, and again no crops worked like it was just bad in this
article that I found. The curse came quickly to those people that moved into
that mountain town, and one of the very very first victims was Nathaniel Carter.
This is like seventeen sixty ish when he was on a business trip,
his wife an infant child were brutally murdered by Native Americans. Shortly after he
was murdered, another one of the Dudley's who had owned the property purchased in
Dudley Town. His name was abel A bl Abi e l Abiel. Abiel
Abiel called him Abel that works for me. Abel himself ended up getting dementia
due to his old age and died in the town at ninety years old,
which sounds like a pretty good life. I mean, you lived up to
ninety. But then one of their friends, the name was Gershen Hollister,
he fell to his death while he was 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 forests had actually killed Gershon.
All these rumors of demons, ghosts, and everything were common among the people
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 eighteen oh
four after hearing the news. He was the husband who was a general 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 Greedy. She
killed herself a week before the election of eighteen seventy two, and then Greley
lost his bid to grant and the curse was blamed in all of these cases.
I mean, it's a high concentration of weird things happening because the town
is so small. There's like twenty six families. Yeah, so that's a
lot of tragedy to happen in like 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 whether you're cursed to like, you believe
it and you yourself rationalize it and then it's true because it's you know,
curse 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 twentieth
century, the curse still continued. One of them was John Patrick Broffei,
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.
He couldn't grow things, just nothing worked anyway. His wife died of tuberculosis,
and then 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.
Z Okay and their house later burned to the ground in a mysterious fire.
Oh my god, it's just like gone, like you're gone. 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 link to
this first migration of the curse from the Dudley's and they just consider this an
internet rumor. Nothing's really there. The place isn't haunted, But the real
story is pretty creepy. Again, Let's go back, right, So let's
go back to the seventeen forties, Thomas Griffs, Gideon Dudley, and then
other members of the family started settling in this area we know as Dudley Town,
again not an actual official city or town. Two hundred 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 town in the eighties
actually just to check it out because it's really creepy. They call it the
Dark Entry Forest. So now enter the Clark family. Doctor William Clark,
who was a doctor of like a cancer 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 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. But then as he's coming closer to the cabin,
he hears screams and laughter and like, just weird someth'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 strange
creatures in the woods. She killed herself. Not long after that, Doctor
Clark stayed around. He actually got remarried, but then he died in nineteen
forty three. But before that he actually founded the Dark Entry Forest Association and
it was made to preserve the forest areas around there. Michelle, do you
remember the Blair Witch Project. I do. Yeah, it's been making news
lately. Yeah, I wonder why like that, Well, it's because the
actors never got paid. Oh, that was one of the top thirty I
think highest grossing movies. Did that whole thing where they pretended it was real
contracts, right dude. Also, yeah, they made a mistake to it.
When I was looking into it. They sold distribution rights for one point
one million, which sounds like a lot. No, it's not a lot
for that. How much that movie grows, Yeah, it grossed a lot.
But also, like if you made a movie for however little they made
it for, and then you're like, what somebody wants this, you'd immediately
do it for those who may not remember what it's about. Right, So
it's a story of three film 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.
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. I
never found it, I remember, I was kind of believing it. I
was like, yeah, this is a very creepy stuff. That specific story,
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 vibe,
we should go there. So people started going there late nineties, but
before then, in nineteen ninety three, through an interview in very reputable Playboy
magazine, they had this interview with Dan Aykroyd 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 like
Michelle does. It's not like well known that he's a spiritualist, but his
dad has like written books on spiritualism and stuff like that. Wow, you
know, spiritualism is where you communicate with spirits via Wuiji Bord or whatever.
That's like a whole religion. So he grew up in that. Interesting.
But because of this interview, people started going there vandalizing the place. But
this was made worse by the Blair Witch Project because the interview happened first,
and the Blair Witch Project came out, and then it just like all hell
broke clues, like people wanted this experience. And by the way, this
is before smartphones, right, like this is maybe around the time the s
kick was out. Maybe I don't not sure, but I remember a time
where like 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,
yeah, you just went to go. Yeah. And people found out
about this, but they started going to Dudley Town so much that the association
they were like no more like and they're not nice about it. 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 where. 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 were there was something in the water
or like you say, 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 little short statement about it.
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,
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. 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 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 the people's belongings
scattered along the ground. 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, 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.
You hear the scream again, this time it's all around you, deafinite.
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. WHOA, 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 occasional
stream of sunlight that gaps through the tree tops. 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 eight hundred and sixty four,
Mount Fuji experienced a violent, six month eruption 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
Ahoki Gara, but most Japanese call it Ujikai, which means sea of trees.
Oh, that's beautiful sea of trees. But we know it by its
unfortunate common name, the suicide Forest. I remember first hearing about this through
Paul's Oh that's it. Yeah, he went there and then found somebody who
died and filmed it and then he published it. That was dumb. Yeah,
it was very weird, disrespectful. Yeah, Logan Paul went to the
forest and actually found a victim of suicide hanging from a tree, and medical
responders came and they filmed the whole thing and then he put it online and
it's like laughing in the video. 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
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 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 be the
young. Yeah, whether that happened or not, 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 they call it senoside was ever common in Japanese culture, They don't
think it was so. Yeah, it s e nic id, But some
believe that the ghosts or the ura are the vengeful spirits of those old people
that were abandoned to starvation and left the mercy of the elements, and they
dedicate themselves to tormenting visitors and luring the sad and the loss off their pass
you know, like, I was 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 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 crypt. The ultimate goal was
to transform the body, while still alive, into a shukusibutsu, a type
of living mummy, which is pretty crazy. And there are eighteen of these
self mummified bunks on display in Japan still, although scientists believe they were actually
mummified after their deaths. But the goal is to be alive and mummified.
So that was something that actually did go on there. And then in the
sixties there is an author named Seyesho Matsumoto who published a short story called Tower
of Waves, which centers on starcross lovers. You know, 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 hoki Gara forest and disappearing. That became like
a huge smash hit in the sixties. 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 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 thing that really cemented it.
The thing that cemented it was that there's this infamous book published in the nineties
called The Complete Suicide Manual. Oh I just got chills. I don't know
why it is. Yeah, you should get chills because it's pretty demented.
The Complete Suicide Manual. It's sold 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
idea of suicide. It does have one of the suicide highest suicide raids in
the world. Yeah, so like there's like less shame to it. Yeah,
I guess there's less shame. Or it's also like they have that thing
where like samuraize, Yeah, you can fall on your soul and then kamikazi
pilots, you know, like there's things like that. The Ahoki Gara Forests
sees more suicides than any other location in 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 bones. If
you dare to venture into this legendary place, do as the sign says and
stay on the path. The story about hearing the corpse scream or whatever that
happened to somebody. They were walking along and they heard screaming and they ran
towards the screaming and it was actually just a dead body under a tree.
But think about all that energy in that forest. The woods are a spooky,
scary place man. Whether they're in Japan or whether they're in Connecticut,
it's a dark place. And if you're ever thinking about suicide, call the
suicide hotline. Talk to a friend. The number is nine eight. It's
a suicide crisis lifeline. You can text them, you can call them.
They're twenty four hours English and Spanish. Baby ben Coforna have a comment from
the night guard. 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 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. Geez. But anyway, thank you for comment. 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 Triangle, the question was does a Bermuda triangle have 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. Ooh, okay, okay, that's a good point.
By the way, big fan. I listen to all your podcasts, 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 put out the fire because we didn't start it.
Dang it. We've been in the doctor this whole time. All right,
guys, Well, we'll see you next week for more tales around the fire.
Campfire Story is hosted by Michelle Newman and Edwin Kovarubias. This podcast was
edited and sound designed by Sarah Worhez Wendel, a VW sound