Midnight in the Dark Forest

Three accounts from one family, one cabin, and one stretch of years nobody in the family has ever fully explained. Between 1985 and 1989, three different people in the same house heard something none of them could account for. A father alone in the house heard footsteps where no one should have been. A daughter heard something try to beat down a solid oak door. A son heard the same thing happen again, three years later, and heard i...

A storm on the night of June 6, 1872. A farmhouse in the country, a wife away visiting her sister, and a knock at the door.The woman on the porch has walked a long way through the rain and she is not wet. The dog will not stop screaming.James Bradley wrote down what happened over the next three nights, sealed it in a strongbox, and left instructions that it not be opened until fifty years after his death. This is what was in the bo...

In spring 1996, a fireball crossed the sky above Monroe Reservoir in front of enough witnesses to make the local paper. That same summer, a swim across the lake with two friends turned into something else, and the men we saw near the wilderness boundary were peculiar and seemed to interrogate us.First it was a UFO story, then it was a summer with friends, the kind where you feel invincible right up until you don't. This is a true a...

In the late 1980s my older brother Jarret and I walked the shores of Lake Monroe and the hollers of Brown County, Indiana. We hunted the ruins of abandoned farms, barns still standing where the houses had gone, wells ringed with stones, old iron in the dirt. Some of what we found was ordinary. Some of it I have spent nearly forty years trying to explain.These are true stories.Narrated and scored with original music by Aaron Marshal...

My son and I went into the Deam Wilderness on a weekday morning to hunt morels and check an old geocache that had beaten us once before. Miles from the nearest road, we crossed paths with two strangers. What happened when we passed them again two hours later is something I still can't explain.

This is a true story from the hill country where Brown, Monroe, and Jackson counties meet, a place the old timers called Sixteen Corners. Nar...

On a cold night with frost promised, a young man stops for a girl standing alone on Gilmore Ridge. Dark hair down, a pale dress too thin for the weather, and the only thing she asks is the only thing she has ever asked anybody. She wants to go home.

This is a retelling of the vanishing hitchhiker, the oldest ghost story America has, set here in the gravel-road hills east of Lake Monroe, Indiana. This is a country of ridge cemeteries...

In 1985, my older sister rode her bike down an abandoned road near Monroe Reservoir in Brown County, Indiana, looking for her lost cat. What she heard in the dark that night, and what chased four of us down that same road the next day, is why my family has called it Monster Road for forty years.This is a true story, told from the firsthand accounts of my brother, my sister, and my own memory. Our father, a lifelong woodsman, examin...

In the summer of 1995, two cousins spent a stormy Friday night on the living room floor of a house deep in the wooded hills of Brown County, Indiana. Behind them, a neighbor's distant security light cast the kitchen window onto the old stone fireplace. Around one in the morning, something stepped into that light. This is a true story. What we saw on that stone has never been explained.Music from this can also be found on:https://aa...

Something has been coming to the window of a remote New England farmhouse. It is not quite the creature of old folklore. It feels older than that."The Window" has its roots in one of the most enduring vampire legends in English folklore: the story of Croglin Grange, a tale of a nighttime visitor at a farmhouse window in rural Cumberland. The legend first reached print in the 1890s through Augustus Hare's memoirs, and it gained a mu...