July 17, 2024 • 21 mins
This week's theme is The Woods. They are haunted, creepy, and dark; you'll never catch us camping. Edwin tells us the tale of Dudley Town, and Michelle dives into Aokigahara forest (aka The Suicide Forest) in Japan.
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Hosted by Michelle Newman and Edwin Covarrubias. Episode edited & sound designed by Sarah Vorhees Wendel of VW Sound
Scary Mystery Surprise (Campfire Story) is no longer being updated, but be sure to check out our other shows from Scary.fm for more scares!
Do you have an idea for an episode theme? email us: hello@campfirestory.com
Get ad-free episodes and support the show at CampfireStory.com
Hosted by Michelle Newman and Edwin Covarrubias. Episode edited & sound designed by Sarah Vorhees Wendel of VW Sound
Scary Mystery Surprise (Campfire Story) is no longer being updated, but be sure to check out our other shows from Scary.fm for more scares!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
You get up, You've made amistake leaving the path. You turn around
and you start to run as bestas you can. The trees all look
the same. Did the path move? It's too late. The forest will
never let you go. Get readyfor a campfire story. I'm Edwin,
I'm Michelle, and we'll share spookystories with playful banter that'll keep you up
(00:25):
at night. So throw some woodon the fire and put a wiener on
a stick. We're telling you acampfire story tonight. Are you ready for
a campfire story? That was myowl? That means yes, I guess.
So yeah, that means yes,because I'm out here in the woods
with you, so obviously it meansyes, I'm ready. Here we go
(00:48):
haunted forests. So a long timeago, there was an English nobleman who
was the administrator and financial agent ofKing Read the seventh. His name was
Edmund Dudley. While the king wassick, it was said that Dudley ordered
his friends to get ready and assemblein arms in case the king died.
(01:11):
It's assemblant army. Ooh, solike be ready to take over? Yeah
yeah, yeah, yeah, that'swhat I imagine. Okay, okay,
anyway, that was the crime hewas charged with, and he was imprisoned
in the Tower of London for constructivetreason. But the real reason, though,
is that they didn't like the waythat he handled the money. Plus
(01:32):
he got super rich for managing money. Politicians today they do that too,
and yet they still have their headson. 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
(01:53):
and settled in America, bringing alongthat 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 actuallyjust 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 insaneand violent deaths. You see, the
(02:15):
family had gotten a hold of thisbook in order to get rid of that
curse. However, things just gotworse because of it. They opened the
gates of hell. So the towndidn't give them anything back. No business
could thrive, and again no cropsworked like it was just bad in this
article that I found. The cursecame quickly to those people that moved into
(02:38):
that mountain town, and one ofthe very very first victims was Nathaniel Carter.
This is like seventeen sixty ish whenhe was on a business trip,
his wife an infant child were brutallymurdered by Native Americans. Shortly after he
was murdered, another one of theDudley's who had owned the property purchased in
(02:59):
Dudley Town. His name was abelA bl Abi e l Abiel. Abiel
Abiel called him Abel that works forme. Abel himself ended up getting dementia
due to his old age and diedin the town at ninety years old,
which sounds like a pretty good life. I mean, you lived up to
(03:21):
ninety. But then one of theirfriends, the name was Gershen Hollister,
he fell to his death while hewas 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 animalfrom the forests had actually killed Gershon.
(03:44):
All these rumors of demons, ghosts, and everything were common among the people
that lived there. Another thing thathappened in that town was that this woman,
Sarah, was struck by lightning infront of her home in eighteen oh
four after hearing the news. Hewas the husband who was a general war
hero, Herman Swift from the RevolutionaryWar also went insane. He was just
(04:08):
kind of like not there for therest 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 electionof eighteen seventy two, and then Greley
lost his bid to grant and thecurse was blamed in all of these cases.
(04:28):
I mean, it's a high concentrationof weird things happening because the town
is so small. There's like twentysix families. Yeah, so that's a
lot of tragedy to happen in likea very small part of a population.
That's what they say. It wasa curse. And I don't know if
you believe in curses, but Ikind of do. I mean, I
think it might be a curse thatwhether you're cursed to like, you believe
(04:48):
it and you yourself rationalize it andthen 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 justhappening. As this town entered the twentieth
century, the curse still continued.One of them was John Patrick Broffei,
one of the final residents of thetown. There was almost no one there
(05:11):
at this point. There was nobusiness, nothing that could happen there.
He couldn't grow things, just nothingworked anyway. His wife died of tuberculosis,
and then two of his children wanderedoff into the woods and never returned.
And then he also went into thewoods and was never seen again.
Z Okay and their house later burnedto the ground in a mysterious fire.
(05:36):
Oh my god, it's just likegone, like you're gone. Not even
your belongings made it. That isso tragic, it's funny. I mean,
that is so cursed. However,historians can actually find a link to
this first migration of the curse fromthe Dudley's and they just consider this an
internet rumor. Nothing's really there.The place isn't haunted, But the real
(06:00):
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 settlingin this area we know as Dudley Town,
again not an actual official city ortown. Two hundred years later,
the land is still kept as aprivate land trust, but there are still
(06:21):
traces of that original village and peoplethat started visiting the town in the eighties
actually just to check it out becauseit's really creepy. They call it the
Dark Entry Forest. So now enterthe Clark family. Doctor William Clark,
who was a doctor of like acancer studies person, bought a house there
(06:44):
when he visited with his wife andfell in love with Dark Entry Forest.
They were from New York, sothey wanted that piece. So him and
his wife were at the cabin theyhad 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, likeshe just wasn't there, and he was
like, that's weird. But thenas he's coming closer to the cabin,
(07:08):
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 killedherself. Not long after that, Doctor
(07:30):
Clark stayed around. He actually gotremarried, but then he died in nineteen
forty three. But before that heactually founded the Dark Entry Forest Association and
it was made to preserve the forestareas around there. Michelle, do you
remember the Blair Witch Project. Ido. Yeah, it's been making news
lately. Yeah, I wonder whylike that, Well, it's because the
actors never got paid. Oh,that was one of the top thirty I
(07:55):
think highest grossing movies. Did thatwhole 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 alot. No, it's not a lot
for that. How much that moviegrows, Yeah, it grossed a lot.
But also, like if you madea movie for however little they made
(08:16):
it for, and then you're like, what somebody wants this, you'd immediately
do it for those who may notremember what it's about. Right, So
it's a story of three film studentsthat they go into the woods and then
they get lost, and then thefootage 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 sothat you think that it was real.
(08:37):
You would find interviews, newspaper articles, like even in the credits they said
that the actors were dead or whateveror like never found or something. I
never found it, I remember,I was kind of believing it. I
was like, yeah, this isa very creepy stuff. That specific story,
it takes place out in the hauntedforest, drew a lot of attention
to Dudley Town because they said that, oh, it's a similar thing vibe,
(09:01):
we should go there. So peoplestarted going there late nineties, but
before then, in nineteen ninety three, through an interview in very reputable Playboy
magazine, they had this interview withDan Aykroyd and said that this place,
Dudley Town, was the most hauntedplace on earth. He grew up as
a spiritualist in Canada. Like again, I don't keep up with this like
(09:22):
Michelle does. It's not like wellknown that he's a spiritualist, but his
dad has like written books on spiritualismand stuff like that. Wow, you
know, spiritualism is where you communicatewith spirits via Wuiji Bord or whatever.
That's like a whole religion. Sohe grew up in that. Interesting.
But because of this interview, peoplestarted going there vandalizing the place. But
(09:43):
this was made worse by the BlairWitch 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 thisexperience. And by the way, this
is before smartphones, right, likethis is maybe around the time the s
kick was out. Maybe I don'tnot sure, but I remember a time
where like you would go somewhere justto go, like, not to film,
(10:05):
not to take pictures, not YouTube, not to make tiktoks. You
would go somewhere just so you couldtell your friends. After that you went,
yeah, you just went to go. Yeah. And people found out
about this, but they started goingto Dudley Town so much that the association
they were like no more like andthey're not nice about it. You can't
even park there, like they're likenot allowed, you can't do this.
(10:26):
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 gasleak or like you know, I mean,
yes, it could be a lotof things. It could have just
(10:48):
been the food contaminate, like drinkingwater contamination. Maybe. When I looked
this up on Wikipedia, there wasa scientist little short statement about it.
Turned out the records actually do showthat this place was originally occupied by the
Mohawk Nation as sacred ground. However, the village's decline has been attributed to
(11:13):
the distance from clean drinking water andunsuitable soil for cultivation. And yeah,
avoid those woods at all cost.My campfire story has a trigger warning.
If you're sensitive to suicide, youknow, if that bothers you, tune
in next week, Edwin. Youare hiking in Japan, you ignore what
(11:37):
looks like a bunch of warning signsall around the trailhead. You're experienced,
and that means they clearly don't applyto you. You've heard that there's a
great view of Mount Fuji from thistrail, and as you hike, you
notice the forest is silent. Nobirds, no insects. As you walk,
(11:58):
even the sound of your feet crunchingon leaves seems muffled. There's no
phone service, but you saw aTikTok 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
(12:18):
scattered along the ground. Different shoes, a hat, an old backpack,
just scattered throughout the woods. Someare 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 whenyou hear it, a scream. Where
(12:41):
did it come from? You headtowards 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, thistime it's all around you, deafinite.
(13:01):
You get up. You've made amistake leaving the path. You turn
around and you start to run asbest as you can. The trees all
look the same. Did the pathmove? 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 grownso closely together that visitors will spend much
(13:26):
of their time in semi darkness.The gloom is relieved only by the occasional
stream of sunlight that gaps through thetree tops. What people remember the most
about this forest is the silence beneaththe fallen branches and decaying leaves. Of
the forest is volcanic rock. Inthe year eight hundred and sixty four,
(13:46):
Mount Fuji experienced a violent, sixmonth 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 eatall noise. This forest's official name is
Ahoki Gara, but most Japanese callit Ujikai, which means sea of trees.
(14:13):
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 hepublished it. That was dumb. Yeah,
(14:33):
it was very weird, disrespectful.Yeah, Logan Paul went to the
forest and actually found a victim ofsuicide hanging from a tree, and medical
responders came and they filmed the wholething and then he put it online and
it's like laughing in the video.Yeah, it's really not good. The
(14:56):
Suicide Forest has become really popular onsocial media. It's in movies, it's
in the media. It has likethis mysterious reputation. But there are legends
around it and it is kind ofconsidered a sacred place. But one of
the legends that has haunted this forestis that in feudal times, when food
was scarce and the situation was desperate, a family might take a dependent elderly
(15:18):
relative, typically a woman, toa remote location and leave her to die,
you know, so they could savethe food so they could be the
young. Yeah, whether that happenedor not, there's not really a lot
of proof that that happened. Thatmight be more of like a fictionalized folklore
in Japan that that happened a lot, because it doesn't Like scholars seem to
(15:39):
dispute whether they call it senoside wasever 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 uraare the vengeful spirits of those old people
(16:03):
that were abandoned to starvation and leftthe mercy of the elements, and they
dedicate themselves to tormenting visitors and luringthe sad and the loss off their pass
you know, like, I wascurious about how this forest became so associated
with suicide. Mount Fuji, likeother mountains in Japan, are considered a
sacred space, and the forests thatsurround them are considered a sacred space.
(16:26):
So for more than a thousand years, Buddhist monks have retreated to the forest
to practice an extreme form of selfdenial and meditation that ended in death.
According to one tradition, monks wouldmeditate in the forest for a thousand days,
subsisting on nothing more than leaves andbark. Then they would be quote
(16:48):
unquote buried alive to continue meditating inan underground crypt. The ultimate goal was
to transform the body, while stillalive, into a shukusibutsu, a type
of living mummy, which is prettycrazy. And there are eighteen of these
self mummified bunks on display in Japanstill, although scientists believe they were actually
(17:11):
mummified after their deaths. But thegoal is to be alive and mummified.
So that was something that actually didgo on there. And then in the
sixties there is an author named SeyeshoMatsumoto who published a short story called Tower
of Waves, which centers on starcrosslovers. You know, they're kept apart,
(17:36):
out of their control, you know, And it ends with the woman
in the story writing a farewell letterto her lover, taking a bottle of
pills and dramatically going into the hokiGara forest and disappearing. That became like
a huge smash hit in the sixties. There's tons of adaptations that still get
(17:56):
made. It's like, you know, the way Romeo and Juliet comes back
into fashion over and over and overagain in Western cultures. You know,
it goes out, comes back in, goes out. So I kind of
imagine that's what's happening there. Butthis book put it on the map as
a popular suicide destination. But thatwasn't the thing that really cemented it.
The thing that cemented it was thatthere's this infamous book published in the nineties
(18:19):
called The Complete Suicide Manual. OhI just got chills. I don't know
why it is. Yeah, youshould get chills because it's pretty demented.
The Complete Suicide Manual. It's soldover one million copies. It's never been
translated into English, it's only inJapanese, and it went out of its
way to really romanticize the forest asthe perfect place to die, and bodies
(18:41):
have literally been found with this book, which Japan actually does have a romanticized
idea of suicide. It does haveone of the suicide highest suicide raids in
the world. Yeah, so likethere's like less shame to it. Yeah,
I guess there's less shame. Orit's also like they have that thing
where like samuraize, Yeah, youcan fall on your soul and then kamikazi
pilots, you know, like there'sthings like that. The Ahoki Gara Forests
(19:04):
sees more suicides than any other locationin the world except for the Golden Gate
Bridge. But yeah, the Internetis littered with disturbing images from the Suicide
Forest, from the abandoned personal effectsand the undergrowth to human bones. If
you dare to venture into this legendaryplace, do as the sign says and
(19:26):
stay on the path. The storyabout hearing the corpse scream or whatever that
happened to somebody. They were walkingalong and they heard screaming and they ran
towards the screaming and it was actuallyjust a dead body under a tree.
But think about all that energy inthat forest. The woods are a spooky,
scary place man. Whether they're inJapan or whether they're in Connecticut,
(19:52):
it's a dark place. And ifyou'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 cantext them, you can call them.
They're twenty four hours English and Spanish. Baby ben Coforna have a comment from
(20:15):
the night guard. Okay, Thequestion was know if someone who has had
contact with aliens, do you believethem? The answer was, I don't
have someone who's seen aliens. Butmy Bible teacher claims to have seen a
ghost and even has a photo ofit. 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. Butanyway, thank you for comment. Yeah,
(20:37):
thanks a lot. And also wewant to hear that story obviously.
Yeah, you gotta tell us.Also from the episode what do you Know
about the Bermuda Triangle, the questionwas 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.
(21:00):
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 onthe air. We love to hear from
you. I guess we'll put outthe fire because we didn't start it.
Dang it. We've been in thedoctor this whole time. All right,
guys, Well, we'll see younext week for more tales around the fire.
(21:22):
Campfire Story is hosted by Michelle Newmanand Edwin Kovarubias. This podcast was
edited and sound designed by Sarah WorhezWendel, a VW sound
You get up, You've made amistake leaving the path. You turn around
and you start to run as bestas you can. The trees all look
the same. Did the path move? It's too late. The forest will
never let you go. Get readyfor a campfire story. I'm Edwin,
I'm Michelle, and we'll share spookystories with playful banter that'll keep you up
(00:25):
at night. So throw some woodon the fire and put a wiener on
a stick. We're telling you acampfire story tonight. Are you ready for
a campfire story? That was myowl? That means yes, I guess.
So yeah, that means yes,because I'm out here in the woods
with you, so obviously it meansyes, I'm ready. Here we go
(00:48):
haunted forests. So a long timeago, there was an English nobleman who
was the administrator and financial agent ofKing Read the seventh. His name was
Edmund Dudley. While the king wassick, it was said that Dudley ordered
his friends to get ready and assemblein arms in case the king died.
(01:11):
It's assemblant army. Ooh, solike be ready to take over? Yeah
yeah, yeah, yeah, that'swhat I imagine. Okay, okay,
anyway, that was the crime hewas charged with, and he was imprisoned
in the Tower of London for constructivetreason. But the real reason, though,
is that they didn't like the waythat he handled the money. Plus
(01:32):
he got super rich for managing money. Politicians today they do that too,
and yet they still have their headson. 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
(01:53):
and settled in America, bringing alongthat 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 actuallyjust 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 insaneand violent deaths. You see, the
(02:15):
family had gotten a hold of thisbook in order to get rid of that
curse. However, things just gotworse because of it. They opened the
gates of hell. So the towndidn't give them anything back. No business
could thrive, and again no cropsworked like it was just bad in this
article that I found. The cursecame quickly to those people that moved into
(02:38):
that mountain town, and one ofthe very very first victims was Nathaniel Carter.
This is like seventeen sixty ish whenhe was on a business trip,
his wife an infant child were brutallymurdered by Native Americans. Shortly after he
was murdered, another one of theDudley's who had owned the property purchased in
(02:59):
Dudley Town. His name was abelA bl Abi e l Abiel. Abiel
Abiel called him Abel that works forme. Abel himself ended up getting dementia
due to his old age and diedin the town at ninety years old,
which sounds like a pretty good life. I mean, you lived up to
(03:21):
ninety. But then one of theirfriends, the name was Gershen Hollister,
he fell to his death while hewas 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 animalfrom the forests had actually killed Gershon.
(03:44):
All these rumors of demons, ghosts, and everything were common among the people
that lived there. Another thing thathappened in that town was that this woman,
Sarah, was struck by lightning infront of her home in eighteen oh
four after hearing the news. Hewas the husband who was a general war
hero, Herman Swift from the RevolutionaryWar also went insane. He was just
(04:08):
kind of like not there for therest 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 electionof eighteen seventy two, and then Greley
lost his bid to grant and thecurse was blamed in all of these cases.
(04:28):
I mean, it's a high concentrationof weird things happening because the town
is so small. There's like twentysix families. Yeah, so that's a
lot of tragedy to happen in likea very small part of a population.
That's what they say. It wasa curse. And I don't know if
you believe in curses, but Ikind of do. I mean, I
think it might be a curse thatwhether you're cursed to like, you believe
(04:48):
it and you yourself rationalize it andthen 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 justhappening. As this town entered the twentieth
century, the curse still continued.One of them was John Patrick Broffei,
one of the final residents of thetown. There was almost no one there
(05:11):
at this point. There was nobusiness, nothing that could happen there.
He couldn't grow things, just nothingworked anyway. His wife died of tuberculosis,
and then two of his children wanderedoff into the woods and never returned.
And then he also went into thewoods and was never seen again.
Z Okay and their house later burnedto the ground in a mysterious fire.
(05:36):
Oh my god, it's just likegone, like you're gone. Not even
your belongings made it. That isso tragic, it's funny. I mean,
that is so cursed. However,historians can actually find a link to
this first migration of the curse fromthe Dudley's and they just consider this an
internet rumor. Nothing's really there.The place isn't haunted, But the real
(06:00):
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 settlingin this area we know as Dudley Town,
again not an actual official city ortown. Two hundred years later,
the land is still kept as aprivate land trust, but there are still
(06:21):
traces of that original village and peoplethat started visiting the town in the eighties
actually just to check it out becauseit's really creepy. They call it the
Dark Entry Forest. So now enterthe Clark family. Doctor William Clark,
who was a doctor of like acancer studies person, bought a house there
(06:44):
when he visited with his wife andfell in love with Dark Entry Forest.
They were from New York, sothey wanted that piece. So him and
his wife were at the cabin theyhad 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, likeshe just wasn't there, and he was
like, that's weird. But thenas he's coming closer to the cabin,
(07:08):
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 killedherself. Not long after that, Doctor
(07:30):
Clark stayed around. He actually gotremarried, but then he died in nineteen
forty three. But before that heactually founded the Dark Entry Forest Association and
it was made to preserve the forestareas around there. Michelle, do you
remember the Blair Witch Project. Ido. Yeah, it's been making news
lately. Yeah, I wonder whylike that, Well, it's because the
actors never got paid. Oh,that was one of the top thirty I
(07:55):
think highest grossing movies. Did thatwhole 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 alot. No, it's not a lot
for that. How much that moviegrows, Yeah, it grossed a lot.
But also, like if you madea movie for however little they made
(08:16):
it for, and then you're like, what somebody wants this, you'd immediately
do it for those who may notremember what it's about. Right, So
it's a story of three film studentsthat they go into the woods and then
they get lost, and then thefootage 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 sothat you think that it was real.
(08:37):
You would find interviews, newspaper articles, like even in the credits they said
that the actors were dead or whateveror like never found or something. I
never found it, I remember,I was kind of believing it. I
was like, yeah, this isa very creepy stuff. That specific story,
it takes place out in the hauntedforest, drew a lot of attention
to Dudley Town because they said that, oh, it's a similar thing vibe,
(09:01):
we should go there. So peoplestarted going there late nineties, but
before then, in nineteen ninety three, through an interview in very reputable Playboy
magazine, they had this interview withDan Aykroyd and said that this place,
Dudley Town, was the most hauntedplace on earth. He grew up as
a spiritualist in Canada. Like again, I don't keep up with this like
(09:22):
Michelle does. It's not like wellknown that he's a spiritualist, but his
dad has like written books on spiritualismand stuff like that. Wow, you
know, spiritualism is where you communicatewith spirits via Wuiji Bord or whatever.
That's like a whole religion. Sohe grew up in that. Interesting.
But because of this interview, peoplestarted going there vandalizing the place. But
(09:43):
this was made worse by the BlairWitch 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 thisexperience. And by the way, this
is before smartphones, right, likethis is maybe around the time the s
kick was out. Maybe I don'tnot sure, but I remember a time
where like you would go somewhere justto go, like, not to film,
(10:05):
not to take pictures, not YouTube, not to make tiktoks. You
would go somewhere just so you couldtell your friends. After that you went,
yeah, you just went to go. Yeah. And people found out
about this, but they started goingto Dudley Town so much that the association
they were like no more like andthey're not nice about it. You can't
even park there, like they're likenot allowed, you can't do this.
(10:26):
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 gasleak or like you know, I mean,
yes, it could be a lotof things. It could have just
(10:48):
been the food contaminate, like drinkingwater contamination. Maybe. When I looked
this up on Wikipedia, there wasa scientist little short statement about it.
Turned out the records actually do showthat this place was originally occupied by the
Mohawk Nation as sacred ground. However, the village's decline has been attributed to
(11:13):
the distance from clean drinking water andunsuitable soil for cultivation. And yeah,
avoid those woods at all cost.My campfire story has a trigger warning.
If you're sensitive to suicide, youknow, if that bothers you, tune
in next week, Edwin. Youare hiking in Japan, you ignore what
(11:37):
looks like a bunch of warning signsall around the trailhead. You're experienced,
and that means they clearly don't applyto you. You've heard that there's a
great view of Mount Fuji from thistrail, and as you hike, you
notice the forest is silent. Nobirds, no insects. As you walk,
(11:58):
even the sound of your feet crunchingon leaves seems muffled. There's no
phone service, but you saw aTikTok 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
(12:18):
scattered along the ground. Different shoes, a hat, an old backpack,
just scattered throughout the woods. Someare 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 whenyou hear it, a scream. Where
(12:41):
did it come from? You headtowards 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, thistime it's all around you, deafinite.
(13:01):
You get up. You've made amistake leaving the path. You turn
around and you start to run asbest as you can. The trees all
look the same. Did the pathmove? 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 grownso closely together that visitors will spend much
(13:26):
of their time in semi darkness.The gloom is relieved only by the occasional
stream of sunlight that gaps through thetree tops. What people remember the most
about this forest is the silence beneaththe fallen branches and decaying leaves. Of
the forest is volcanic rock. Inthe year eight hundred and sixty four,
(13:46):
Mount Fuji experienced a violent, sixmonth 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 eatall noise. This forest's official name is
Ahoki Gara, but most Japanese callit Ujikai, which means sea of trees.
(14:13):
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 hepublished it. That was dumb. Yeah,
(14:33):
it was very weird, disrespectful.Yeah, Logan Paul went to the
forest and actually found a victim ofsuicide hanging from a tree, and medical
responders came and they filmed the wholething and then he put it online and
it's like laughing in the video.Yeah, it's really not good. The
(14:56):
Suicide Forest has become really popular onsocial media. It's in movies, it's
in the media. It has likethis mysterious reputation. But there are legends
around it and it is kind ofconsidered a sacred place. But one of
the legends that has haunted this forestis that in feudal times, when food
was scarce and the situation was desperate, a family might take a dependent elderly
(15:18):
relative, typically a woman, toa remote location and leave her to die,
you know, so they could savethe food so they could be the
young. Yeah, whether that happenedor not, there's not really a lot
of proof that that happened. Thatmight be more of like a fictionalized folklore
in Japan that that happened a lot, because it doesn't Like scholars seem to
(15:39):
dispute whether they call it senoside wasever 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 uraare the vengeful spirits of those old people
(16:03):
that were abandoned to starvation and leftthe mercy of the elements, and they
dedicate themselves to tormenting visitors and luringthe sad and the loss off their pass
you know, like, I wascurious about how this forest became so associated
with suicide. Mount Fuji, likeother mountains in Japan, are considered a
sacred space, and the forests thatsurround them are considered a sacred space.
(16:26):
So for more than a thousand years, Buddhist monks have retreated to the forest
to practice an extreme form of selfdenial and meditation that ended in death.
According to one tradition, monks wouldmeditate in the forest for a thousand days,
subsisting on nothing more than leaves andbark. Then they would be quote
(16:48):
unquote buried alive to continue meditating inan underground crypt. The ultimate goal was
to transform the body, while stillalive, into a shukusibutsu, a type
of living mummy, which is prettycrazy. And there are eighteen of these
self mummified bunks on display in Japanstill, although scientists believe they were actually
(17:11):
mummified after their deaths. But thegoal is to be alive and mummified.
So that was something that actually didgo on there. And then in the
sixties there is an author named SeyeshoMatsumoto who published a short story called Tower
of Waves, which centers on starcrosslovers. You know, they're kept apart,
(17:36):
out of their control, you know, And it ends with the woman
in the story writing a farewell letterto her lover, taking a bottle of
pills and dramatically going into the hokiGara forest and disappearing. That became like
a huge smash hit in the sixties. There's tons of adaptations that still get
(17:56):
made. It's like, you know, the way Romeo and Juliet comes back
into fashion over and over and overagain in Western cultures. You know,
it goes out, comes back in, goes out. So I kind of
imagine that's what's happening there. Butthis book put it on the map as
a popular suicide destination. But thatwasn't the thing that really cemented it.
The thing that cemented it was thatthere's this infamous book published in the nineties
(18:19):
called The Complete Suicide Manual. OhI just got chills. I don't know
why it is. Yeah, youshould get chills because it's pretty demented.
The Complete Suicide Manual. It's soldover one million copies. It's never been
translated into English, it's only inJapanese, and it went out of its
way to really romanticize the forest asthe perfect place to die, and bodies
(18:41):
have literally been found with this book, which Japan actually does have a romanticized
idea of suicide. It does haveone of the suicide highest suicide raids in
the world. Yeah, so likethere's like less shame to it. Yeah,
I guess there's less shame. Orit's also like they have that thing
where like samuraize, Yeah, youcan fall on your soul and then kamikazi
pilots, you know, like there'sthings like that. The Ahoki Gara Forests
(19:04):
sees more suicides than any other locationin the world except for the Golden Gate
Bridge. But yeah, the Internetis littered with disturbing images from the Suicide
Forest, from the abandoned personal effectsand the undergrowth to human bones. If
you dare to venture into this legendaryplace, do as the sign says and
(19:26):
stay on the path. The storyabout hearing the corpse scream or whatever that
happened to somebody. They were walkingalong and they heard screaming and they ran
towards the screaming and it was actuallyjust a dead body under a tree.
But think about all that energy inthat forest. The woods are a spooky,
scary place man. Whether they're inJapan or whether they're in Connecticut,
(19:52):
it's a dark place. And ifyou'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 cantext them, you can call them.
They're twenty four hours English and Spanish. Baby ben Coforna have a comment from
(20:15):
the night guard. Okay, Thequestion was know if someone who has had
contact with aliens, do you believethem? The answer was, I don't
have someone who's seen aliens. Butmy Bible teacher claims to have seen a
ghost and even has a photo ofit. 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. Butanyway, thank you for comment. Yeah,
(20:37):
thanks a lot. And also wewant to hear that story obviously.
Yeah, you gotta tell us.Also from the episode what do you Know
about the Bermuda Triangle, the questionwas 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.
(21:00):
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 onthe air. We love to hear from
you. I guess we'll put outthe fire because we didn't start it.
Dang it. We've been in thedoctor this whole time. All right,
guys, Well, we'll see younext week for more tales around the fire.
(21:22):
Campfire Story is hosted by Michelle Newmanand Edwin Kovarubias. This podcast was
edited and sound designed by Sarah WorhezWendel, a VW sound
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