The Music Box

 

So today I want to tell the story of the music box card.  The picture above isn't a picture of the actual music box but it is almost identical.  The story of the music box happened long after I moved away from the haunted farm and the silent woods.

 

It was March in the year of  1993 just a couple months after my sister, Connie passed away quite unexpectedly. My niece Christy was getting married and I had stepped in to try and help with things, as her mother would have, One of the things I planned was the rehearsal dinner in the basement of the church.

 

I had gotten home, tired but satisfied that the dinner had been nice. I was walking around my bedroom preparing for bed while my husband was in the living room. I was thinking that I was pleased with how things went when suddenly I chastened myself because I was feeling good about things while my sister had not been around to enjoy the moments of her daughters wedding rehearsal.

 

 As I am thinking this I reach my hand up and switch off the bedroom light. Immediately I hear a sort of twisting or winding sound and as I stand puzzled, I reach for the light switch. As I turn the light on the music begins to play from the jewelry box/music box on my dresser.

 

I walked over to examine it and as I touched it, it stopped playing. I picked it up, puzzled and turned the knob on the back. Yes the same "winding" noise I had heard only minutes earlier. I knew that it was a message, a message from my sister, saying that it was "ok" to be happy about the evening. I told my husband what had happened and then calmly went to bed, which is not like me at all. I'm usually jumpy around things of this sort. Yet I knew I had nothing to fear.

 

The next day I tried to experiment with different things to see if I could "make" the same thing happen again. The music box stating to play. I set the door of the box slightly ajar as I walked across the room. I pulled the drawer out. I walked softly. I stomped across the floor. Nothing recreated the music and most definitely nothing could recreate the fact that the box had to wind itself up before it could play the music.

 

The music box cards represents messages, reassurance and comfort.

Haunted Woods

So as I was musing about the silent woods I started thinking about haunted woods, in general, and what history might tell us about such places. What do such places have in common, if anything.

Take for instance the Forest of Rothiemurchus  in Scotland, burial place of Chief of Clan Shaw. If you are brave he leaves you alone but show fear and who may never be seen again. The rains, mists, and grayness of the Scottish weather are favorable to spirit activity.

Then there is Dudley Town, USA. Located in Connecticut, the remains of this town, sometimes called the Village of the Damned, are crumbling in the forest. People claim that when the enter the part of the forest near the town, it falls strangely silent. The location is supposedly cursed and visitors claim to have seen orbs and spirits.

Ballyboley Forest in Northern Ireland is reported to be a sinister place to visit. Reported to be an ancient Druid site, with overgrown stone formations and circular trenches, there have been reports of figures dressed in weird rags, blood smeared trees, black smoke and moaning. Locals reportedly do not enter Ballyboley Forest. Visitors claim it is unusually quiet and without wildlife.

Screaming Woods, England  Pluckley Village is reported to be the most haunted village in England and it is also home to the Screaming Woods. This strong concentration of paranormal activity and hauntings may be due to the location of the village in terms of magnetism in the ground. Paranormal activity is believed to flourish in areas of strong geological magnetism. Among other things,the sounds of footsteps and most importantly screaming have been reported coming from the woods.

Hoia Baciu Romania (the World's Most Haunted Forest) is said to be actually a gateway to another dimension. It is sometimes called the Bermuda Triangle of the Country because people who live near it are afraid to enter it as they believe they will not return home again.  Lots of pictures of disc like objects, dead vegetation zones and strange rashes and dizziness are linked to this forest.

These are just a few "haunted forests." Like the silent woods most notably people comment on the absence of normal forest sounds and often the lack of wildlife.

The Ball of Fire

 

I wrote earlier about the ghost lights that appeared at the end of our driveway and caused hearts to beat faster as we played in the dark yard of the farm. Earlier, much earlier there was another light. It was different in quality, it had a reddish almost fire like appearance. This light appeared across the hills and on the opposite side of the silent woods, at my uncle's home, long ago when my mother was a child.

 

This light would come out of the woods and circle the house in the dark night sky. This light appeared more sinister in nature than the ghost lights and no one knew what it wanted. After the light appeared on several different nights, my grandfather stood in the yard watching it. Then he spoke.

 

"If ye be from God then you're welcome, but if ye be from the devil be gone."  The light shot across the sky into the woods (the silent woods? I wish I knew but the telling of the story through the years never included a direction). It never returned again.

 

What was the light? Where did it come from and where did it disappear to?  These questions were never answered. The malevolent feelings the circling light resonated was enough for my grandfather. He seldom spoke of the light again but the younger family members did and they carried the tale down through the ages.

 

 



The Ghost Hunts

We just completed another ghost hunt last night and it seemed "uneventful." Oh there were a few "creepy things" like the rods pointing us towards by brother's grave and the tingling sensation and goose bumps while on the old bluff road. We talked about doing a day time hunt and looking for other places to explore the paranormal. We talked about the ghost lights, and past hunts and we laughed. It was chilly and we drank hot chocolate in the cemetery.

 

Then I woke up this morning and I thought for a moment about the "reason" for the hunts. And it came to me that as others search for childhood memories in cotton candy, parades, and holiday dinners, we search for them in the hunts. Everyone always wants to capture the feelings, the memories, the meaningful experiences from the past. To hold tight to them as a foundation or proof of who they are. A sort of memory family tree. Ours are just a little "unusual".

 

Most people laugh when I mention the farm, the woods, the strange encounters. Why shouldn't they? If you have never experienced such odd comings and goings than why would you even begin to have a knowledge base or a belief that such things might actually happen. When I hear people say they drank a bottle of wine that cost over 500 dollars, I laugh too. It's not in my mind's eye that such things happen!

 

Perhaps the ghost hunts are a search for meaning, a connection to the past, a validation of what we experienced, our heritage. Perhaps they are a hobby for a chilly night sandwiched between Halloween and the Day of the Dead. Perhaps they are a "path" we are supposed to walk for some reason. Perhaps they are a connection between the generations. Perhaps they are just a whim and we are lost in investigating things we cannot see. Does it matter?

 

 

Perhaps it is like the tunnel (some call it Satan's tunnel) a dark void that one must travel through to get to the light on the other side. Don't stay too long wandering around inside or you might just lose your way.

 

The Journey cards are a deck of cards that highlight many of these strange and "other worldly" experiences. They are a history of sorts. The Silent Woods is a blog to muse about it all. The ghost hunts simply deepen the meaning.