Late last month, a woman out walking in a stretch of English countryside called Cannock Chase happened upon a forest clearing where baby dolls had been attached to the trees. According to Staffordshire Live, the 64-year old hiker had ventured further than usual into the forest while out walking and, “as [she] dug through the undergrowth,” happened upon the dolls.
“They were in some sort of order,” she remembered. “Their dresses were all raggedy and they were all tied and nailed to the trees.” A video of the site shows all of this pretty well, and it, along with a bunch of other photos, include other details, like a snow-dusted Ouija board with some candles placed on it.
As people jump to conclusions about the baby forest’s use as a place to conduct satanic rituals, practice witchcraft, or engage in all sort of other fun and good dark arts, we should also consider the fact that it’s just as likely that this was, until very recently, the premier hangout spot for disaffected Staffordshire youth who like to come together and smoke cloves, try to contact the ghost of Ian Curtis to complain to him about their parents, and discuss their favorite scenes from The Crow.
Still, the hiker decided to dig a bit deeper. After leaving the woods to see that the dolls were hanging in a spot that had previously been the site of a war hospital and housing for miners, she got in touch with “a friend who is a spiritual medium” to see if she wanted to “take a look up there to see if she can feel anything.”
As best we can tell, there’s no word yet on whether the medium found anything other than empty liquor bottles and rusted-over black and white band pins. But, even the hiker doesn’t think the place is all that frightening anymore. She apparently returned to the spot a bit later, “stood in amongst the dolls,” and prayed and “talked to the dolls and wished the children who used to live in the mining village eternal rest.”
“It wasn’t that scary,” she says.
Let that last remark be a lesson to any who would be freaked out by stumbling upon another spot like this. Old dolls are not necessarily haunted by the trapped spirits of tormented children taken from this earth too soon. Sometimes they’re just cool decorations you can use to make an outdoor space a little bit more exciting when getting together with your pals to summon demons or, more likely, sew a new patch of Siouxsie Sioux’s eyes on a jacket.
[via Boing Boing]
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