The Woods Have Eyes
A glimpse into the supernatural along with a challenge
I’ve decided to change focus. A very small subset of the world cares to read about farming and philosophy. But EVERYONE loves the paranormal and a good ghost story.
I’ve got stories for you this week, but I also have a challenge: Are the words I’m sharing with you the truth or are they fiction?
It’s up to you to decide.
Disclaimer: y’all know I love Jesus, but my people are from the hills of Appalachia. My great-aunt Daisy recited prayers to stop wounds from bleeding and to call the fire out of burns. In my world, faith and the supernatural are synonymous. Like the illusive black panther that everyone spies roaming the backroads of South Carolina while the authorities insist it does not exist, the forest of my consciousness contains unquantifiable mysteries.
I rarely get the farm to myself. We have a glorious stream of visitors coming down the driveway daily and from my perch on the front porch of the farmhouse, I hear voices in sessions, in barn chores, filtering through the air from morning to night.
My mother lives with me and Christopher works seconds shift with the airplanes. Mom’s away doing overnight pet sits lately so I’ve had this weird collection of hours after dusk when the work has ended in the barn and the gates are still open for Christopher’s late arrival home.
Let me preface this by saying that although I’m prone to spook like a horse over sudden sights and sounds, I’m not generally a suspicious human. As an only child, I really dig being alone. I’ve also been threatened at gunpoint and spent a period of time in constant vigilance as a stranger tried to harm me. I am neither naive about the threats of the world nor hyper-vigilant. It was Christopher who recently suggested that we take an Uber home after dark in Atlanta when the daylight walk to a venue had us strolling under sketchy underpasses. He’s trained in self-defense. I’m oblivious.
Monday evening, I luxuriated in my aloneness. I weeded the front garden until the sun slipped behind the trees and I blended a mock- mojito, sprigging it with the virulent mint that has now airdropped into my potted ferns, as I curled up at the porch table to write and listen to tree bugs.
The horses snuffled in the barn at the base of the hill. The cats loafed about. The border collie remained generally concerned, as is her wont, but something had been off with her. Her stomach hadn’t been settled and I’d attributed it to the Fourth of July fireworks that the neighbors continuously lit and I doubt they’ll ever really be finished. It’s like a never-ending smorgasbord of explosions.
My back was turned toward the walkway that leads out into the woods. One moment I was sunk into the peace of the farm, the next I felt exposed, like the way my old Newfoundland used to hide in the bathtub and act surprised when I found his ginormous bear shape standing behind the shower curtain.
As I turned to look behind me, I expected to see someone standing there, the sense of an approaching presence was so great. But there was nothing but shadows and emptiness filigreed with shapes cast from the dull glow of the porch lights.
I moved inside the house and locked the doors. The dog curled timidly into a ball near me. I kept glancing at the dark windows that looked out through the woods and as I returned the gaze of the glass, my nervous system remained on fire with the sense that I wasn’t alone.
I’d put the feeling out of my mind by the next night. I moved my computer and books out to the porch to sat under the blessed breeze of the fan to do accounting. I clicked and entered and toggled through spreadsheets and databases in an easy rote memory from years of being the farm’s one-man administration.
The dog stayed inside the house in the air conditioning. Her stomach was still not settled and she’d had a few accidents throughout the day. Things are so rarely off with her physically that I was consumed with a gnawing worry, like the way I’ve grieved the day she won’t be with me forever for so long instead of being present with her while she’s on the earth and vibrant.
I came and went, refilling drinks, messing around with things, adding puzzle pieces to the image spread out on the dining room table because I’d suddenly been beset with the need for the household to work puzzles together.
By the time the sun set fully behind the peak of Paris Mountain behind the house, I was surprised to see the lights illuminating the porch.
I listened to the sounds of the night birds settling into their routines. A horse coughed and sneezed.
And there it was again, the sense that something was watching from the dark edge of the woods.
I gathered my things and locked myself back inside the house.
When Christopher arrived home, the once joyful act of midnight watering the gardens was tense with tiredness and long pauses where we stopped the flowing water hose to investigate weird sounds coming from the woods. We thought we heard a woman talking. We glanced at each other as we both heard a low growl.
“I’m not making this up in my head, right?” I asked.
“I hear it too,” Christopher said.
“What is it?”
By the third night, I was vigilant. Something had changed. Something was off.
My mother gathered her things and left for her overnight house sit. She worried over the dog who hadn’t been able to stomach dinner. As mom drove away, I didn’t linger on the porch as the sunlight began to dim. I stayed inside and set up my desk to record the voice-over for last week’s writings and I worked through the edits with half my perception focused on the cracked door behind me and the other trained on a hyper-focus of stereo sound fixated on the dense woods that surround the farmhouse.
The room I work and sleep in is a glorious sunroom of windows. It’s my favorite room in the house. Every wall is filled with windows and light, which is perfect when the sun shines and the wind is moving the branches of the thick oaks.
But as I sat at my desk working that night, I felt like a fish in an aquarium. Situated in a corner of windows there wasn’t much between the inside and outside, between me and it, whatever it was. Because if the it was just my inflated imagination, it was no less real to the alarms going off inside my body. I couldn’t escape the feeling that I was being watched.
I loaded the recording and did a last read-through of my newsletter to make sure it was ready to publish in the morning. And then something happened that I will never be able to explain.
Something crashed into the back wall of the house between the desk where I sat and a nearby window that I couldn’t see out of. This something was huge, like a full-grown buck or a hungry black bear. It sounded like it ripped the crawl space off of the foundation. The sound was like wood splitting, like glass breaking, like the furniture had been overturned beside me.
I was afraid to look.
I began to tremble deeply, internally, like I was shaking apart from the inside out. I wrapped my hand around the base of the pistol that I had placed near me. I opened my phone so that I could quickly dial for help.
When I finally made myself turn toward the noise to see what sort of damage had just been created — there was nothing there.
The windows were intact. The furniture was in place. Everything was just as it was.
Except, I wasn’t.
I texted
and : HELP.Laci was nearby and changed course to come to the farm. I instructed her to wait in her truck when she arrived and I would walk out and escort her inside. And Brooke kept the messages flowing, a constant blip in the radar as she kept watch on her people. Neither one questioned me, second-guessed, or suggested other possibilities. They just moved into action.
Laci arrived within minutes and I met her in the front yard. We peered around the corner in the back of the house and found — nothing. Nothing at all. There were no footprints. The walls of the house were untouched. There were no branches or fallen trees. The area was clean and everything was exactly where it should be.
We locked ourselves inside the house and waited for Christopher to get home from work.
As Laci played with my books and the dog, Brooke kept texting. “Did it sound like a human or did it sound like an animal?”
“It sounded like both or neither,” I said.
And somewhere between asking Chat GPT what steps should be taken after an attempted break-in by an animal-humanoid hybrid (the answer was shockingly helpful and concise) and sending funny videos to distract me, Brooke said, “I’m staying up with you until Christopher gets home. At least I can call 911. Or a shaman.”
We heard nothing more from the woods. With every light in the house on and Laci and the dog opening early birthday presents, Brooke typed again, “Maybe you really do need a shaman.”
Christopher examined the back of the house thoroughly when he arrived home. There wasn’t a scratch or a mossy wall out of place. The dry, baked clay beneath the windows was smooth and undisturbed.
As we watered the gardens we both felt a sense of something in the woods, something watching. Distant sounds caught our awareness. We paused the hose water and listened to a soft wind move through the dense canopy of leaves and branches and vines, trying to make something out, trying to see what it wanted.
“It feels like it’s trying to tell us something,” I said.
Despite what I’ve written so far, I’m going to preface the next bit with — I SHIT YOU NOT.
In the morning light, I pushed aside my worries and busied myself with summer camp and barn things. There was a message from a someone I didn’t immediately recognize, but it had the looks of the six thousand spam mails I receive every day. I typed a short response and continued with my business.
When a call came through from the same name, I almost didn’t answer because of the one time my ex-husband’s account was hacked and I answered a Facebook call from a con artist.
But something stirred in my memory. I knew this person calling — I knew his name. When the pieces finally clicked, I couldn’t answer fast enough.
Two decades ago, in the early days of the farm, I marked the significance of the venture with two events. An Episcopal priest performed a formal barn blessing AND my father suggested I connect with a friend of his friend who practiced shamanism to have the shaman walk the land and offer any suggestions.
The same father who fully immersed our lives in strict Christian doctrine until the moment I moved out of the house to attend college had taken up yoga and was busy broadening his vision of spirituality. It would have been a great talking point for us, but I was still mad at him for ripping my Bauhaus posters off the wall when I was thirteen and sending me to a therapist because the school principle thought I was a vampire. (“I really don’t think you’re a vampire,” the therapist said, and we laughed. He was a great therapist.)
Back then I didn’t have words to describe what Sarah and I now call the woo. Despite my father’s recent open-minded conversion, I was deeply programmed to hide any interest in weird things. I scheduled time with the shaman to visit the farm, but I didn’t send out invitations and publicize the event like I did with the priest.
I didn’t know what to expect from a shaman’s work, but the experience was immensely helpful. He gave me excellent tips about how to care for the land, suggestions I still practice today. As we walked the fields and pathways of the barn, it was the first time I considered what it meant to be a steward and guardian of the natural world. I saw the farm through fresh eyes and took many of his practices to heart.
I often referenced the day I spent wandering the farm with this man, but I had not spoken to him since.
Until he called me, twenty years later and just hours after Brooke and I joked about her needing to contact a shaman.
It started out like any other phone call, an exchange of pleasantries, a discussion about the weather, but I needed to know what compelled him to call me on this day of all days.
“I reached into the astral web and it led me to you,” he said.
His words brought to mind a superhighway of information traveling across the world and beyond.
In Canadian anthropologist Jeremy Narby’s initial fieldwork with communities in the Peruvian Amazon, he writes, “My training had led me to expect that people would tell tall tales. I thought my job as an anthropologist was to discover what they really thought, like some kind of private detective.”
As Narby dove deeper into researching indigenous understandings of plant medicine, he asked questions that the pharmaceutical companies exploiting the Amazon for medicinal knowledge could not answer. Namely, how did the shamans in these cultures speak to the plants? How did they receive their extensive and ancient knowledge about cures and remedies?
Narby realized that he had to begin with an inverted hypothesis — he had to, “. . .believe in order to see, rather than the other way around.” He then took it one step further, “Was this information coming from inside the human brain, as the scientific point of view would have it, or from the outside world of plants, as the shamans claimed?”
What he discovered was a significant link between what shamans throughout the world experienced as they reached out into the broader field of understanding — or the astral web — and our world’s building blocks: DNA.
On the phone, I told the shaman about the weird happenings I had encountered around the farm the night before.
The shaman didn’t miss a beat. “They’re shapeshifters,” he said. “They either want to communicate with you, or eat your horses.”
I told him that the horses didn’t seem very concerned, but my dog was freaking out.
“They must have something to tell you,” he said. The conversation was so matter of fact, so easy, as if I had put a message out to the ethers and he was busy formulating a response before he’d dialed my number.
We spoke about things I could do to put the shapeshifters at ease. The shaman asked if I had done anything to draw attention to myself.
For the first time in my life, I was able to respond that I was all good — I’d been actively working to lay all my old ghosts to rest. “But the woods around the farm have recently been clearcut — everywhere. This area has never seen such unprecedented growth. The farm is one of the last long stretches of wooded areas remaining in the area.”
“Maybe they’re looking for a new home,” he said.
We decided that we would speak again soon, but in the meantime he would continue working within the astral web to connect with the shapeshifters and see if he could figure out what they wanted me to tell me.
Do you know the thing going around the internet where women are asked if they’d like to meet a bear or a strange man if they were alone in the woods?
This situation absolutely sealed my answer. Bears have rules that make sense to me. I choose the bear.
But I don’t know what to do with a shapeshifter who is looking for a new home. I’m hoping that the shaman will have suggestions for me when we connect later this week. Until then, we’ll welcome them like we do every new creature that arrives here. We’ll greet them with respect and boundaries and I’ll ask them if there’s a better way of talking than slamming into the house.
Those who love wisdom must investigate many things.
-Heraclitus
Tell me your thoughts. Do you believe in otherworldly creatures that live in the woods?
When Brooke suggested we ask Chat GPT for advice about what to do after an attempted break in by an animal humanoid hybrid, this was the answer: “Seek Professional Help: if the encounter seems particularly unusual, consider contacting animal control or a wildlife expert. For the animal-humanoid hybrid aspect, it might be useful to consult with local experts in wildlife or folklore who might provide insight.”
I either made this whole encounter up, or I lived it. Tell me what you believe. I’ve opened the comment section up for everyone to contribute their thoughts.
Subscriber Gathering
“If you have any interest in shamanic activities, animal control, self defense classes, or community watch groups . . .” says Brooke, please join us for our monthly Paid Subscriber Gathering this Friday 6-7 PM EST. We’ll meet by Zoom and talk about all these things plus journaling, life, and more. Please join us.
Paid subscribers can find sign-in information here.
Until then, I’m going to keep seeking answers.
Love,
Kim
P.S. I’m immensely grateful when you click the heart, share, re-stack and forward my writing to others, however you best like to share in whatever platform you choose. This is the single best way to help writers spread their words. Thank you!
Well, you definitely experienced something real, and not necessarily friendly. It makes sense that highly sensitive people (like us horse people) would sense the presence of a "presence" whether natural or supernatural. Although not at the barn, it has happened to me many times but it doesn't scare me as much anymore. However, I would be VERY afraid if I lived in the middle of the woods and something crashed into the side of the house in the dark of night! As a child I was terribly afraid of the dark. Knowing this, my big brothers would go outside at night and scratch on the window screens of my bedroom to scare the "bejesus" out of me. One night when our parents went out to dinner, leaving our oldest brother in charge, he made me go outside to feed the dogs in the dark. Somehow my young mind came up with the idea that everything in the dark is just the same as it is in the light, only the light is not there, so just imagine that it is. Years later the memory of that lightbulb moment (no pun intended, really) came immediately back to me while reading Psalm 139:12, in which the psalmist says to God, "even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you." Perhaps God planted the simplified version in my 10 year old mind, taking the power away from my big brothers to scare me? I have found Him to be sweet like that. : ) Anyway, I don't have experience with shape-shifters except for weird things I see, or think I see, when I wake up in the night, but that would be a good word to describe it! Does anyone else "see" things between sleeping and waking?
It's true. Not just because I believe in the woo either. I got chills reading when the call came in and that's how I know it's real. Great read! Can't wait to hear what happens.