What follows is not a complete record. Scholars and archivists across Pennsylvania and New Jersey continue to piece together fragments of the People of the Tree and the lore surrounding Devil’s Wood, work that remains ongoing and, in places, deliberately obstructed. What is presented here reflects what has been recovered so far—understood to be incomplete, and likely to change as more comes to light.

 

The Mythology of Devil’s Wood

A working reference for the novel by Mark McNease

The Devil’s Tree

An ancient tree standing near Ringing Rocks on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River, with its counterpart—the true Devil’s Tree—across the river in New Jersey. Though it appears to be perhaps three hundred years old, Benjamin Delacorte insists it is far older—old enough, he tells Peter, to have stood “when they crucified Jesus.” This is not exaggeration. The tree has not lived on natural biology for centuries. It has been sustained by something else, fed by whatever has haunted that ground since long before European settlers arrived.

Around the tree, the ground stays unnaturally warm—no snow ever settles there, even in the dead of winter. Press an ear to the bark, and some claim you can hear children screaming and playing.

The Founding Pact

In the mid-1700s, a Delacorte predecessor made a bargain beneath the tree with a demonic presence bound inside it, trading a soul for something desired. The tree became cursed permanently. This single act is the origin of everything that follows—the compact from which the entire mythology of Devil’s Wood descends.

Maren Delacorte

Benjamin’s mother, and a serious practitioner of a real, dark craft—not a dabbler. She bound herself to the tree deliberately, feeding it something real. She was hanged as a witch from one of its branches when Benjamin was seven years old. He stood at the tree line and watched it happen.

Her death did not diminish her power—it deepened it, and something of it transferred to Benjamin, who learned from her afterward, through the bark itself.

Benjamin Delacorte

Now over one hundred and sixty-five years old. After his mother’s death, he cut the branch she was hanged from and carved it into a walking stick—at the boulder field of Ringing Rocks, in the resonance of the stones—and named it “Devil’s Wood,” deliberately reclaiming the word once used to destroy her.

Everything he has done since traces back to that single night. He is not driven by a lust for power. He is a child who watched his mother disappear, and has spent a century and a half making certain he never does the same.

The Walking Stick’s Curse

The carvings on the stick are not a historical record—they are an active, living curse, connected to a pre-Columbian spiritual tradition referred to in this mythology as the People of the Tree. The symbols protect the bargain: anyone who draws close to deciphering them becomes a target. This is why Oliver was killed—he was close to a translation.

The stick does not kill in an obvious, dramatic way. Victims initially feel more themselves—sharper, more vivid, more alive—which is, in fact, the beginning of the drain. Slowly, their vitality, their specificity, the thing that makes them irreducibly themselves, is siphoned away. They do not die outright. They fade into generality.

Ringing Rocks

The boulder field where the stick was carved—a genuine threshold site, where the stones vibrate constantly at a frequency below human hearing. When the stick returns there, the rocks ring louder. Whether that is a homecoming or a warning is something Benjamin has never let himself examine too closely.