We are, in the end, drops of water from on ocean that awaits our return. Until then, we seek.

July 18

I had not expected to spend a sleepless night. Ghost stories told around a fire, which is what this at first appeared to be, are the stuff of childhoods and the easily frightened. We were adults—three women and four men, one of whom had done his best to scare us all with a preposterous tale.

I didn’t know any of them. The retreat had been arranged for seekers, such as we were, not for a group who knew each other. And while I place myself firmly in the agnostic category, I will admit now that I belong more in the believer column, though it’s not a belief that comforts. It’s a belief in the malevolence of things we don’t understand and are better off not examining. The whole experience has confirmed my conclusion that the human species is not the pinnacle of evolution, but it’s most tragic mistake.

What you are about to read are the entries of a journal found in an abandoned cabin somewhere in Hunterdon County, New Jersey. The location remains undisclosed, for reasons that will become clear in the writing. Nothing in this journal has been changed. Only you can decide if these are based on fact or fiction. The answer may ultimately be found in the Devil’s Wood. Be prepared to believe the unbelievable.

July 14

You don’t need to know my name. For your own safety, it’s better that you don’t. By the time this tale is finished, you may wish you’d never met me, so let’s pretend you didn’t.

I was told this story on a spiritual retreat—a group of like-minded seekers spending a weekend in the Pennsylvania countryside at a campground that shall remain nameless for obvious reasons. People like to visit gravesites, and though this wasn’t one, not technically, the woods we were told about weren’t far way. The last thing I want is for them to be discovered.

I assumed the story wasn’t real. There were no tree worshippers in Pennsylvania, no ghost houses, no skeletons in a place called Devil’s Wood. But I was wrong. What I’m about to tell you is all true. There’s a walking stick in my closet that proves it. I want to be rid of it, but it’s not yet ready to be rid of me.

I have to be honest about how little I understood that first night. Retreats like this one are full of people telling stories they need someone else to believe. It was a spiritual retreat, after all. Some of us believed in God, some of us believed in nothing, and a few were convinced the Devil had stopped by a time or two. I’d learned to nod, to make a sympathetic face, to let people have their delusions. Someone always has a ghost story. Usually it’s a dead relative who visited them, or a past life intruding on the present, or a version of themselves they buried a long time ago and haven’t stopped digging up. Ghosts are often reflections in that way.