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Submitted By Derby Duncan

I moved from a big city to a small rural village in Cornwall; it took a long time before I got used to the slower, quieter pace of life. There are times when it still seems strange to lie awake at night listening to the hooting of an owl in a nearby tree - instead of being lulled to sleep by the low murmur of traffic and the distance-muffled rattle of passing trains.

I found myself in a place of green fields, abandoned mine-workings, roofless cottages which hadn’t heard a human voice for generations and narrow, winding lanes (most of them so confined that cars couldn’t pass each other). This place had somehow escaped the passage of time; unregulated woodlands were populated by distorted, bent trees that wore tortured expressions; some of the hillsides housed the eerie, tenantless stone tombs of Celtic warriors. The local people were just as alien, just as far removed from the Midlands city-folk I’d grown up with - they believed in old ideas and superstitions and (at first) I privately laughed if I overheard them solemnly talking amongst themselves about ghosts and demons. Yet, as I spent more time in this place, amidst their landscapes, forests and uninhabited places, I had to give ground; bit by bit, I grudgingly admitted that many of their odd beliefs had foundations in fact.

Because you probably haven’t experienced the ‘culture shock’ of being transplanted from an up-to-date, modern city to a rustic village where little has changed for hundreds of years, many of the weird and uncanny things I’ve seen and heard here would just strike you as ridiculous. In order to really understand, you have to live in a place like this. You have to breathe the air and get in tune with a time when our ancestors were more in harmony with Nature; a time when they had the sky as their ceiling and the winds for their walls; a time when walking at night meant relying upon the fickle moon to light your way (this village has no streetlights - in fact, even the main roads in this region are unlit); a time when the interiors of woods and forests were the homes of wandering spirits and malicious fairies and seldom (if ever) entered by living humans.

I’d lived here for just a week or so. Even though it was close to Midnight, my dog needed to go for a walk - I had spent most of the day rewiring my cottage and he’d only had a couple of strolls around the garden. It was dark and I didn’t have a torch (flashlight); perhaps for the first time I realised how dependent we city people are upon the thousands of street lamps that make the night brighter for us. The moon had a disconcerting habit of disappearing behind clouds and plunging the dog and I into pitchy, inky blackness.

We headed down a cramped, cobbled lane which led away from the village and eventually passed through part of a wood. The locals called it ‘The Copse’ - but it was really an expansive wilderness of trees and bushes; all of them fed and nourished by a multitude of little streams and ponds. The entire wood was large enough to get lost in. The fantastically-twisted branches of tall, old trees overhung the path; the woods stood dark and impenetrable on either side of the man-made track. It was like passing through a tunnel. Far in the distance, I could see a dim circle of uncertain light - the place where the lane emerged from under the boughs.

As the dog and I stepped under the roof of the forest, I felt like an intruder; it was the sort of unsettling environment that I’d walked through in childhood nightmares. The boughs creaked in protest and the leaves whispered conspiratorially in an evening breeze that was too light for me to even sense. The dog picked up on my feelings; he pricked up his ears and walked close against my leg protectively. We pressed on; I was an adult and not a child to be frightened by my own overactive imagination. A third of the way through the tunnel, we both heard something and stopped. Although the dark and the screen of treetrunks, boles, branches and foliage stopped me seeing far into the wood in any direction, sound still carried.

I heard children’s’ voices. They were laughing in the high-pitched, breathy way that children laugh when they play chasing games. Then they were singing; the song was ‘Ring-A-Ring-A-roses’ and they laughed again as it ended (on the last line “Tish-oo, a-tishoo, they all fall down” all the children taking part are supposed to sit down suddenly). Then they took up a new song “Round And Round The Mullberry Bush”. I almost smiled - these simple songs and games hadn’t been part of city children’s lives for several generations. The fact that kids were playing outdoors, unsupervised, after Midnight was also something that would probably never happen in any English city these days.

My musings were interrupted by a horrible change in the children’s voices. Very suddenly, with a terrible abruptness, they all began to shout and scream. Their little voices were raised in howls of fear; I heard some of them calling for help; some called for their mothers: “Save me Mummy! Save me!”. Even though it was so dark that I could barely see my hand in front of my face, I turned to leave the path and cross into the wood itself. But, as I dithered over finding a safe place to set my feet, the dog rushed in front of me. At first I thought he was eager to go ahead and lead - but, no, he barred my way and even barked at me. When I attempted to walk around him, he shifted his position and stopped me again. I was about to push him aside when the children’s screams stopped. They ceased just as abruptly as they had begun, leaving nothing but a dead and pregnant silence; a discordant stillness, broken only by the insidious noises of the leaves and branches.

Although confused and rattled by the incident, I refused to turn and rush home. The dog still needed to finish his walk. So we continued and reached the end of the tunnel, walked a little further down the lane and then retraced our steps towards the cottage. Whilst we were under the roof of the forest, the dog seemed to make a point of walking between me and the side of the path where I’d tried to set off towards the voices.

The next day I told my nearest neighbour about hearing children playing in the woods so late at night. I tactfully didn’t mention anything about them calling for help; it occurred to me that I’d been the victim of some sort of practical joke - perhaps they’d tried to give the ‘Townie’ a fright? The old man’s face assumed a worried expression; I could see that I’d said something that really bothered him. He took my arm in a fatherly sort of way and enquired: “Young man, yee didn’t go into the woods looking for ’em did ’ee?”. I confessed that I had almost done just that. “Dids they scream an’ holler?” he asked. Thinking that he was about to tell me that I had indeed been the butt of a prank, I nodded. “Them weren’t no children” he said, his mouth set in a grim line “Don’t ’ee go in them there woods after ’em again, do ‘ee hear me?”. He refused to explain any more, but made me promise to ignore any voices (particularly children’s voices) that I might hear coming from the interior of the wood after dark.

The locals simply don’t go out of their way to speak to newcomers. They are as resistant to new faces as they are to change. For several years I could barely get a word out of any of them. Then I happened to be interviewed on TV about my latest book; a camera crew came to my cottage and they filmed the village streets as ‘background’ for their story. Even though their homes had only been on the screen for a few seconds, the locals were as pleased as punch. They thought that I’d done something to get their village noticed; some of them even told me that they’d video-taped the repeat of the programme that evening. Overnight I became an accepted part of the social structure and tongues loosened.

Thus it came about that I finally learned the truth about the children in the woods. I was given exactly the same explanation by several different people. They told me that, over the years, lots of people (most of them children) died in the woods. Some of them drowned in the ponds and streams; some of them were sucked down by hidden patches of quicksand. One little boy - a son of the elderly neighbour who’d warned me not to enter the woods at night - had gone there to pick up firewood the morning after a tremendous storm. The winds had knocked down a big tree; it was torn out, roots and all, leaving a gaping hole where it had once stood. The boy fell into that crater; it was half-filled with water and the sides were steep, slick and slippery. The poor lad tried to get out for hours - those who found his body saw the marks of his desperate struggles all around the inside walls of the pit - but he tired and drowned.

I was told that the spirits of the children who’d lost their lives in the woods communed there. Either out of hatred against the living or a great need for human company, they regularly called out to people who went along the path through the woods at night. They rarely succeeded in luring any of the locals - those who lived in the village were all too familiar with the pleading voices’ real origin. But, from time to time, unwary children and strangers to the area took the bait. Entering the woods - where even the vague light of the moon did not penetrate - could be a death sentence after dark. There were plenty of places where a person could fall, plunge or drown.

I had other strange experiences in “The Copse” - many of them in broad daylight. That weird and unsettling place didn’t always wait until darkness fell before it provided something to frighten and disturb. But I won’t tell you of those times here and now. If you want to read about them, then write to the webmaster and tell him. One of these (as yet unwritten) stories is about a friend who scoffed when I told him the tale you’ve just finished...it took just one trip into the woods (on a fine sunny afternoon) to change his mind and make him a believer.

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