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Classic Archive Merged: Pani(ic) In The Woods

bannik: <<<Is it in English?>>>
No, it's in Russian. Moreover, the tales are in a local dialect (funny grammar and local names for things), so those stories may be quite confusing even for a native speaker, but that's what makes them so authentic. All tales are divided into sections (tricks of home spirits, male/female wood spirits, the cursed girls who want to get married to remove the spell, the dead who return to see their relatives, prophecies, local voodoo, etc.) I may share some of them if the right subject arises.

<<<...suddenly the wind picked up creating a small twister or dust devil...>>>
This just reminded me of one story from that collection when village teens were hanging near a main road and saw a swarm (twister) of mosquitos moving down the road, then one kid threw a knife into it, and when they picked up the knife there was blood on it. :eek!!!!: - droplets of blood. No kidding! This mosquito twister was matter-of-factly explained by the teller as a devil wedding. (direct connection to the flies - get the point?) BTW, old folks over there tell kids to stay away from any dust twisters (dust devils). Good advice.
 
Re: Other forest inhabitants

Gloria said:
Other legendary figures, like Baba Yaga, the flying old hag, who is still an object of fear among Russian toddlers due to parental "efforts", has been proven to date from the Scythian-Sarmatian period of nation building.
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Hellboy encounters Baba Yaga in the Dark Horse Comics graphic novel entitled (drumroll) "The Baba Yaga".

You can view it online here , although you need Flash installed.
 
When I was a kid (7-9 year old), I would walk my Gran's dog in the woods behind the area she lived in. Now, these woods spanned quite a distance, and on three sides was civilisation, the other, a mental hospital.

I remember really vivdly (and have been telling this story for almost 20 years, with no embellishments - although I do frequently forget things that happened, and have to be reminded by my parents who have been listenening to me tell the stories for 20 years :) ), the summer days walking in the woods, trying to avoid clouds of midges and evil nasty wasps.

I would walk for what seemed like ages and ages, not choosing a route, trying to go a different way each time, but would end up at the same clearing each time. At one side of the clearing, the trees were sparse and smaller,and at the top of a hill, so I could see the mental hospital in front of me. It was still a ways away though.

Every time I got there, though the sun would be shining (I only seemed to walk the dog on sunny days), and it was warm. Then, I would start to feel uncomfortably warm, then I would hear a low buzzing that seemed to come from inside me and miles away at the same time. The colours of the trees and bushes would go from a warm afternoon green to a washed out dull green - like a grease stain on green paper. The dog would be lying on the grass with a manner like he'd been hit with a newspaper for raiding the fridge (he had been abused before my Gran got him, and would periodically rip apart my mums handbag if she had chocolate in it.

It would be then that I would run as fast as I could back the way I came - I always ended up back onto the busy road I entered the woods from in seconds, even though I had been walking for a long time.

And yes, I would go back there every sunny day until the dog died. I even took a kid from next door that I was friendly with one time, to show him the clearin (he was the same age as me, but his parents wouldn't let him play in the woods. As soon as we got there, he started crying and we had to go back. He said later that he thought he was dying, and refused to talk about it - he refused to play with me after that.

When I got home, I would always be covered in cuts (some of them quite deep - I have a scar on my leg that's still visible when I have a tan) and bruises. The dog would always lie on his bed and refuse to leave the house the rest of the day. He always went back with me though.
 
Bad places

Interested..

Apart form the obvious in woodland connection Reading the stories through from the start few other things seem to make em so similar,
the clearings on a sunny day and the present buzzing sound (described as Wasp-ish or insect like by a couple of people)
Dog walking (or is this only there as a reason to be in the woods alone)
Two feature some form of grave or burial, LIttle My's Barrow and Curzones supected disturbed baby grave
Then the sudden panic / fear in all Present (including Canine companions) followed by retreat

This has got me simply because the first few accounts seem to be fairly similar, so come on has any one else got any similar to add?
or can any one add any thing on the buzzing? medical - insect related or otherwise.
 
This has got me simply because the first few accounts seem to be fairly similar, so come on has any one else got any similar to add?
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I just noted this today because Isabel is starting to make her presence known here in New Jersey but I've noticed it before also. On windy days I get a nervous but slightly blissful feeling in my gut.:) Is this due to the electrical charge in the air?

Perhaps certain place happen to have a certain electro-magnetic charge that causes panic in people and animals when they feel it. Maybe the buzzing results from the charge. Or perhaps insects in the area feel panic too, which causes them to buzz more intensely.

That's all I can add at the moment.
 
Buzzing wires

One childhood memory I am keeping forever is the extremely loud buzzing noise emitted from telephone/electrical wires on poles in the hottest summer hours. That is, I remember asking an adult when I was 4 what that noise was and receiving the answer: "That's the heat in the wires." I never investigated further but it sure as hell sounds like ciccadas. Any thoughts/scientific explanations on "buzzing wires in summer"?
 
Re: Buzzing wires

baracine said:
One childhood memory I am keeping forever is the extremely loud buzzing noise emitted from telephone/electrical wires on poles in the hottest summer hours....thoughts/scientific explanations on "buzzing wires in summer"?
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Never heard this in summer, but when I lived in Norfolk and had a long walk home, I often heard a crackling buzzing from some high-voltage power lines that ran alongside the rode, it seemed to be more noticeable on damp or misty nights, I always assumed it was a coronal discharge from the cables, due to the high electrical field around the cables ionizing the air.
 
During the summer, grime and soot build up on the power lines. This is more conductive than just air and when it gets damp helps to conduct electricity away from the lines to the nearest earth.This is usually the power pole (or ceramic insulating pod, not combustable) which if made of wood can ignite from the heat. Power companies often clean the tops of power poles in the dry months to prevent the poles catching fire from electrical arc. The crackling noise is caused by the grime and bugs and moisture, just think of the crackling when a bug flies into a bug zapper.
 
Buzzzzzzing, not crackling!

The noise from telephone poles in hot, dry, sunny, summer weather I am describing has nothing to do with a crackling or discharge but is exactly as described by the various victims of woodland panic attacks, i.e. an extremely loud buzzing insect sound (crickets or ciccadas) that seems to come to the listener extremely rapidly from a great distance, reach a kind of climax and depart or stop abruptly.

Come on, is this a particularity of Canadian telephone poles?!
 
Just thinking, I earlier noted that 2 of the accounts featured Burials or graves in clearings. This got me to thinking how little ancient forest actually survives in this country, Yes we have a lot of woodland but much of dates from the middle age's or (more often later centuries)
Walking through dense woodland you can some times be crossing ground that was once open farmland in the Iron age and later a complex medieval landscape with ponds, droveways and villages (deserted and now long gone) all if which will now be invisible among the trees and deep forest carpet.
Often you can find Bronze age barrows now in woodland that once would have commanded clear views in an open landscape.
I think what Im getting at is I wonder what could have been under Creamsticks feet at one time in a seemingly empty clearing?
 
Re: Buzzing wires

extremely loud buzzing nois.... in the hottest summer hours.
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This reminds me of other threads that have discussed "Hummadruz", no point in the mods amalgamating the threads as they are all on seperate subjects.

Search for Hummadruz on FTMB and you get all the disparate threads tho'

Maybe the noise is a precursor to Pan's manifestation?
 
IT'S NOT THE HUMMADRUZZ...

... At least, not the way it is described in the postings I found by following your advice. The loud, buzzing noise from my childhood is definitely connected to hot, dry, sunny summer days (noon or afternoon) around telephone poles. It mimics almost perfectly the sound of a million crickets, except it it even louder, if that's possible.

Also, none of the postings I saw gives a definitive definition of what the "British" hummadruzz is supposed to sound like. For lack of a precise definition, anything and everything could be a "hummadruzz"... or a thingamadjig, for all we know.

Whereas I can positively describe the summer outdoor recurring buzzing noise I remember as a sudden crescendo of crickets reaching an almost unbearable fortissimo of various lenghts and stopping or whizzing down abruptly.
 
I remember reading an account, billed as an alien one on a flying saucer site, about some man in university parks, oxford, meeting pan - in the '60s. Pan told him that he appeared less and less frequently these days because fewer and fewer people believed in him, or something.

Anyone know what I'm talking about?? The story struck me.
 
Faggus said:
I remember reading an account, billed as an alien one on a flying saucer site, about some man in university parks, oxford, meeting pan - in the '60s. Pan told him that he appeared less and less frequently these days because fewer and fewer people believed in him, or something.

Anyone know what I'm talking about??
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No, but there's an article in a Weird N.J. issue in which the writer describes a Pan encounter in a local park called Menantico. First he hears a rustling in leaves coming towards him very quickly in a zig-zag motion. The creature which looks exactly like Pan stops at the end of the thicket about six feet in front of him, and almost as soon as it appears, disappears back into the woods.

Years later he met someone wearing a t-shirt he won at a tournament in Menantico Park that had a picture of Pan on it. He inquired about the picture, but the man didn't know why Pan's image was on the shirt.
 
I remember that story too...

Except it was clearly a work of fiction from the 1900s contained in some supernatural anthology. I know I have read it. It's just a question of extracting it from about 5 000 such short stories I have in the house.

A quick perusal gave me: The Story of a Panic by E. M. Forster and The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen. But it not one of these two.

Encounters with Pan have been recounted regularly for the past 2,000 years, starting with that Alexandrian Christian preacher who claimed to have heard a cry in the forest: "The Great God Pan is dead" in the 3rd century AD. I don't think even he wanted this to be taken literally. He just meant: "We (the Christians) won. They (the pagans) lost."

Now can we get back to the buzzing sounds, please?
 
EUREKA!!!

Faggus wrote:

I remember reading an account, billed as an alien one on a flying saucer site, about some man in university parks, oxford, meeting pan - in the '60s. Pan told him that he appeared less and less frequently these days because fewer and fewer people believed in him, or something.
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I finally found the short story in question. It may not be the one you mean but it is the one I mean... It is by British humourist E.F. Benson (of "Mapp and Lucia" fame), first appeared in a collection appropriately called "Pan" in 1920 and has been reedited in the collection "Desirable Residences", Oxford University Press, 1991. It is called "The Satyr's Sandals".

In it, the narrator is walking in a London park at night and happens on Pan and his cohort of satyrs and nymphs who are deciding to pack their things and move to Paris because England has definitely become too staid and boring for their taste and nobody believes in them anyway.

After they leave (they fly away) and the author/narrator goes back to his homebase of Rye by the sea (of which Benson was the mayor for a long time and which was the model for Tilling and served as the outdoor shooting location for "'Mapp and Lucia - the television series"), he takes a nature walk and notices a copse all riotous with flowers and spring birdsong (it's late February). He also finds a Greek sandal on the edge of a reed-bed... THE END

Oh so very fortean how humourous literature of the 1920s can become a "factual" account of an alien encounter in the 1960s!

Filmbuffs already know, I presume, of Jean Renoir's marvelous (colour) comedy "Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe" ("Picnic on the Grass", 1959) in which a staid scientist (Paul Meurisse), soon to be elected president of Europe and to initiate a continent-wide program of artificial insemination and birth control (to replace sex, presumably), falls into a panic (i.e. sexual) trance while picnicking in the woods with his entourage and rediscovers the joys of natural fatherhood by engaging in the old in and out with a country maiden whom he eventually marries to the general consternation of the civilised world and his fiancée who is the very proper (British) international president of the Girl Guide movement...

Now, about those persky buzzing sounds...
 
The buzzing I heard was kind of like an "in-ear" sound (almost like the sound of your own blood pumping through your eardrum or whatever makes that "whoomph" sound when you're trying to get to sleep in a quiet room) and on a separate note, there are no graves in the wood where me and my friends had our little "episode". Even if there were, I don't really see it as that relevant; I think that it would just contribute to the impression that the copse in question is somehow a "scary" place, which wasn't why we experienced what we did in the first place.

I have to admit that I don't buy the notion that the archetype of the foreboding wood caused our experience either. We were a little too young to have heard about druids or tree spirits or Pan or whatever; in fact we were at that age when you'll go just about anywhere with little worry about what dangers may lie in store. It was the middle of the day, and extremely sunny; we had gone into the woods in good spirits rather than to dare and scare each other; it came completely out of the blue. I personally think that our experience, and a lot of experiences like it, may have something to do with the sheer quantity of living matter in a forest or a wood; perhaps we get confused by this on quite a primitive level (the cryptozoologists at the unconvention this year who talked about the Bolam Beast surmised that it may have been a product of human brain activity, although they went a little farther and suggested that the concept of a certain type of primitive fear then led to the formation of a tulpa in its image, which I'm not too sure about).

What happened AFTER we heard the noise and became disoriented may be down to the "scary wood" archetype, though, or at least the characteristic that contributed to that archetype in the first place - we didn't know where the noise was coming from, our path all of a sudden was obstructed by big trees, we began to imagine things lurking behind the obstacles . . . anyway, we didn't go back in there for a little while afterwards. I do remember all of us being convinced that there was something in the copse with us . . but now I'm finding it hard to convince myself that it was anything other than excited brain activity.

Please excuse the patina of cynicism. I think this is the longest post I've ever submitted.
 
Panic in the woods

I remember experiencing severe panic in the woods when I was a child (I seem to remember I was four, but that seems too young):

I was playing at home, with Dad working in the garden, when Mum decided to take the dog for a walk. When asked if I wanted to accompany her, I declined as I was too busy engaged in my own activities (making a fleet of paper aircraft or something). However, five minutes after she had left I naturally became bored and decided that actually I did want to go out fo a walk, so with a brief 'bye to Dad, I left to catch up with Mum and dog. Now where I lived then, we generally had two options for walking the dog, the long and most often used trek over the wooded hill or the short (don't have much time) jaunt around a farmers field. I of course assumed that Mum had gone the woods way and so set off at a distinct trot in that direction, which just happened to be completely the wrong one, unbeknownst to me.

Now these woods, the hill and the quarry they encompassed had been mine and my friends local play area for as long as we could remember. Although dotted with caves and pot-holes, we felt completely safe in them and knew the terrain intimately. The route that Mum would have taken (had she actually gone that way) would have been the same as always and I was confident of catching her. However, when I got halfway up the hill, with no parent in sight I started getting a bit worried and so shouted out for her. My memory after this is a bit blurry, but what I think happened was I spotted movement (parent sized) further up the woods, off the path and where the woods were denser, which I presumed was Mum. I remember shouting out in the direction of the movement (shadow?) and it stopping (disappearing?) and no response being given. This really affected me and I went into blind panic mode sprinting full pelt up over the hill, down through the quarry and to my grandparent's on the other side of the hill, where I promptly burst out crying, ranting about the woods and crying for Mum, and generally making them wonder what the hell I had been up to! I must have been in a real panic as instead of turning back and going home the way I had come I opted for the longer (extra 1.5 miles ) route through the quarry, which just happened to be the quickest route out of the woods!

Ever since then I have had a slight fear of being alone in dense wood (although this episode could also have been the catalyst for my interest in forteana!)
 
Ever since then I have had a slight fear of being alone in dense wood (although this episode could also have been the catalyst for my interest in forteana!)
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Yep, me too. I was always interested in ghost stories etc. but as far as actually wanting to find out more about the unexplained, my experience was the tipping point. I'm kind of freaked out to discover that so many people have experienced the same thing though! Any fans of M. R. James on here?
 
Fear and loathing in the woods

Actually, this experience wasn't as bad as the title makes it sound.

Last year I was out geocaching (http://www.geocaching.com) in a preserve in Iowa called Woodland Mounds. Near the end of the walking trail, way back in the woods, are some remnants of mounds from the Woodland Indian culture of say 1000 years ago.

At any rate, I arrived and began hiking. The place was completely deserted. I found my way easily to the cache, near the mounds and stopped in a clearing for a break. It was bright and sunny but, while I sat there within say 300 feet of the mounds, the park began to feel sort of cold and grey.

Finally I rose to hike back. As I walked away from the mounds, I began to feel incredibly sleepy. All I wanted to do was to lie down. I hadn't exerted myself at all getting there as I'd been hiking heavily during the previous two months. But I felt an uncontrollable urgy to take a nap.

Nonetheless I continued on. However, I kept finding my way down the wrong trails heading back to the mounds. Mind you I had a GPS with me and know how to use it. But, despite my best efforts, I kept finding myself heading in the opposite direction I intended.

I persevered and finally got back to my truck. I sat there for several minutes feeling strange, like when I drink some wine (which I do rarely because I can't hold my alcohol)...everything felt choppy.

As I drove away, however, I began to feel normal. After driving just a couple miles, I felt perfectly fine like when I arrived at the park.

Of course, now I want to go back better prepared, pay my respects to any spirits and see if they'll share some wisdom with me.

Anthony
 
Re: Panic in the woods

Originally posted by siriuss
My memory after this is a bit blurry, but what I think happened was I spotted movement (parent sized) further up the woods, off the path and where the woods were denser, which I presumed was Mum. I remember shouting out in the direction of the movement (shadow?) and it stopping (disappearing?) and no response being given.
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This was obviously Pan pretending to be your 'Mum' in order to lure you deeper into the woods.;)

Originally posted by Anthony Clifton
As I walked away from the mounds, I began to feel incredibly sleepy. All I wanted to do was to lie down. I hadn't exerted myself at all getting there as I'd been hiking heavily during the previous two months. But I felt an uncontrollable urgy to take a nap.
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Poppies?
 
"I became aware of a shrill buzzing that quickly increased until it was intensely loud, then it cut out abruptly, and I found myself falling backward. I didn't feel any sense of panic, and I haven't experienced anything like that before or since."


This post sounds incredibly like an experience I had during the 60's when I was about 8 or 9 years old.
I was walking in some nearby(to my house)woods,and all of a sudden started to feel strange,a dreadful feeling overcame me and the buzzing sound got louder and louder until I seemed to black out.
The next thing I recall is being flat on my back staring into the sky. Above me was the strangest thing, a large black "smoke" ring rising into the air at a somewhat fast speed. Upon getting up and shaking a dizzy feeling off, I went straight home to find that I had been gone for almost 2 hours! I should have been gone for only 10 or 15 minutes. To this day I have no idea what took place there,but always had a sense of dread when going through that area,which I avoided for months after the experience. Only recently I saw a photograph of a similar "smoke" ring taken after a ufo had been sighted. The time period of my experience and the ufo sighting coincided,however the sighting was not in my area or even in my town. I believe the photo I saw was taken by a man named Heflin during the 60's.
I still after all these years feel anxiety when being near the area even though it has changed considerably since then.
 
Is it possible that these events may be caused by localised gravitational fluctuations acting on the brain, inner ear and eyes?
Just a mad idea.
 
To be honest this all sounds like the buzzing sound described in Jacques Vallee's Passport to Magonia and another book by Hough I've mentioned on this site before.

The sharp and loud buzzing sound (or the flashing of lights of a supposed Ufo) accompanies a feeling of dread, or dislocation from the reality of the world around you and is connected with fairy/Ufo folklore. Fairies and aliens are almost synonymous in these books as being manifestations of an external intelligence which hijacks one side of your brain in order to induce hallucination, in which they can manifest to your unconscious mind, or abduction, where you are removed mentally (though your body continues to stand unseeing in the real world) and you are taken to another dimension/place for the sake of curiosity or bogus instruction.

The loud buzzing sound is a way to tune in to a receptive mind. If you hang around you may be abducted, and there are some pretty nasty cases in these books, including one where the witnesses saw the man disappear in a field never to return though his voice was heard calling to them a year after his disappearance, or you may go into a trance-state where you believe you are going somewhere, there are plenty of cases of abductees thinking they are abducted in front of witnesses, only to be told that they went into a trance for an hour and nothing happened in the real world.

These cases nearly always happen when you're alone so what better place than the woods? You're are also much more likely to be keenly aware of sights and sounds so something searching for a receptive mind would find it easier to contact you.

Dappled light flickering through the moving leaves of trees may induce this hypnotic trance state also, which all humans are susceptible to, which explains many peoples feelings about woods, BUT with some leading to further experiences that can't be easily explained by this 'seizure' or even EM fields (which, although shows evidence of a sense of presence and interference, cannot reproduce the detail and the scale that it happens in fairy/Ufo folklore).

It's very interesting and I recommend Passport to Magonia as it seems to explain more of the history of this phenomenon and makes all our supernatural experiences a lot more connected and coherent.

Very spooky indeed.:D
 
ENOUGH WITH THE FAIRIES ALREADY!!!

Isn't anybody going to corroborate the very natural, common and rational explanation of telephone/electrical wires vibrating in the noonday sun in summer, which I witnessed firsthand several times as a kid? Anyone?
 
Hey, cool your jets. There were no cables near where I was.
 
No, nor where I was either time I got the woodland spooks. I only heard the buzzing once but it were in deep country, loike, and bain't no 'leccy cables round tharrr.
 
And I personally find what Chant had to say very interesting. I think I might take a look at that book Chant. Thanks.
 
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