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Stairs / Staircases In The Forest

UnknownUnknown said:
I love old school phenomenology stuff. Even though it's deeply out of fashion these days. This thread made me hunt out the classic The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, because he has a great phrase about "the complex of memory and imagination" that happens in daydreams - and in how we feel some images are so resonant.

He writes brilliantly about the poetics of staircases, and about houses more generally. He also has a chapter called 'the dialectics of outside and inside' which maybe sheds some light on why we get tingles up the spine when such an inside-space as a staircase is pictured in such an outside-place as the deep woods.

Really enjoy thinking about that kind of stuff so thanks for the prompt!
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Love that kind of thing too. I'm reminded of how much I love "exterior" things inside a building. Windows from one room into another, interior 2nd story bridges connecting two spaces, that sort of thing.
 
Hogarth999 said:
Isn't that all to do with the Search and Rescue Officer's posts in /nosleep on reddit?

https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/3ppq81/im_a_search_and_rescue_officer_for_the_us_forest/

If so the guy eventually admitted that he made it all up (which is normal for most stories in /nosleep).
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Yeah, fake. made up stories without getting even basic details right. Obvious this guy is unfamiliar with the government land agencies, acronyms, jargon, jurisdictions, etc.
I am retired from the U.S. Forest Service where I spent over thirty years as a firefighter, and participated in numerous SAR. There is no job title or position as a SAR Officer in the Forest Service. By law, primary jurisdiction for SAR in National Forests is the local law enforcement, with the Forest Service in an assisting role. That one detail set of alarms and raised red flags. Then he mentions 'Parks' in his narratives. The Forest Service and the National Park Service are two different government agencies. The Forest Service administers the National Forests, has nothing to do with National Parks. The National Park Service administers the national parks. Parks and Forests are two distinct and separate entities. No employee of either agency would make that egregious of a mistake. The two agencies cooperate when they lie adjacent, but the people involved know the limitations and jusrisdictions on either side of the boundary line.
Numerous other factual errors in his stories leave clear to me not only are the stories pure fabrication, he has not spent much time in the outdoors at all.
 
Cynical Apathist said:
Yeah, fake. made up stories without getting even basic details right. Obvious this guy is unfamiliar with the government land agencies, acronyms, jargon, jurisdictions, etc.
I am retired from the U.S. Forest Service where I spent over thirty years as a firefighter, and participated in numerous SAR. There is no job title or position as a SAR Officer in the Forest Service. By law, primary jurisdiction for SAR in National Forests is the local law enforcement, with the Forest Service in an assisting role. That one detail set of alarms and raised red flags. Then he mentions 'Parks' in his narratives. The Forest Service and the National Park Service are two different government agencies. The Forest Service administers the National Forests, has nothing to do with National Parks. The National Park Service administers the national parks. Parks and Forests are two distinct and separate entities. No employee of either agency would make that egregious of a mistake. The two agencies cooperate when they lie adjacent, but the people involved know the limitations and jusrisdictions on either side of the boundary line.
Numerous other factual errors in his stories leave clear to me not only are the stories pure fabrication, he has not spent much time in the outdoors at all.
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Did you find many doggers ?
 
Cynical Apathist said:
What is a dogger?
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LOL ... erm ...People that drive out into woodland and 'make love' with other people watching and joining in in their cars .... it's called 'dogging' in The UK, woodland based swingers.
 
I thought the term dogging was restricted to car park orgies but Wikipedia thinks it also includes any outside sex at all ... blimey! ... in that case, I seem to have been dogging before? ... I feel so dirty ..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_sex

edit: .. no, hang on ... I've re-read that and I'd have had to actually encourage someone else to watch if I was bonking outside. I've been caught by accident before but we managed to cover ourselves up in time .. so I haven't been dogging. Not in public anyway.
 
Basically unisex cottaging - without the need of a cottage. Or a car, or a dog, come to that! :huh:
 
Swifty said:
I thought the term dogging was restricted to car park orgies but Wikipedia thinks it also includes any outside sex at all ... blimey! ... in that case, I seem to have been dogging before? ... I feel so dirty ..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_sex

edit: .. no, hang on ... I've re-read that and I'd have had to actually encourage someone else to watch if I was bonking outside. I've been caught by accident before but we managed to cover ourselves up in time .. so I haven't been dogging. Not in public anyway.
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I think an essential element of dogging is the intention to share the experience. ;)
 
I'm confused by all of this and I'm a UKian . This poor forest rescue fella doesn't stand a chance!.
 
Well ... night all. I'm off to bed X

stairs.jpg
 
Having long hair I wouldn't let a barber near it - they still think its unnatural and just want to cut it all off.
 
Swifty said:
LOL ... erm ...People that drive out into woodland and 'make love' with other people watching and joining in in their cars .... it's called 'dogging' in The UK, woodland based swingers.
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We called it 'horizontal recreation'. I occasionally found people making love in the woods, more often just skinnydippers. As long as they are in an area 'unlikely to be observed by someone under the age of twelve' it is perfectly legal and we ignored them. Once while on patrol I encountered a lesbian social club with a large campsite in a remote area. Lots of women of all ages running around in various stages of undress, and a few engaged in horizontal recreation. Their campfire was safe and were not leaving trash scattered around, so I wished them a good day and moved on. Another occasion found an inflate-a-date in the woods, from the residue on the openings it had been recently used, but no one around. That was kind of weird, in a disgusting way.

Personally, only had one disappearance that was mysterious. A single 20 year old male was reported missing by his family when he failed to return home. He had been hiking solo off-trail. The local SAR group found his campsite intact. All his gear was in his tent, including his hiking boots, but no sign of him. The campsite was near some tall cliffs, and best guess he arose in the middle of the night to relieve himself, and in the dark fell over the cliff. There were signs of a recent rockfall at the cliff base, and it was thoroughly searched and excavated to no avail. I was part of the group that conducted a much wider grid search over several miles in every direction, but again no luck. Speculation is he survived the fall, but was disoriented and injured, then wandered off trying to return to his campsite at the top of the cliff and eventually succumbed to his injuries. No trace ever found. All other SAR I was involved in, save one, had a happy ending. The one was an elderly developmentally disabled woman that wandered away from her group on a picnic. Her body was found the next morning, death from hypothermia after an unusually cold night.
 
It must be a great feeling when you find them alive and can all return them to their loved ones. That's very sad about the old lady and the young man though ..

Lightening the mood for a moment, I've heard the phrase 'horizontal jogging' used for people making 'the beast with two backs' in the UK ...

... and I propose we change the term 'dogging' to the more pleasant sounding 'teddy bear's picnic' ..

 
Although it isn't in a forest, the fourth paragraph down on this below link talks about the creepy folklore for this staircase and the effects/superstitions on climbing and descending it .. perhaps legends like this have evolved to be considered similar to the forest staircases. It's well worth reading to the bottom of the page, fiction written as classified reports ..

http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-723
 
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drbates said:
Yes.

More disturbing is the number of women working in barbers. I'm not letting a woman trim my beard. It just feels....wrong.
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I've often tried to persuade Mrs rover to trim mine, because I'm terrible at it. She's always refused.
 
Swifty said:
It must be a great feeling when you find them alive and can all return them to their loved ones. That's very sad about the old lady and the young man though ...
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to keep this on topic -- The OP referenced as reddit link in which the author claimed massive number of people each year disappear without a trace for no known reason. That is not true. People do get lost, but in the vast majority of cases are found alive. The few deaths that occur are readily determined to be from either injury from falls or weather related. Even deaths from wild animals are rare. One recent study found that in the 116 year history of the U.S. National Park Service there have been 71 deaths from bears, out of tens of billions of visitors over that time span. Statistically speaking, you are safer in the wilderness backcountry than in many large cities.
 
Hello, Fortean Times forums. New member, first time poster here - but noticed this thread had been dredged up from last year and I have some information that will put to rest any doubt that may still remain on whether or not there is any truth to the SAR officer's postings on reddit.

As someone said way earlier in the thread, /r/nosleep is a subreddit equivalent of telling scary stories around campfire. I mean that in the best way possible, as I am a longtime member of the community there - and as such participate in many of the goings on around nosleep.

This story won its month's "story of the month" contest, and as such was awarded the laurels and gifts that come with the honor. During the last 6 months or so of 2015 (when the story was posted), I was a contributor of one of the prizes that each month's winner would receive. I hand-make hardbound journals, and wanted to support the great writers that often appear on the site - and so I did.

That means that I actually spoke with the author, got his address, and sent him his prize. I talked with him personally. There is no doubt in the world that the story, brilliant and spooky as it may be, was indeed a work of fiction. (I will offer up proof if anyone really cares enough to ask.)

***

In other news, it was indeed that very story that intrigued me so much that it eventually caused me to go on the research/journalistic binge of a lifetime. I first discovered the work of David Paulides. After a short time though, I found myself unable to believe a large portion of the data he presented. So, I decided I'd stop listening to his interviews and videos and start from square one. I looked into some of the more well known cases first, and found that almost the entirety of all articles or postings about them from around the internet are just pure copypasta of one another. I started to dig deeper. I paid for newspaper archive subscriptions and began original research. This led me to discover MANY discrepencies in some of the information Paulides had presented in quite a few of his interviews. (My theories on why these exist is too big a topic to cover briefly, and something I'd like to cover in whatever form this project ends up taking.)

This project has consumed me. I spent the months of May - September working on a project chronicling the most compelling and bizarre disappearances from deeply wooded areas of America. Originally, my intent was simply to satisfy my own curiostiy, and possibly write a sort of listicle and sell it to a website. After a few days of research however, I found myself deeply entrenched in awe and wonder, unlike any I had experienced since childhood. I decided that I enjoyed discovering all I could about it so much, that I wouldn't dare sell my hard work for a pittance, but rather publish it in some way myself. It would have felt like selling my soul.

So, I just kept at it all the way until a few weeks ago. Every time I thought I had found enough about the cases, I'd find another - ultimately culminating in a compendium of about 10 instances, researched to their last detail. I then thought I could just make a video for YouTube and put it up - but its length would be unheard of. I've tried to put it into a script that lasts under 30 minutes, but the fact is it just can't be done in any way that is satisfactory to my taste. There's just too much great stuff there. (Plus, half of the so-called "horror" channels on YouTube just rip eachother off on a day to day basis. VERY rarely do they even cite sources, which is a huge reason I started this project to begin with. Websites, interviews, videos - none of them including any bibliography letting me know where I could fact check their data. The vultures would be circling in moments, pecking all this hard work to the bone.)

I have compiled nearly a thousand articles of newspaper clippings. I have interviewed the park rangers involved in numerous high profile disappearances. I've interviewed men responsible for tracking dog teams. (In one instance, I have uncovered brand new, previously unreleased information about a particularly interesting case.) I have more information than I know what to do with. Now, my research is complete. I have shown it to two people in a relatively concise format, but am uncertain with how to proceed.

I ask you now, lovers of the strange and unusual: documentary (or short film?), or book...something else? I know that a lot of the stuff I have would be of great interest to many people like myself and I want to get it out there. I just feel I have spent too much time and effort to hurry up and put it out in a format that I'm not satisfied with.

What do I do with it all?!

(I didn't expect to write all this when I signed up on here. I just wanted to clarify the stairs in the woods issue. Now I feel like I just went to confessional or something. Sorry about that.)
 
I'd go for an actual book, if you can, especially if you have extensive bibliographies, clippings, transcribed interviews, and the like -- but then, I'm an old fashioned guy; it's only been a few months since I got my first cell phone.

Heck, I'm writing a book (hopefully) tracking down the original stories behind fortean-type reports that have been incredibly misrepresented on the 'net.

YouTube videos, to me, would just be more videos among the scores of poorly-done documentaries already there. I've about given up on documentaries on TV and on YouTube. I used to watch them to see how many mistakes they made rather than to learn anything.

I hope you come out with your material in some fashion, because it sounds fascinating.
 
I vote for a book, your research is likely to last a lot longer in that format.
 
... lavishly illustrated with wood block print art or some other similar traditional method. I bet you could find a talented art student who wants their first commision ... as long as it isn't airbrush style fantasy art. That would balance your meticulous and thorough writings out nicely in a book.
 
Maybe if physical publishing is problematic, an ebook might appeal to readers of Forteana and general strangeness?
 
Corenerd - if you aren't already a member, have a look at Folk Horror Revival here - and there is a flourishing and addictive FB group too :)
 
Scholarship in adverse circumstances - i.e. without the funding syringe - tends to become marginalized as obsessive or even borderline-autistic these days.

Even such a scholar as Mike Dash, puts it this way, "The history that I like best is the stuff that no-one else is interested in – I’ll never knuckle down to George Washington or Henry VIII if I can curl up with a strange old book about a forgotten island in the Pacific or social banditry in Brazil. So I tend to stumble across stories that I love, but which are too small, too odd or just too fragmentary to tell my publishers about.

"They know much better than I do what is marketable, and inevitably what sells isn’t always what I find fascinating. So I created A Blast From The Past to write about these small, strange stories. Because they’re eye-opening, and because they offer insights of their own into the world we live in. Because I think they ought to be better known. And because I hope you’ll like them too."

His gems are given away!

The market for what we might call "serious" Forteana is wretchedly small. I have the feeling that half that population may visit this site and most of them are impecunious. A popular subject might ride a wave of enthusiasm and gain crowd-funding - the modern version of subscription publishing.

Meanwhile, I need to obtain a money-spinning, dubsteppin' cat . . . like, quickly. :eek:
 
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