NOPE
America's most haunted forest is in...Massachusetts?
Content Warning: This week’s Halloween newsletter is about a hiking destination with a history of murders and strange happenings. If this doesn’t sound appealing, consider a trip through the Mind The Moss archives this week.
Those of you who’ve been reading Mind The Moss since the newsletter’s inception in 2021 know that I have a penchant for hikes that evoke a sense of creeping dread, and that I like to spotlight these hikes around Halloween each year. It’s an extension of my soft spot for movies and books that conjure the same feeling. As a ninth grader, I got chills reading Lord Of The Flies, savoring the slow burn of the lost boys forming two different societies on the island, with deadly results. Three years later, I watched The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for the first time and to this day, it’s my favorite American horror film; unrivaled in the sheer terror it wrings from a simple (and plausible) story about a group of teenagers on a road trip across the panhandle, who happen to knock on the wrong door of the wrong house while searching for a spare jerry can of gas.
But each of us has our limits, even if it takes us years to find them. The other week, a friend asked me if I wanted to go and see a new movie about a demented clown who comes up with very creative ways to dismember people. I was torn. Psychotic clowns are almost always a resounding YES for me. But if I’m going to watch a movie which has lots of gruesome violence (something The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is actually rather modest in utilizing—leaning harder into psychological terror), there has to be a higher purpose. So after a couple hours of deliberation, I texted my friend back. “You know what,” I wrote. “I don’t think I can do this.” So we caught The Apprentice instead, which itself is something of a horror movie, and both of us were glad to have pivoted.
It was a useful warmup for a bigger test of comfort zone appraisal that would happen later that week; a test involving a state forest that people speak about in hushed tones.
