As a reader (and devotee) of Blackwood and Machen, I have a serious (if amateur) interest in woodland Forteana.
Steve Stockton's Strange Things in the Woods (2020) is a collection of experiencer anecdotes from kids, hunters, hikers, and others who saw, heard, felt, smelled, or fled from something strange in the woods.
This one is both funny and weird, but it happened anyway. Some friends and I were messing around in the woods, miles from anywhere, when we came upon an old barn. There had been a dairy farm in this particular place decades ago, but the river had been dammed up to make a lake, and now everything except for the barn and accompanying silo was under a dozen or more feet of water.
The barn looked like it was about ready to fall over, but being adventurous boys with more curiosity than good sense, we decided to explore it anyway.
We went inside, but there wasn't a lot to see—not much excitement in an old abandoned barn. I figured we should leave, but then one of the guys got the bright idea that we should climb up into the loft and look around.
Like I said, the barn was dead old and looked on the verge of collapse—I wasn't too keen on the idea of climbing around up in the top of it. But, ah, youth…
Rather than be called yellow or chicken, I decided to climb up with the rest of the guys.
If the barn had been boring, the loft was doubly so. Just a bunch of wobbly boards with gaps big enough to see the dirt floor some distance below. It looked like a good place to fall and break a leg or even your neck. I was getting ready to climb back down, hoping the wooden rungs would support my weight for the return trip, when one of the guys called out, "Look! Come and look at this! You won't believe it!"
The rest of us hurriedly made our way over to the corner and up to a higher side loft, where the one kid had found something exciting. It was a cow pile.
And a fresh one at that.
Now this may not seem very exciting to you. If you've ever lived on or been around a farm, you come to know cow manure as a fact of life, and you'd better watch where you step. But here, in the top loft of an ancient barn that hadn't been used in decades, was an unmistakable fresh pile of cow flop.
If you stop and think about this for a little while, you'll realize just how weird this discovery was. Number one, like I said before, the barn hadn't been in use for at least twenty or thirty years. Number two (no pun intended), even if it had still been a working farm, there would be no way for a cow to get into the upper loft on its own, nor any reason for putting one up there by manual means—the upper side loft was just a little platform under the eave of the barn, maybe twenty or thirty feet off the ground.
Yet there it was. We even poked it with a stick to ensure that, yes, it was indeed fresh. Some things are better left to the imagination, and we never could come up with a plausible reason for our discovery.
All of which recalls Blackadder: "The path of my life is strewn with cowpats from the devil's own satanic herd."
Jay
15 June 2021
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