Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: I'm Ben and welcome to the show where you and I gather around this campfire to hear some of our fellow campers scariest experiences.
Whether you're a new or returning one, I'm glad you're here.
Welcome. Welcome everyone to our second season here at camp.
During the off season, the staff and I completed many necessary improvements to the infrastructure here at camp.
To start off season two, we're going to hear a story that is under reported.
You see, the Jersey Devil dominates the lore of the Pine Barrens. But according to at least two campers, those woods are cursed by more than that monster.
So tonight I'm going to share the story of the witch of the Pine Barrens.
Now, without further ado, do you want to hear a ghost story?
[00:01:05] Speaker A: I didn't come to the Pine Barrens to prove a ghost story wrong. I came because I promised myself I wasn't my mother.
It sounds dramatic when I hear it out loud, but it's true.
We were best friends. And as much as I tried to deny it, it was she who taught me to love the outdoors.
To love camping, hiking, all of it. But she up and left when I was seven. No note, no suitcase. Just a morning where her mug sat on the counter with a lipstick half moon. The door didn't even slam because she had the kind of care that makes no sound at all.
Growing up, I discounted the love for adventure she taught me and wrote my life in opposition to her. I took jobs that bored me just because they were steady.
I learned how to love like a ledger. Predictable deposits, no overdrafts.
Wasn't going to be a person who vanished.
Swore I'd never come back to this town either.
But grief rarely respects boundaries.
It makes you turn keys you promised to throw away.
When the county called last month to say they found human remains and personal effects in a collapsed hunting blind by the north ridge.
Bones. A tarnished locket with a photo of us.
The officer on the phone said my mother's name, Victoria, like he was reading it off of a street sign.
I drove up the next day to identify her ring. I even stayed long enough to pretend I was tying up loose ends. I cleaned out the storage unit she's been paying for in cash. Box after box that smelled like mice and damp wood.
And tonight I carried what little of her the county gave back in a paper envelope and decided to camp a single night under the trees because I didn't know what else to do with the ashes. And after all, the memories of my mother and I camping were the only ones I really had.
The forest is a long spine of black between the highway and nothing.
The locals call this area the hollow. Pines, like the trees, are empty but listening.
I parked at the trailhead an hour before dusk, shouldered my pack and walked in until the noise of the road dissolved and all that was left was the steady scuff of my boots and the high whisper of the leaves in the wind.
I told myself this was practical, scattering the last of her somewhere quiet, somewhere kind.
Though this closure felt like a choreography.
I set up my tent in a small clearing with a blackened fire ring and a half rotten log for a bench.
The sky, drained of life from bright colors to black.
Crickets woke up like a switch flipped. I built a small fire, took the envelope out.
It was lighter than it should have been.
That's the thing that struck me first at the county office.
How little a life weighs after it's over.
I held it and tried to feel something.
Relief, anger, grief shaped into a single word. But all I felt was the same old fear thrumming under my ribs like a second pulse.
You are her child.
You are what you come from. I am not her, he said aloud to the trees around me.
They didn't argue.
You just quietly sighed with the wind.
As I sat there at the fire by myself, I started thinking about a story my mother used to tell me around the campfire.
Every forest has its ghost story, and here it begins with a crow, black as coal, eyes glowing ember red in the moonlight.
Long ago a witch burned to ash, but her crow survived, and it still waits. In these woods.
They say it chooses its own, dropping a strange little gift at your feet, a ring, a coin, or something that feels heavier than it should.
And once you take it, you vanish.
Some say it's just a tale to keep kids close to campfires, but others whisper it's the softer version, told so no one has to admit the truth.
People disappear here, sometimes slow, sometimes all at once, but always after the crow decides.
I was thinking of that when a sound came that wasn't fire or wind, was a soft, measured overhead, like something cutting and folding the air with lazy certainty.
Could have been a big owl.
I wanted it to be a big owl, but nothing was there.
I cleaned up around the fire and left a small amount of embers to glow as I convinced myself the wind decided to howl at an unfortunate time.
But mere seconds after laying down in my tent, three taps landed on my roof tent.
Gentle, precise, the way a fingernail clicks glass.
Tap, tap, tap.
Fear crawled back up my Throat like a hand.
It has to be an owl, I said, like saying it out loud could make it true.
I unzipped the tent.
At night out there, it has a thickness.
The clearing looked the same, but the spaces between things felt crowded, like someone had moved the trees closer. When I blinked, my fire, now just a faint glow, did little to help me see.
My breath showed briefly and then vanished as I looked down at the ground.
There was a feather on the ground at the edge of the firelight, placed almost deliberately at the opening of my tent.
I've found crow feathers before.
I've kept a few tucked into jars with beach glass or old keys.
This one was wrong.
It was longer than my hand and glossy. A slick midnight that drank the firelight instead of reflecting, looked wet, and the air around it smelled faintly, sharply, like burned herbs.
I didn't want to touch it.
Every part of me didn't want to touch it, so of course I did.
When my fingers closed around the shaft, it was warm.
Not just from the fire warm, like it had body heat.
I struggled to pick it up. It had so much more weight to it than it should, feeling more like a small piece of lead than something a bird could fly around with.
As I held it up to my face to examine it, the whole forest took a breath and didn't breathe out.
The crickets cut off mid chirp, the leaves quit whispering. Even the coals stopped ticking.
I lifted the feather higher and the silence pressed against my eardrums until my own pulse sounded too loud.
In that silence came the first wingbeat, slower than any birds I've heard, a deliberate flap of the night, then another and another.
The shape that slid down through the branches barely bothered to be a silhouette. It didn't need to. It burnt itself into the dark by existing.
When it landed on the log, it bent the wood.
That's how heavy this crow was.
That's how wrong this crow was.
Its feathers weren't black. Black is too simple an explanation. They were a total void that no light would dare escape the eyes.
They turned toward me. The red wasn't a shine. It was a banked coal.
The beak opened on a crack of sound that wasn't a caw.
Come, it said.
The voice wasn't human.
It also wasn't entirely not human.
It sounded like someone speaking through a mouthful of ash.
It was my mother's voice after a cigarette. It was the voice I imagined the witch might have used if she wanted to be kind.
I felt something like a hand skim the surface of my thoughts.
Not Entering, testing the temperature, I dropped the feather with a sound I didn't know feathers could make, a little chime when it hit the stones, as if something inside it rang once and swallowed its own echo. The crow hopped once, two glossy steps, like liquid. Then it tilted its head and opened its beak again, and something small fell out into the dust.
It was a thin silver ring with a spiral engraving.
The metal was blackened, the way silver gets when it's been forgotten for a long time.
When it hit the ground, the air around it rippled heat without heat, and a smell moved across the clearing like a memory.
Rosemary, sage, penny, metal, old wood.
The story says the crow drops a gift, and if you pick it up, you're hers.
It also says some gifts feel heavier than they should.
It doesn't say what the weight is.
The crow made a small sound.
It didn't have language, but it had syntax.
I picked up the ring.
The weight was ridiculous.
It should have been a wisp, but nothing.
It felt like a brick.
As I held the ring, a thin flash slid across my vision.
No, through my vision, the clearing wavered like heat.
I was standing in a room that didn't exist anymore.
Rough plank walls, herb bundles hanging from rafters, crisp and rattling, jars of something green and something darker, A kettle with a dent like a thumbprint on the table, a book whose pages were black with soot around the edges, and in the doorway, a figure with my cheekbones and my mother's mouth.
Not a face I recognized, a face I could have worn if I'd been born, when trees were the only neighbors.
She didn't look surprised to see me. She looked tired, in that way you look when the thing you knew would happen finally stops pretending.
Behind me, the sound of many feet moving, the hush and stamp of a crowd, firelight that wasn't from a fire you sit around.
The woman in the door did not flinch.
She jerked her chin, my mother's gesture when she was trying not to beg, and I understood the command the way you understand your own hand in the dark.
Run.
The scene snapped shut. The clearing returned, flinging me into the body I'd apparently left momentarily bent over the ring with the forest pressing inward and the crow waiting like patience was its form of hunger. The silence wasn't just absence of sound, it was attention.
The trees were listening so hard the air was taut.
Crow said softly, like it hated to repeat itself, come.
And I realized what it wanted me to finish wasn't a spell. It was a sentence.
I did the stupid thing you do when you still believe in choices.
I ran.
I grabbed my headlamp because hope is stupidly practical, and bolted into the trees. The beam carved a narrow white tunnel through the dark. I kept the ring because I couldn't make myself drop it. I told myself I was running away from the crow and the gift and the story.
I was running from my mother.
Maybe you don't understand that. If you had a mother who knew how to stay. If you did, I hope you hold her gently. If you didn't, you already know.
Sometimes we run to prove we can.
The path I'd taken in was clear earlier. Now it braided itself under my feet.
Needles made a soft ocean. Every trunk looked the same. My headlamp spotlighted bark and then more bark, and then the beam caught something white off the ground.
Feathers.
Not the crows. Little downy tufts from a smaller bird, scattered fresh.
Something had eaten here.
I turned right. The ring in my hand tugged me left, the way a magnet knows a nail.
The forest rearranged itself with a slow, impolite confidence.
I knew that because I saw my own boot prints in places I hadn't stepped.
When I broke into a hollow I didn't recognize, the ground under my boots stopped being duff and became something else.
I looked down.
The forest floor was scattered with black feathers.
They weren't all the same, so some were new, sharp edged, oily. Some were old, curled at the edges like leaves in a book.
Some were bent the way a feather bends when it's been used and used and used.
In the center of the hollow sat a circle of stones.
Someone had burned a fire there a long time ago and never bothered to clean it up because the soot had crusted into a skin.
The ring in my hand grew heavier. It pulled my wrist down until my knuckles brushed the ashes.
I could smell rosemary again, and sage and something hot, like hot iron.
Come, said the crow.
I didn't hear it, not with my ears. The word was behind my sternum. The word used my ribs like a drum.
I knelt because resisting suddenly felt like refusing to breathe.
I am not making myself noble here.
I didn't pray. I didn't beg.
I'm not even sure I could have spoken if I wanted to.
The ring wanted to be in the circle. The feather wanted to be with it. My blood wanted to stop arguing with itself.
I put the feather down, the one for my camp.
It lay there like a slash of night on stone.
Then I set the ring beside it.
The two objects looked obscene in how precisely they belonged next to each other, like puzzle pieces that had been cut Apart, solely to teach the pleasure of reunion.
The air pressed inward again, harder.
It did not press down, it pressed in, like the whole forest wanted to occupy the space where I was.
The ash at the center of the ring cracked just once.
A thin line of heat moved across it like a fuse, and then the heat became a line of memory and the memory became a voice.
It wasn't the crow.
It wasn't the witch.
The voice was my mother.
The night before she left, half drunk and soft, kneeling to tell me a story about a blackbird that knew our name.
She hadn't said the word witch.
She hadn't said blood. She called it a family story, the way some people say recipe.
I had fallen asleep before she finished.
I remember that now because the voice in the ash finished the sentence I never heard.
And when it comes, you'll know.
You'll think it chose you because you're special. But you were only ever next.
The ring jumped once, like a heartbeat. The ash flared white with the spiral pointed, and I did the thing I had avoided doing since the county office.
I put my finger through the ring.
It didn't close around me, it didn't need to.
The weight climbed my hand up the tendons into my wrist.
It was a relief, so sudden I almost sobbed.
This is the part I'm ashamed of, although I know I shouldn't be.
I was so tired of being against myself, so tired of insisting I was a different shape than what the mold wanted me to be.
Surrender felt like sleep.
Surrender felt like turning the burner off.
The crow moved without sound. It came to the opposite side of the stones and settled there, head cocked, eye a coal behind gauze.
I thought it would peck me. I thought it might tear.
It didn't have to. The forest did the work.
From the tree line the wind rose in a single low breath.
Feathers lifted and turned, thousands of small black tongues whispering.
The ash climbed in a thin column and bent toward me, touched my cheek, touched my eyes. It tasted like penny in the back of my throat and like rosemary behind my teeth and under all that.
It tasted like my mother's jacket when she came home late from the bar and made me scrambled eggs because guilt is a good cook.
When the ash let go of my eyes, the ring had cooled, the feather had not. It smoldered like a wick that refused to agree to be out.
The crow blinked once, slow, like a priest after a confession in which the sin is familiar enough to be boring.
I stood up because my knees hurt.
I looked at my hands, expecting them to be different they were.
Both palms were darker now, the same gray smudge you get when you handle old paper. I rubbed at it.
Didn't come off.
I heard water again. I heard crickets. The forest released its breath.
Behind me, at the edge of the hollow, someone's foot shifted on leaves. I turned so fast my neck popped. There was nobody there, just the trees.
Just the sensation of aftermath, the way a broom feels after a fight, where the words were quiet and exact and changed everything anyway.
I'm not her, I said to the trees, because I'm a stubborn animal.
I'm not, the crow answered in its smoke voice.
You are.
It didn't come closer. It didn't need to. It watched.
It would watch for as long as it took.
That's what the story always said, didn't it? Not that it hunts, that it waits.
It waited for the right blood and the right hour and the right, right moment when the weight of an object would feel like relief.
I wanted to run again. I wanted to throw the ring into the brush and kick the feather into the ash until nothing left glowed.
It didn't.
I picked up the ring and slipped it into the envelope with my mother.
I took the feather, still warm, and tucked it into the inner pocket of my jacket.
Then I walked back to my camp, along the path that stayed put the this time, as if the forest had gotten what it wanted and felt sated enough to be ordinary.
At the fire ring the coals were nearly out. I fed them a little wood.
The flame relit, a way that memory does when you let yourself look at it straight without flinching.
I held the envelope over the smoke until it picked up the scent.
I whispered the name the ash had put in my mouth.
It didn't taste like power. It tasted like something final and obvious, like the word home, said by someone who'd never had one.
Dawn seeped in as my mother and the ring fell into the fire.
Gray came up through the leaves and the trunks turned from black to charcoal.
Mist moved low, slow as an animal that doesn't hurry because what it wants isn't going anywhere.
I packed up.
When I slung my pack, the feather felt lighter now, not because it weighed less but because I did.
On the way out, the path didn't split. It led me past the hollow without detouring me into it.
The air smelled like pine dirt and the first day of school.
Near the trailhead a weathered sign stood with the usual warnings.
Fire Bears, glass bottles. Respect the land.
The crow sat on the cross being above the sign too still to be anything but itself.
It watched me the way you watch a kettle patient.
Certain didn't speak, didn't need to. We both understood the schedule.
People vanish in these woods, fast or slow. The story doesn't care about time, only about completion.
Some last weeks before they're gone.
Some go the same night.
If you're listening to me now, I'm somewhere on that timeline.
The feather is still lighter and no longer calls me.
I want to say I'm afraid that would be true.
I also want to say I'm relieved. And that would be true too.
If you ever camp in the hollow pines and wake to tapping on your tent, to a feather lying glossy and heavy in the needles, you'll have your own argument with yourself.
Maybe you'll win.
Maybe it'll help you through whatever is holding you back.
[00:23:50] Speaker B: Thank you campers for listening to this week's story.
I hope you are enjoying the start to Season two.
I don't have any other show announcements this week after kicking off the new season, but if you'd like a shout out at the end of an episode, head over to patreon.com do you want to hear a ghost story?
As always, I'm just glad to have you all as campers on this journey.
Please keep sharing the show with anyone you think might like these stories, or someone you're just trying to scare.
If you're enjoying the show, please leave a review. I would love to hear from you.
Until next time.
