why are American forests like that?

a first look at revealing the hidden spirits that haunt the American wilderness

An unmistakably dark aura emanates from the American wood. Something heavy and sinister. Tales of ghosts, cryptids, missing people, and occult phenomena arise from every corner of the country. Paranoia over just what kind of threats might exist out there in Nature persists deep into the subconscious of the insulated American mind. The whole nation feels haunted— and the reality is that it is.

But just what is behind this feeling? What still threatens a country founded and civilized for hundreds of years? And why does it lurk where no one can see, in the darkness of the American wilderness?

The answers lie in the realm of the unseen.

You may meet talk of unseeable or “spiritual” realms with skepticism, perhaps even outright dismissal. How are we to believe convenient explanations from an unverifiable world, let alone any of the folk tales of strange experiences that may happen there?

Nowadays, it's as if every time a hiker goes missing in Appalachia one can expect a speculative story of his mystical abduction, or her being devoured whole by an unknown creature, to get attached to it. A mysterious staircase is said to have appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the woods, leading to a portal that impossibly sent him 20 years into the future or halfway across the country to another forest. Blood was found suspiciously on clothes she wore when she had been last seen, in a pile neatly folded and ironed. Aliens were encountered and conversed with, just as he was probed and sent back to tell the tale. To suspect the culprits behind these occurrences requires one to accept that they could even happen in the first place. And they all simply seem too made-up and mythical to ever believe.

But it is exactly in this disbelief that makes up the root of why things feel the way they do in America. Our national character is aversion— to the unfamiliar, the exotic, the uncivilized. It is to be separate from all that lies in the dark, as well as the strange entities that dwell within it— to shield ourselves from that which is on the outside of our understanding, and perhaps to eventually convince ourselves they no longer exist at all.

“24. American xenophobia is both its strength and its weakness. Its puritanical suspicion of the outsider and the exotic maintained its harmony. But its blind paranoia— of aliens, demons, the dark— leaves many with only a child-like understanding of the true threats of the world.” — from 50 truths on the hidden metaphysics of America

We recline into our settlements, our suburban utopias, our walled gardens safe in our delusions that whatever is out there is out of sight and out of mind. Our willing ignorance has become its own counter-aura of protection to the unknown anomalies that may or may not persist in that otherworld.

Thus, to a certain point, it matters not whether these happenings occur from a paranormal world or the banal wilderness, both are domains that are alien to us and increasingly become so. They are homes to beings we know lurk but that we’ve never seen with our own eyes. Ones with tremendous power that could take our lives. What difference does it make if it was a cryptid or a bear that is behind these missing persons— or to suggest, as I am about to, that in these forests we can encounter gods long forgotten?

It all comes down to what we believe exists within a hidden realm, of which we no longer seek to venture into.

But if the lines between the normal and paranormal are blurred, then let’s first elaborate on the more grounded explanation. If not spirits beyond our understanding, what exactly is it that haunts America?

America is haunted by its past. Some will point to supposed sins of slavery or colonization as the origin. Others believe the nation to have been cursed long before settlers ever arrived, saying that we live upon grounds that were once bathed in the blood of human sacrifices made by the Natives. Regardless, it’s crucial to realize that the albatrossal weight that so crushingly impresses onto the land goes beyond our judicial hindsight or need for a culprit, and instead extends to a greater historical conflict that colors its every inch.

What we have in this nation is an eternal tension between the American and his paradoxical place in the New World— a land that is not new but ancient, and where civilians routinely venture into the outside as outsiders themselves. Our national drama is the interplay of the foreigner on foreign soil. Here, man and the Wild are not just unfamiliar to one another, but also intensely adversarial. And the wilderness is the theater by which these equally threatening forces come into opposition.

Our ties to the past are inescapable like a persisting memory. The anxiety one feels venturing into the New England wood is the same as the settlers that came before us did— unwelcome and with hostility. Whether it be from the myriad of beasts that inhabit this country, our extreme weather, or the Natives that were not only formidable warriors but often terrifyingly unpredictable, the savage character of what existed all around the seedlings of early American civilization was comprised of both sudden and apocalyptic perils. Whatever carnage that occurred on this soil before and after Whites arrived are definitive of the land’s original bloody character. The only way to cultivate something new and lasting was to segregate oneself away from the ceaselessness of conflict— and through this, the insularity of American society was born.

“1. The metaphysical foundation of America is segregation— without this it is nothing. This goes beyond Black and White race relations, but is more broadly a distinction between Light and Dark. The Old World and the New. Ordered Civilization vs. the untamed Wild. Known vs. Unknown.” — from 50 truths on the hidden metaphysics of America

This nation could not have founded itself without conquering its many threats, and conquered them they did. But the manner in which America dealt with these defeated forces afterward was to sweep them under the rug and keep them away. Reservations were constructed for the Natives. National parks for the wildlife. Segregation for the Blacks. Again, the goal was to push everything “out of sight and out of mind.”

For a long time, this strategy was effective and allowed for the blessing of unimaginable prosperity to abound throughout America. However, the severance had simultaneously created an inner conflict within us. On one level, we have a leaden guilt. And on another, a shameless fear. Both are rooted in an unresolved saga of a relatively young civilization— one that becomes more and more unaware of its origins as it struggles to self-maintain.

Today there is seemingly no need to feel wary anymore of threats like the Natives or a now-scarce population of major animal predators. Despite this, White America remains anxious over their ghosts, which so severely haunt the nation that they still comprise the core of its central, national concerns.

Immigration, crime, and integration make up almost every domestic and political dispute in this country. Each issue involves the conundrum of what to do with the increasing prevalence of unfamiliar entities and the dangers they may or may not pose to our insular neighborhoods. Many remain fearful and want them purged, while others are tortured by the guilt of excluding them. But together, the Right and Left in America share the same neuroticism over apparitions of our history. And it is here that it is essential to consider again how often our reality teeters into spiritual conceptualizations— how often we refer to hidden entities from worlds out of our immediate grasp.

The plain truth about why the land and everything upon it feels so malevolent is because of an unresolved and nightmarish history. But taking this as it is is insufficient. Psychoanalysis is required to make sense of it, and from there metaphysics. And regardless if one is to study the past, the mind, or cosmology— we find a reliance on having to fathom realms that are unseeable, and to believe imaginably in their contents.

We must concede that superstitions and folk tales reveal more about a people’s character than its politics— they reveal their aspirations, their fears, and ultimately their fate. It just so happens that in America, our unifying mythos pertains to the persistence of our demons and the strange, hidden worlds they emerge from. Disbelief only serves to further inspirit the endurance of this grand drama.

And so next, let us explore the more mystical interpretation— the one of old Gods and the shadows that exist behind the light of the nation’s Christian faith. A second look at what haunts the American wilderness is in order.