Boo-Doo Happy Hour
With each Mentatrix, we take a look at the world outside, and learn more about the world inside.
Hello, wise Mentatrix readers! I wonder if I can lure you with this appetising happy-hour offer of endless, choose-your-own-witch stories, three days after Halloween.
In the tradition of Mentatrixes, I’m looking at life, nature, and local culture where I live, in southwest Germany, between the Black Forest and the Rhine River, and prompt you to reflect on how our human minds work.
Halloween came this year with a full array of fog, moderate chill, and an abundance of pumpkins, whether in supermarkets, on the fields along the road, or on window sills.
My daughter and I celebrated it with pumpkin pie (among other yummies), and a bottle of dark red Sicilian Lunático.
The fog clinging to the trees around my house made me think of the predilection people in the Black Forest have for tales of witches, devils and other spooky apparitions. You can even buy witchcraft guides in the bookshop!
I’ve been on about eighty hiking trails in the Black Forest. I stopped long ago trying to remember each place called The Devils Cliff, or the Witches’ Dance Place. True, some trails are witchier than others.
On the Kandel mountain, for example, a large area is littered with rocks and cliffs. On the Walpurgis night (30 April to 1 May) 1981, the witches apparently overdid it; a deafening sound was heard from the villages nearby, and the following day, people discovered that a large cliff had come off and crashed on the mountainside. Among the rubble, there was a broom :-o.
The hiking route called The Witches Trail of Lautenbach takes you to a plateau where a witch was said to be up to mischief and made hikers wander around until the first rooster crowed in the morning to lift the curse.
Nowadays, the danger’s gone: there’s a witch’s house and brooms sticking out all along the trail, but you realise the witches are also prone to get into trouble, especially when steering their brooms after a long night’s mischief.
Mermaids coming out of the Mummelsee (the Lake of the Waterlilies, or of the Mermaids? — etymology is deliberately ambiguous here), a headless rider looking for his severed head, curses, ill-meaning dwarfs, all magic beings seem to show up in particularly eerie places.
But what makes a place feel eerie, and inspire such tales of spooks?
Is it the dark hour, as in the story where this man was coming back home talking to himself, surrounded by the solitude of the dark forest?
A forest ranger overheard him saying, “If only the devil brought me a sackful of gold!” The ranger disguised his voice and called out, “How much do you want?” That’s one way such spooky tales come to be, as the man rushed straight home and hid under his bed in terror.
Or is it a lake with an unfathomable bottom, surrounded by dark woods, like the Lake of the Waterlilies — sorry, of the Mermaids? The invisible, therefore?
Is it our pattern-seeking mind, discerning movement or living beings in moss-covered stones, or knotty trees with twisted branches?
Is it lost places, decrepit through the passage of centuries, which, we tell ourselves, have witnessed so many lives and deaths? Again, our imagination lends stones and wood consciousness, only to get a brief glimpse of that which lies beyond our individual lifetime.
If you think tales only spring from the imagination and become materialised on a hiking trail or in a book of folklore, you might wish to think again. In the case of the Witches’ Landing Place near the town of Wolfach, it was real women hikers who regularly met to practise for a yearly five-day hike in the Alps starting in 1987. Someone dubbed them the “Mountain witches”. And so the Mountain Witches Landing Place came into being in 2003: from reality into myth, for a change.
And if you think imagination and myth is all there is to it, maybe you’d like to think again, again. The Palace of Rastatt, by Karlsruhe, is said to be haunted; by white, or by grey women — or both, randomly (read the anecdote here.)
So much so that a ghostbuster squad was on a mission in 2011. Apparently, there are traces of supernatural presence: a mysterious light effect in the Hall of Ancestors, or a faint woman’s voice saying “Go away!” Two of the ghostbuster squad report to have felt a hand touch :-o.
Where these tales come from, therefore, cannot be pinned down. But should we try to? It’s easy to dismiss them with a condescending smile. Sure, I wouldn’t exactly trust a ghostbuster squad; but maybe I wouldn’t exactly like to stroll at night through an eighteenth-century palace either.
The borders between the visible and the unfathomable? Elusive. Does that mean they don’t exist? Two centuries ago we couldn’t see germs, atoms, or the black hole in our galaxy. Did it mean they weren’t there?
Oh-oh.... I can feel a chill down my spine!
Boo!
Great question: "But what makes a place feel eerie, and inspire such tales of spooks?"
I love lakes with unfathomable bottoms! So much room to describe creepy things and scare the reader. Add darkness and it's a homerun