It’s spooky season, and Mother Nature takes the prize for best costume.
Frost creeps over wilted flowers and rotting mushrooms. Spiders, fat from months of feeding, skitter across dead leaves. At dusk, crows gather, weighing down skeletal trees as they roost by the hundreds.
The spirit of Halloween is alive in the Maine wilderness. So, in that spirit, I’m sharing some of the spookiest things I’ve stumbled upon in the woods lately. It’s been a particularly strange autumn.
First, we have a dead woodpecker with its head stuck in a tree. Skeletons are inherently creepy, but this one wins extra points for its placement.
Here are the details: While guiding a group hike in eastern Maine, I noticed a bundle of black and white feathers against a dead tree beside the trail. Inspecting it closely, I discovered it was the back of a hairy woodpecker, and the bird was very much dead. All that was left of its head was its skull and sharp beak.
The tree where it was displayed had fallen, breaking at about hip level. Jagged pieces of wood protruded from the top of the rotting stump. And there the woodpecker dangled, its neck wedged between two spikes of wood.
What had happened? Had the bird flown into the tree accidentally, becoming trapped? Or even more spectacular, had the bird been drilling on the tree when it fell, one strike from its beak being the last straw?
Lucky for me, the people I was guiding that day were more intrigued than disturbed. One of them suggested that a person may have placed the dead bird in that position, a possibility that — after growing up with horror films like “The Blair Witch Project” — creeps me out more than anything else. Let’s hope the bird arrived there naturally and not because woodspeople are hanging skeletons in trees, shall we?
My dog, Juno, discovered the next spooky thing: an old deer skull atop a 2,600-foot mountain in western Maine. The bones bleached white and picked clean, the skull was nestled in a bed of reindeer lichen and blueberry bushes.
At least, I think it was a deer skull. It seemed large to me — though I’m no expert. The animal ID app on my phone, Seek, identified it as a caribou. However, caribou died out in Maine in the early 1900s, and technology is regularly wrong. Unfortunately, the skull was missing the front of its upper jaw, where, if it had been a caribou, it would have had small canine teeth (that white-tailed deer don’t have).
Odds are, it was a large white-tailed deer. But I like the added mystery. And I like to think about the journey it took to reach the top of the mountain. The rest of its skeleton was nowhere in sight.
To make things weirder, someone had arranged hundreds of rocks to form a large spiral on the bedrock nearby. It looked ritualistic — or alien, like a crop circle. But perhaps the scariest thing about it was how much it disrupted the natural landscape. Leave no trace.
My final spooky sighting was made worse by the stench.
I was walking along a trail near my house when I came across the carcass of a huge snapping turtle. I nudged the upended shell with my boot. Rainwater and bones sloshed around inside it, releasing a putrid smell. With a branch, I slowly ushered the stinky remains off the trail, all the while yelling at Juno to stay away.
Can you imagine if she’d rolled in it? Ew.
The smell of death is spine-tingling all on its own. What made the discovery even more eerie was this unanswerable question: How did the turtle get there?
By the state of it, the snapper had been dead for quite some time. I walk that trail almost daily, and I hadn’t noticed a giant turtle rotting in the middle of it. So, had someone dumped it there recently? Had an animal dragged it to the spot? Am I dealing with a zombie turtle?
Unless one of my neighbors confesses some odd behavior, the mystery will remain unsolved.
But that’s OK with me. The woods are filled with little mysteries and miracles — things that spark the imagination and fill us with wonder. Every once in a while, those hard-to-explain sights can seem scary, especially during this time of year. But I say: Embrace it.
The Maine wilderness is one of the safest places you can be — despite the fat but harmless spiders, congregating crows, clacking branches and rattling leaves. Enjoy its spookiness like you would a classic horror movie or local ghost story.
despite the fat but harmless spiders, congregating crows, clacking branches and rattling leaves.
Mother Nature has always liked to put on a show. The theme is ever-changing, and right now, it’s spooky season.
