by Alicia MacLeay
Halloween is approaching, and I’ve been thinking about haunted and spooky hiking trails and mountains. Here are a few tales and sources to get you started, in case you want to add some excitement to story time around camp. Share your own tales below.
Beware of mountain spirit Pamola — or your own peak’s “der berggeist” — while hiking Maine’s Katahdin.
Starting locally — because all good ghost stories are local — Mainer Stephen King has plenty of horror novels, but for an outdoor fix consider his psychological novella The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. In it a 9-year-old girl gets lost on a family hiking trip on the AT and fears she’s being hunted by “The God of the Lost.”
The presence of a mountain spirit or ghost (der berggeist in German) is longstanding and appears across cultures. In Maine we have Pamola, an Abanaki spirit (half moose, half eagle) who lives on and protects Mount Katahdin. According to the Penobscots, Pamola did not welcome mortals on the mountain and it was taboo to climb the peak. Pamola would cause bad weather—snow, ice, wind, and fog—to confuse those who dared climb its mountain.
Over in New Hampshire, Mount Washington has its own summit presence and ghosts, as well as haunted AMC huts and apparitional hikers, all covered in Haunted Hikes of New Hampshire by Marianne O’Connor. (Also read “Slamming Doors, Cries for Help” in the AMC’s Appalachia, Winter/Spring 2009. The mental image of faces in hut windows freaks me out.)
For a broader scope, Haunted Hikes: Spine-Tingling Tales and Trails from North America’s National Parks was written by former park ranger Andrea Lankford. It has tales of a crying ghost in Yosemite, a 4-year-old from 1891 haunting the AT near Bluff Mountain in Virginia, mischievous “jumby” spirits in the Virgin Islands, and “flying saucer hot spot” Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve. (www.hauntedhiker.com)
You don’t have to believe in ghosts or “hard-to-explain” events to have a spooky hike:
Margie Cohen of the American Hiking Society told me the Pinhoti Trail in Alabama is particularly spooky to her. Part of the trail is on a severe ridge in a designated Wilderness Area. Due to the ridge’s hydraulics there have been some small plane crashes, but because it is a designated Wilderness Area (no mechanization), the Forest Service does not remove the crashed planes. “So, while you’re hiking, you can come along a plane wreck that has been there for many years,” said Cohen. “I think that is pretty spooky.”
So, what spooks you on the trail? Share your own spooky hiking or backpacking story here.
I’ve ordered my own copies of the haunted hiking books mentioned above, but will probably stick to reading them while off the trail.
