Blackstead Forest

The Blackstead Forest (known formally as the Blackstead State Park in 2004) is a massive old-growth forest in southeastern Ohio, stretching across the edges of three neighboring counties (Braddock, Traeburn, and Charlotte). It bears a dark reputation in the nearby area, and many locals consider it a source of paranormal activity; it has often been blamed for the countless disappearances that have plagued the area throughout recorded history. It is also widely considered to be haunted. The forest's evil reputation is centuries old, perhaps much older.

Throughout the ages, even the fiercest warriors and explorers have avoided the Blackstead Forest. Information about the area prior to European contact is almost nonexistent. The Susquehannock people spoke fearfully of a haunted place they called "the Black Knife" that they had avoided since at least the 13th century. This "Black Knife" was a huge arrowhead-shaped stone that sat deep in a forest near the confluence of the Traeburn and Ohio Rivers. According to Swedish missionary Johannes Campanius, some among the Susquehannock spoke of an old legend that the sun was drawn into the west every evening by a “forest of night”, only to escape its clutches and flee underground to the east by morning. This group believed that the world would come to an end when the “dead shaman” captured the sun and ate it. This mention of a “dead shaman” is curious, since the Shawnee openly spoke about their own reason for avoiding the Traeburn Valley - that it was the abode of the “Wandering Pilgrim.” They believed this figure had crossed the eastern ocean on a canoe “when the deer ate grass on the high mounds in the city of the west” (probably a reference to Cahokia, which reached its height around 1100 CE and had been abandoned by the 14th century). The Shawnee were willing to share what knowledge they had about the Blackstead Forest and its dread “Wanderer”, though they didn’t know much. Their lore held that the Wandering Pilgrim was a white man, though paler than the English and Americans; his face was “the color of the moon in winter”. He had access to “old medicine” bestowed on him by a “distant spirit of night”. This is where another strange tale emerges, this time from the Powhatan:

In the days when Wahunsenacawh (whom the English knew as Chief Powhatan) sat at the great council fire and received wampum from a hundred chiefs (a reference to the Powhatan Confederacy of the late 16th and early 17th centuries), the great English mother (Elizabeth I) sent her first band of children to a place they called Roanoke. A pale holy man came to them from across the mountains, and when winter came and they began to eat their dead, he told them that in his forest he sat in a holy place where there were stones as tall as three men and these stones stayed hot in the winter because many people had been burned on them hundreds of seasons ago, enough for the stones to stay hot for many moons to come. And the English agreed to follow him, because he was also English like them, though his accent was strange and old. And he called himself Stillness, and the English went and passed over the mountains like ghosts and never returned.

If the Powhatan tale is taken literally, it means that the Shawnee’s “Wandering Pilgrim” was English, and he was in North America before colonists landed at Roanoke.