Blind People in Fog

Buddha taught Metta Sutta, a mantra of loving-kindness to the monks who had come to stay in a forest for meditation during the rainy season for three months. The spirits dwelling in the forest started harassing the monks at night to scare them away, and being perturbed by the thought that they would be harmed, the monks went to seek Buddha’s guidance against their fear of the forest’s spirits.

Fear is essential to all beings: to strive, to survive, but it also restricts us from seeing the true nature of the reality. If compassion is extended to both seen and unseen, the born and to-be born, and what is known and unknown, there would be no fear at all.

We, humans, are afraid of what we cannot truly comprehend. It is the horror of Abjection. It’s the horror of what once was, now lost and can never return.

I slept till eleven in the morning, and got late on the first day of my trip. Our tour guide, Mihail had been waiting in the hotel’s lobby to pick us up in a travel bus. I rushed to get ready after my phone blared up with the missed calls from Mihail, and I ran downstairs to meet him half-apologetically in the lobby.

“You’re thirty minutes late.” He spoke in his Russian accent, and I flushed in embarrassment.

I hadn’t expected Mihail to be young and good-looking in his mid-thirties. Being a man of fair countenance, he had good temperament too and didn’t blow up at me for being late although the other people weren’t quite happy about it.

I apologized to him and the others and got on the bus before it could get further late. The bus departed from the hotel to Hoia Baciu forest in Transylvania near Cluj Napoca.

Hoia Baciu is said to be one of the most haunted forests and is infamous for its local legends about paranormal sightings. In 1968, a military technician, Emil Barnea had reported to have seen UFO in the forest’s clearing, but the government dismissed his claims and regarded him as a lunatic. Afterwards, the man lost his job for making such a heretic claim. Mihail told us since then, many strange people have come here to look for a hidden portal to another world.

When we got off the bus and entered the forest, Mihail instructed us to walk in groups and not to wander off alone into the forest by ourselves. I stayed beside Mihail and listened to his interesting stories about the forest. According to the locals, evil spirits lurk among the trees of Hoia Baciu forest. The shepherd who had once disappeared in the forest never came back, and the girl who suddenly returned after her five years of disappearance had no recollection of what happened to her during that time.

Whether it’s a ghost or a UFO, it’s all manmade conjecture to explain the strange phenomena that people might experience in the dense environment of the forest due to its thick miasma and fatigue and exhaustion.

As we ventured deep into the forest, all those stories somehow seemed to be true. Once the fog started to set in, the miasma in the forest thickened which created an eerie atmosphere. The trees in the forest were all crooked and spiraling which in itself gave off the spooky feeling as if they would start walking freely once the sun set in.

Not paying attention to where I was walking, I tripped over an exposed tree root on the ground and sprained my ankle. Mihail stopped to check on me, but I told him that I was fine and he did not have to wait for me.

Mihail went in with the others but told me not to fall behind and get separated from them.

I massaged my ankle and waited for the pain to subside before getting up to join the others. I followed the trail in the forest where Mihail had gone with the others, but the miasma in the forest had grown denser in the late afternoon, so it became difficult to find them from a good distance.

As I further walked among the thicket of trees, I felt someone following me, but when I turned to look, there was no one behind me.

Thinking I was being paranoid, I hurried to find the others, but this disturbing feeling of being stalked did not go away. I hid behind a tree to see who it was following me. It could have been someone from our group who must have stayed behind with an ill intention and waited to get me alone in the woods.

As the heavy footsteps approached near, I reared my head from behind the tree to see who it was, but a hand on my shoulder pulled me back and I looked up to see him frowning at me.

Was he the one following me?

“Wh—” I opened my mouth to ask, but he raised a finger to his mouth telling me to be silent. I got the cue and waited in silence to catch the stalker.

 A hunched male figure in a tattered black hood and pants appeared from behind the trees and trudged past us without looking in our direction. The person was quite frail and weak and judging from his haggard appearance, he didn’t seem to be one of the tourists, so I concluded that he must be a local.

He tapped on my arm and signaled me to follow him silently. He walked us through the trees and put a good distance between that person and us.

“Is he a local from here?” I asked him. “He’s been following me for a while.”

“He might be lost, so he wanted to follow you to find his way out.” He answered.

“Lost?” I became alarmed. “Shouldn’t we go back and help him?” I was about to turn and go back, but he stopped me with his hand on my shoulder.

“Do you think he is a good person?” He asked me. “He is pushing you further into the forest to corner and trap you.”

Then, he leaned forward and said, “Not all the people you see here might be humans.”

I stared at him in horror, but a smile on his face told me that he said it to scare me.

“Are you a local guide here?” I changed topic of our conversation.

“You can say that.” He answered while checking our surroundings.

“Do you know the way back? My team might be looking for me.” I asked him, and he beckoned me to follow him  in silence. However, he suddenly stopped walking causing me to bump into his back and cuss at him. I stepped back to ask him what was wrong, but became quiet when I noticed some figures in the fog.

Those tall, stick like figures were moving in the fog and passed each other as if searching for something but couldn’t find it. He gestured at me not to make a sound and retreat in silence, but I accidentally stepped on a fallen twig, and the cracking sound made those figures snap their heads in our direction.

I held my breath, and looked up at him in fear, but he’s glaring back at those things in the fog. He took my hand in his and wrote in my palm that as long as we didn’t make any sound, those things wouldn’t see us since they did not have eyes.

He must have meant bad sight, but I nodded my head in understanding and quietly retreated from there with him. The person we had seen before was still wandering in the forest, yet we managed to avoid him.

However, we might not have gone too far when my eyes became irritated and started burning. As my vision blurred, and I couldn’t see clearly, I blinked and rubbed my eyes to clear the fog, but it further irritated my eyes and worsened the burning pain.

“What’s the matter?” He stopped to ask, and I told him that my eyes were suddenly itchy and burning.

He took a good look at me and said, “The miasma in this part of the forest is highly toxic. Keep your eyes closed, otherwise you will go blind.”

I panicked at the thought of going blind, but he assured that my eyes would be fine once I get out. He ripped his shirt to make a blindfold for me and told me not to rub my eyes as it would damage the cornea when he tied the cloth securely around my eyes.

 Then, he clasped my hand and led me through the forest.

“Don’t you need to cover your eyes?” I asked realizing that he did not tie anything around his eyes to protect himself.

“No, my eyes work just fine in this kind of environment.” It was indeed strange, but given that he’s a local, his eyes must have been accustomed to the miasma and toxic air of the forest.

I continued walking with him before he stopped in his tracks and held onto my hand tightly. It was eerily quiet around us, but my sensitive ears picked footsteps approaching us from my right side.

“There is—” I started, but he hushed me and pushed me behind himself as someone came near us.

“H-Her…H-Hum—”. It was an incoherent chattering, a guttural growl that did not even sound   like a human speech.

That person trudged closer to us, but he stepped forward protectively and said, “She is with me.”

“Leave!” He warned and waited for the other to leave before he took hold of my hand again and started running through the woods towards the forest’s entrance.

Eventually, I made it back to the forest’s entrance where Mihail was waiting for me. I removed the blindfold and found my eyes working completely fine. Mihail asked me where I had been, and I told him how a strange person had been stalking me, but a local guide helped me find the way back.

“Where’s he?” Mihail asked me, as there’s no one beside me.

“He must have left.” I told him, and mentally berated myself for not asking his name again.

As we turned to leave, I saw the missing notice of a person pasted on a tree.

Mihail followed my gaze to see what I was looking at, and told me that this person had been missing for three years, but his mother would still come to put up a new notice in a hope to find him some day. I thought of the person from before, and wondered if it’s him or not.

“There were people in the fog.” I told them and a woman from the group immediately asked, “Could it be the blind spirits of the forest? “

“I have heard that those who die in this forest lose their eyesight and can’t find their way to the netherworld.” She told us.

“It must be another team in the forest. Let’s go back before it gets dark.” Mihail told us, and led all of us back to the bus.

As our bus was about to leave, the drizzle started, and through the misty window of the bus, I saw that haggard person standing at the forest’s entrance. I immediately tore my eyes away from him and pretended not to see him. If he could make it to the forest’s entrance, he would be able to go back home himself.

However, it was raining, and I couldn’t help myself but ask Mihail to stop the bus and let that person on-board.

“There’s no one here.” He became confused. Goosebumps stood on my arm when I saw that person still standing in the forest.  

“Is there really no one?” I asked Mihail in disbelief.

That person peered up from his hood causing me to freeze in horror. There were no eyeballs in his sockets; instead, two empty black holes stared back at me.

“Did you really see a blind ghost?” I shuddered when the woman asked me. However, when I looked back again to see that man again, he was not there. I said nothing to the woman, and went back to my seat in a shock. Was it all my imagination?

I rolled up my sleeve to look at the scar on my forearm, and had a sudden foreboding feeling about the trip.

That person who had saved me in the forest, who was he?

Castle in Romania 

The following few days in Romania were well-spent, I found myself being at peace away from the humdrum of monotonous life. Being in Transylvania meant visiting its Bran Castle as well —the famous Count Dracula’s Castle. I got up early in the afternoon, showered and dressed in a plain black vintage gown. I buttoned up the high collar and secured a belt in place around my waist. I pulled up my brunette hair in a half-up do and slipped in a golden hair-stick which was the heirloom left to me by my late paternal grandmother.

I checked myself in the mirror to see if I looked decent to go outside and took my checkered brown coat with me in case it got chilly later at night.

Mihail first took us to Peleș Castle which is nothing short of its magnificence. The castle has one hundred and seventy rooms of varying themes. It has a Turkish Parlor, Theatre and a Hall of Honor extending over to three levels and is painted in beautiful emerald green. Everything in the Castle from its stairs to the walls and even the beams is artistically wood-crafted and holds its regal ambiance in the rich hues of red and gold. I wandered off to the study room, took some pictures and visited the dining hall wishing how nice it would have been to be born in those times.

I came out to take the fresh air of the garden and looked at the sculpture of Elizabeth of Wied, sewing socks. She was titled ‘Mother of the Wounded’ after Turk-Romanian war, and was a writer and the patron of Romanian Red Cross, but what the artist had captured was a simple private moment of meagerness; a plain nature of woman instead of her accomplishments.

A woman is never celebrated for her accomplishments, but her duties.

Then, it was time to visit Bran Castle whose flaming red towers stood in stark contrast to the white walls of the castle, and which was in its full splendor against the autumnal landscape of the Carpathian mountains. Visiting the castle was a childhood dream of mine coming true partly because of the lore of Vlad Țepeș who inspired Stoker’s Dracula, and partly because of my own strange constitution towards the dark places.

The inside of Bran castle was indeed a splendid sight to see; from the murals to the portraits on display—woodwork, furniture, weaponry and armor, everything was majestic. The secret hidden passage that connected the first and third level of the castle was narrow and steep. I took the passage for the experience but felt the dark walls closing in on me when I descended the stairs—a chilling morbid feeling of being suffocated slowly. I paused to catch my breath when I heard someone call my name from above that lingered in the passage. I turned around and looked up to ask who was it but received no answer, so I hurried to leave from there and went to join the others on the first floor.

It had gotten darker, and the air had become chilly too. I rubbed my hands and arms to relieve myself of some cold and looked around for Mihail but I couldn’t find him. It was then I sensed that something was off with this place. Neither the people around me were the familiar faces, nor I could see anyone from my group. I cast a furtive glance over my shoulder and saw them staring strangely at me for some reason. They all were dressed quite peculiarly in a Victorian fashion and had sunken red eyes.

Growing uncomfortable, I tried calling Mihail but couldn’t get through due to poor signals.

I turned around to ask someone for help, but the lights in the hall suddenly went out. I stood there in darkness and the silence around me became disturbingly unbearable.

Then, I heard a snarl.