Another boy, aged fifteen, disappeared from Alexandria on the northern edge of Lake Champlain. He was believed to be a runaway, but no one was sure. Still, he was too old and disappeared several months after their night in Coombs’ Gulch. Most of the missing were adolescents. Most had been found at some point. There were a number of missing black children from cities like Albany or Buffalo who seemed to disappear with little media attention and even less police interest. But there was nothing, no one like the boy they buried in the box that night, no one missing from anywhere near Coombs’ Gulch or the town of Pasternak.
The month of October birthed Halloween-themed ghost stories, spooky accounts of eerie, unexplained incidents and folklore that fueled the morbid imagination of autumn. It was happenstance that he found a faux-news article out of Texas with the clickbait headline ‘Mysterious Ghost Girl Captured on Hunting Camera’. The image was of a girl, dressed in a jacket, knitted wool hat and boots, kicking her leg up in the darkness of the forest as if she were in the middle of a childish game with her friends. It was captured on a motion-activated camera a hunter attached to a tree in Upstate New York. It was in the Catskills, far south of Coombs’ Gulch, but, still, Jonathan saw something in it, sensed a similarity. That the girl was captured on this camera was especially strange because the hunting area was so far away from any town or home where the child – who looked about nine or ten – could have wandered from. Also, the picture was snapped in the middle of the night, her image blue and ghostly, bordered by tree trunks glowing like Roman pillars in the background. Some speculated she was a ghost – it was the reason the story became popular. Others said that it was clearly a living child and police were investigating, trying to find out who she was and what she was doing in the forest at that time of night. Most believed it to be a clever hoax.
But something caught Jonathan’s eye: a few paragraphs down, it noted the girl resembled a child who disappeared from the area nearly forty years ago. It was, of course, impossible, but the image on the hunter’s camera did truly resemble the missing girl from 1975. She was even dressed the same – third-hand clothes, probably from Goodwill, outdated by decades. The resemblance fueled the ghost speculations. The parents were long lost to history and couldn’t be found for the article, probably old and senile, lost to the tangling complexity of life.
Why had no one ever searched for that boy they buried in Coombs’ Gulch? Why was there no record of anyone remotely resembling him posted? Where were the news articles, the school pictures, the haunted, weary parents pleading for help and mercy? It was all too mysterious to ignore. For lack of anything better, he started a new search.
He found images, some clearly staged or faked, others with tales to accompany them, a few with tabloid or blog articles published online. The ghost child of Cannock Chase woods was a video that purported to show the ghost of a child walking through a dark British forest. It was filmed for one of those ghost-hunting programs where a bunch of idiots wander around in the night, yelling, asking questions into the silence, pointing their fingers at nothing and scaring themselves. The image was blurry, barely visible, but the ghost hunters seemed pleased with themselves. Another video from Cannock Chase was shot with a drone in the middle of the day. It showed a girl – clear as the day itself – standing in a night dress at the shadowed edge between the rolling moor and dense trees.
He found other images captured on camera from around the world, sometimes by unsuspecting campers or vacationers who only realized what their photos contained after they’d returned home and scrolled through their digital pictures. An overweight husband and wife smiling for the camera; in the background a child peeked out from behind a tree, his face blurry but recognizable, eyes shadowed and dark. Still others showed a child’s face buried in the foliage or underbrush so deep it was difficult to tell if it was an actual child or the human brain piecing together a recognizable form out of disparate parts. But the faces, real or imagined – or perhaps a little of both – were there in the background, a part of the landscape, watching, as if drawn to people, seeking them out or, perhaps, trying to be found.
Many held their mouths open to impossible dark lengths, as if screaming louder than any living thing could possibly scream.
Then there were still other photographs taken from hunting cameras. Pictures that made shivers run down his spine and caused his stomach to drop – the pallid night vision coloring, the wrongness of the scene, the misplacement. It was the most terrifying aspect of those photos, and now, it occurred to him, it was the most terrifying aspect of that night in Coombs’ Gulch. Those children didn’t belong there. Their presence in those photos meant something was intrinsically wrong. Whether they had been misplaced by God, man or computer graphics, Jonathan couldn’t tell and didn’t care. It caused him to recoil. A young girl wearing a nightgown caught in a photograph of two deer in the night, her eyes glowing from the camera shot. A boy of four or five years old at the periphery of a night-vision shot, frightening off a large buck. A figure standing at the edge of the camera’s range, whose eyes were deep holes, mouth open in a scream, a pale, white face like the one they had buried ten years ago. Jonathan stared at that photo for
