#30 Goodbye Grove

Age: As Old As Sin

Hidden or Lost: No

History: There’s a first time for everything, including murder. And the very reality surrounding the scene of that historic crime still bears the scars, even centuries later it still hungers for spilled blood.

For millennia, the site of the first murder was left alone, avoided on an instinctual level by any early human who wandered close. Those who moved in later noted the ominous gnarled foliage and twisted, misshapen trees, and marked the area as cursed ground. But as progress rolled on, roads and houses were built closer and closer to the site, bringing vulnerable human wills along with them.

By the early 20th century, the haunting forest had drawn in serial killer Garvey William Bloor, who used the increasingly small copse as his hunting ground. When the authorities finally caught up with him, chasing him into the thick rows of trees, they reported that the unnamed pond at the center of the terrible wilderness had become thick and red from gore, the shores overrun with writhing piles of thick eels. In the end they set the woods ablaze and Bloor burned to death. Miraculously, by the next day the forest had regrown strange black-leafed plants to replace what was burnt.

Today the site is known as Goodbye Grove, named after a more recent rash of disappearances in the early 2000s when eleven young people from the surrounding towns went missing in the span of a week, all said to have been last seen wandering that midnight-dappled maze of gnarled arbors. None were ever found. As it was in centuries past, locals now avoid the area, and tell their kids urban legends about the Ghost of Bloor, or the Witch of the Trees that sings a siren call to lure people into the woods.

All agree that there's something in those woods, but it's not what any of the legends say. The truth that only a few wise, terrified locals know is that a cruel being resides in Goodbye Grove. An intelligence that was trapped within a dimension of pure pain until the first murder weakened the barrier to its prison. Its influence poisons the land and the hearts of any who come near. Occasionally it has even managed to manifest itself in our world using some bloodthirsty human vessel or appropriate sacrifice as its escape route.

Now seen by most as simply a foreboding chunk of land off the highway, Goodbye Grove’s evil is simply waiting for its next murderous victim.

1. Bloor’s Cabin

2. The Bark Horn

3. The Ripping Thorns

4. Poisoned Oak

5. Redwater Pond

6. 1,000 Graves

7. The Endless Caverns

8. Site of the First Murder

9. Hidden Crossroads

10. Breathing Barrows

11. Abandoned Campsite

12. Stone of Seth

13. Victimstorm

14. Lying Signpost