The Haunting of Notecka Forest

by Lawrence Dagstine

It was January 2007 when I first heard about Poland being haunted. My father was in the Veteran’s Hospital of Brooklyn, New York, due to congestive heart failure. He had survived a double bypass operation. My fiancée was pregnant at the time, and we would visit him on the weekends. He had a funny old Jewish man for a roommate, up in age, I’d say near ninety. He had served in World War Two, and he loved to tell stories. He told my father “What a handsome son you have,” and that “He looks just like you,” then asked me what I do for a living. I told him I was a horror writer. Then he went into a whole song and dance about Halloween, and asked me if I knew Stephen King. I laughed, of course. By now I had figured him senile with age, but then he said: “Do you want to hear a real ghost story?”

Naturally, being polite, I said, “Sure, why not?”

The man told me about his Polish relatives, and an old abandoned graveyard in the western province of Lubuskie, and how the mischievous spirits of small children who supposedly froze to death one winter, or just vanished without a trace—much of it is still a mystery to this day—occupied the woods surrounding it. It had happened at the turn of the 19th century, in a once-thriving German community known as Brandenburg, and this was how I first learned about The Haunting of Notecka Primeval Forest.

But it wouldn’t be for at least another whole year until I would finally come back and research the phenomena surrounding this deserted wilderness deep in the heart of Europe. There weren’t too many books on the subject. A few titles paid reference to the area—these were very minor, of course—such as the Encyclopedia of Haunted Places: Ghostly Locales From Around the World, by Jeff Belanger, and the Berlitz Poland Pocket Guide, by Neil Schlecht. The only reason some of these places were even mentioned is because Poland actually has real haunted castles and gravemarker tours throughout various parts of the country. Like Transylvania, Romania, they’re known for it. It seems that ghosts are fairly common in Brandenburg, and a very popular tourist attraction. One such place is a town called Przemysl, where there is an ancient castle filled with many centuries worth of strange happenings.

It is said that, during World War Two, the childlike spirits of Notecka Forest would cause German soldiers to wander off and go mad, and that they, too, would just disappear and never be heard from again. One day a local woodcutter had even spotted an owl-man. He returned to his village—then part of a German state and called Schwerin and Netze Forest—and had told everyone that he had seen some thing that was part human and part feathered creature. According to Notecka’s forestry workers, such paranormal sightings and eerie legends are not uncommon. Matter of fact, the apparitions lurking in these woods have become one of the highlights surrounding its wilderness tour. On cold winter nights, the weary, unsuspecting traveler can hear the voices of the children and see them running and playing through the tall thin trees. Sometimes they can even hear the voices of the soldiers, speaking in German—the ones who are still lost to this day.

Still, I wanted to know more about the children and the vanishings, and how a whole community of adults eventually followed suit. And why?

According to Polish legend, these vanishings seem to lead back to that “out-of-the-way” graveyard—aptly named, The Deserted Forest Cemetery—which to this day is still neglected and overgrown with foliage. These were where the sounds of the children and soldiers were heard the most, and only at night. It was also where the disappearance of Brandenburg’s inhabitants took place well over a hundred years ago. [CB1] This all happened in this once-bustling German community of woodcutters and mushroom collectors, located at the center of Notecka Forest. Some say the graveyard is cursed, others insist that an ancient evil is bound there and that is why it is completely isolated from any settlement and does not appear on local maps. Others claim that it is the wild mushrooms that grow in the region. The forest is ripe and full of them. Blueberries, too. And like most raw mushrooms they can have either toxic or hallucinogenic effects on the brain if ingested. Locals would pick them up from the ground and eat them, then insist that they heard voices or saw something out of the ordinary, something which resembled a child running past them through the brush.

Though a primeval forest, the region is considered an ecological paradise. There are many different species of trees and wildlife. Some of the animals living there include wild boars and deers, hares and woodpeckers, cranes and storks, and it is a beautiful place to go hiking in the daytime. It is said to be an ideal place to escape the modern world. Forestry workers say Notecka Forest is one of Poland’s most natural attractions, but how many of the thousands that flock there every year are told about its supernatural attractions?

If the woods surrounding the Deserted Forest Cemetery are really cursed, haunted as many proclaim it to be, and it really isn’t the work of visitors over the past hundred years hallucinating on the habitat’s vegetation, then I would think that it would be a tourist spot one would not want to run away to.

If my research into Notecka Primeval Forest, its surrounding graveyards, supernatural tours and bizarre occurrences taught me anything, it's that there may well be more lore here to discover. That, and the Polish man in the hospital bed knew perhaps too much about unexplained phenomena and vanishings. Only if I ever decide to vacation there, I wouldn’t go at night.