Disappearing Forest

The Midnight Article"DISAPPEARING FORESTS: MYTH OR MORE?" was written by u/katzassand posted to r/MidnightPaper.

The text of the Article was as follows:

DISAPPEARING FOREST: MYTH OR MORE? The local town legend. You've probably heard it, and if you haven't then you just haven't talked to the right people yet. Everyone knows it exists, but not everyone will talk about it. Some people believe that if you talk about it, the forest will find you and turn you into mist, others say that the forest only takes those who disrespect their land, and but none will go walking in a heavily wooded area once the sun goes down.

The stories all start the same. A local child, sometimes its a boy, sometimes a girl, living in a farmhouse near the edge of a forest, goes wandering into the woods past dark on a foggy, moonless night. In some versions the child is simply looking for a lost pet and hears it just beyond the treeline, and in others the forest itself is whispering to the child. The parents don't realize their child is missing until the next morning, when they awake to find the bed empty and the front door ajar.

The father immediately goes to the phone to call the police while the mother dons her coat and shoes. She's going to check the fields and the forest, she tells her husband. He regards her with confusion. What forest? Her heart sinks. She runs outside only to see the forest behind their house was missing too.

The mother goes back in the house to share this revelation to her husband only to have him regard her with further confusion and now concern. He tells her they've never had a forest behind their house, that she must be delirious with worry. She swears it was there yesterday.

After they finished talking to the police, the mother calls the neighbors down the road, in case they might have seen anything. While on the phone with them she also asks about the forest behind their house to which they declare to have no recollection of there ever having been a forest there, and they've "been here for nearly 84 years so surely they would remember such a thing!"

Months pass with no sign of their child. Eventually the mothers obsession with the forest that no one in town can seem to remember drives her husband away, leaving her in the farmhouse alone. Lost, alone, and confused beyond anything, the woman found solace in a bottle.

One evening, just after the sun had gone down, the woman had run out of her favorite comfort beverage. Despite having had a few glasses of "comfort" already, she got behind the wheel of her car and began making her way to town to replenish her stock. The roads were still slick from a heavy rainfall earlier that day, and a fog was rolling in. Not being able to see it, she began drifting over the middle line as she approached a corner. Around the other side of that corner was a truck. She swerved harshly. Her car hit the soft shoulder on the other side and flipped into the ditch. It began to roll down the embankment, coming to rest against a small crop of trees.

Miraculously, the woman was unharmed and able to exit her vehicle. She knew she would be unable to climb back up to the road, and not thinking clearly for many reasons, she walked into the small forest. Fog swirled around her ankles, still she did not stop. Deeper and deeper into the trees she went, as if drawn forward by an invisible force.

It began as a pang in her chest. A memory long since locked away tugged at her mind's edge. The longer the woman walked among the trees, the sadder she felt. Until eventually she fell to her knees, sobs wracking her body, crying out the name of her lost child. Approaching footsteps cause the woman to look up, she sees someone who resembles her child although nearly a teen. Her heart swells with hope only to have logic state that it could not possibly be them, it hadn't even been a year...

'Mom?' The person offers a hand and helps the woman to her feet as several other people of various ages and types of clothing peer out from behind the trees.

The next day police found the car at the bottom of the embankment, severely damaged from rolling down with no occupants, no bodies found nearby. No forests were found either.

Description:

The Disappearing Forest is a Biological-Type Oddity with several anomalous qualities. Its primary quality is making seemingly whoever enters it disappear. The forest itself appears to be capable of materializing and de-materializing, though when, how, or why it does this is unknown at this time.

The article mentions that a woman entered the forest and was reunited with their child, although they had aged considerably since their disappearance. The woman also witnessed several other people "of various ages and types of clothing."

Pocket Dimension?:

The Disappearing Forest seems to exist in its own pocket dimension, where the passage of time is irregular or at least very different than the ordinary passage of time outside of it. The woman in the article spotted their own child, who had aged into a teenager, and several people who we can deduce were from different time periods. How the forests keeps the people inside it alive for as long as it does (enough so that their clothing is different from that of the current day and age) is unknown, though it isn't hard to imagine that a forest of any kind contains animals and plants that could be eaten for sustenance.