When I was a kid, my dad always used to warn me about the forest.

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He would tell me stories about monsters roaming amongst the trees in search of small children, and one of the stories he told me the most was about "the witch". These were just stories supposed to scare me, of course, but for some reasson the story about the witch in particular stuck with me to this day.

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The story begins with a young writer searching for inspiration for his upcoming novel, and one of the places he decided to search was the forest. Since it was so close to his house, he could wander the woods for hours a day, any time he liked, and that was what he did.

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It was on one particular evening in late October that he encountered the witch.

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On this particular day, he had ventured deeper into the forest than ever before. The trees and the land around him were foreign, and that thought excited him. He was flooded with ideas for his book, when he encountered an abandoned, small wooden shack, partially obscured by a wall of untamed bushes and vines.​​

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The writer walked around the shack to see if he could find a way in, and quickly found a small door, seemingly uniquely made for someone who was a foot shorter than him. He noted that there were several symbols carved into the wood, but he was unable to decipher any.

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He cautiously nudged the door open, and the last light of the setting sun flooded the room, exposing the table and chair against the back wall, and the bed next to a metal fireplace. On the table was a leather-bound book.

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Inside the book, the writer found pages upon pages of more symbols, which looked similar to those scratched onto the door. Around the symbols were annotations in a language that the writer could not understand. He kept turning the pages, until their contents suddenly took a dramatic shift.

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The symbols were replaced with detailed drawings of monsters. Most were so alien to the writer that he could not even begin to try to describe them, but a few stood out to him, one such monster being a bear-like entity with black flesh and a bear skull over its head.

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There was a snap of a twig outside.

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The writer slammed the book shut and continued to listen. He stood deathly still, not even to breathe. He realised his heart was racing.

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Shuffling through the undergrowth, the writer could hear someone dragging something along the ground towards the cabin. The footsteps stopped for a moment, before continuing again.

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The writer assumed they had noticed the open door of the shack.

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He searched for a place to hide, but the room was devoid of suitable places.

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A figure entered the shack. She was a woman, a pretty woman with dark hair and shimmering emerald eyes that glared at the writer through the darkness. The woman was dressed in a black cloak with a gold trim around the wrists and neck, and the woman had the hood of the cloak over her head.

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The writer glanced behind her and realised she was dragging the body of another woman.

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The woman stared at the writer for a while, before her mouth suddenly grew unnaturally wide and she charged at him, dropping the other woman as she made her move. The writer pushed past her and made for the door of the shack, but an unseen force slammed it shut.

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My dad always ended the story there, pronouncing that "that's why you should never go into the forest alone" before bidding me goodnight and leaving my bedroom. Part of me did not believe a word of the story, but another part of me wanted to find the witch.

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And that was what I decided to do.

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It was easy to find the forest from the story, that part had been definitively based on something real, but the challenge was finding the witch's shack. I began my search in the early hours of the morning, and spent hours picking random directions and walking for what felt like hundreds of miles, but finally a small wooden structure caught my eye, peeking out from amidst a wall of giant shrubbery.

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It was reaching the later hours of the afternoon, and the sky burned orange with the sunset, only exposing a slim fraction of the shack, but I spotted it nonetheless. It was exactly how I had imagined it from my dad's story.

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I began to tentatively approach the shack, but that was when I heard someone moving around amongst the trees. I threw myself down onto the ground in a nearby ditch, and peered over a nearby log. I watched in awe as the woman from the story, with dark hair and emerald eyes, emerged from the forest, walking towards the shack. She was not dragging anything with her.

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The woman paused when she reached the doorway of the shack, before her head snapped to face me.

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I wasted no time. I immediately clambered to my feet and sprinted as fast as I could away from the shack. I could not hear anyone pursuing me, but I had never been so afraid.

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I made it to the edge of the forest, arriving on a road not far from my house. I paused for a moment to check my surroundings for any sign of danger, before I continued my sprint home.

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I have not returned to the shack since. It has been three years, now, but I remember that day like it was yesterday. My dad had not been joking or just trying to scare me when he told me to stay away from the forest.

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There was real danger there, and I have no intention to face it again.