The Boy in the Woods

by Alexandra Hill

In a small village far away was an urban legend. There was a boy that had gone missing in the haunted woods hundreds of years ago, and the village people never dared to step into those woods. It all started before the woods were presumed to be haunted. Children would run in the field in front of the forest, gather the wildflowers, and chase butterflies. There was one boy, however, that was fond of the forest and wanted to enter it. The village people didn’t mind it, as long the child returned home before dark.

He entered the forest and saw a ton of beautiful flowers and varieties of trees. As he got deeper, he felt a strange sensation. Nature was strange to him, but he was interested in it. He headed back to the village and brought home some of the flowers that he found within the forest.

As days went by, he would go to the forest every day to explore more and more of it. He loved seeing all the animals and exploring the new scents. However, one day, he got lost in the woods, and no matter where we walked, he couldn’t get out of the forest. It was as if the forest didn’t want him to leave. He began to get scared and cried, falling to his knees as he sobbed.

Meanwhile, the villagers began to worry when the little boy didn’t come back from the forest. They went into the forest and searched as far as they could before dark. Once it went dark, they pronounced him missing or dead. The search party went over to his home and told his parents the terrible news. The parents were devastated and sobbed.

The boy in the forest was starting to calm down and turned around to see a dark figure looking at him from behind a tree. Curious, the boy went closer only to be impaled by the figure going into the boy’s body and soul. The boy then looked at his hands and began to laugh hysterically. He wasn’t the same boy

anymore.

In the present, the village has grown larger, and the legend has stayed alive. No one ever steps foot into the forest. Whenever a child wants to go near, the elders tell the story about the boy that went into that forest and never came back. Some nights, though, some kids claim to have dreams of the forest. In their dreams, they see the boy laughing menacingly with blood flowing out of his eye sockets before they gouge their own eyes out. Right before the boy does, though, the children all wake up.

One kid, however, never woke up. The next morning the family went to wake their son up, only to see that he no longer had his eyes and had a scar on his arms, saying, “I am always watching.”