The Trail of Terror

***image1***If spirits are actually the personalities of those who once lived and refused to cross over to the other side at the moment of death, then wouldn’t these spirits reflect the turmoil of that former life? And if hauntings are the residual effects of trauma being imprinted on the atmosphere of a location, then wouldn’t places where terror and insanity were commonplace be especially prone to these hauntings?
Rumor has it, the violent escape from the old asylum, now Bldg. 2078 on Vogelweh, was a well known event that many have not forgotten.

Those who dare, can enter the haunted woods from 6 to 11 p.m. Sunday and Monday and from 6 to 10 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday. The cost is $5 per person and children 14 years and younger must be accompanied by an adult. A special kids area will also be set up for children too young for the trail. Entrance costs $2 per child. All proceeds from the haunted woods goes toward the Combined Federal Campaign.

The building on Vogelweh that houses the haunted woods had long been used as an institution for the mentally and criminally insane. The outcasts, the misfits and the strange were picked up from various parts of the countryside and committed to the asylum to be experimented upon with new and inhumane methods.

The most violent of the committed was Sven the Buzz-Saw, a lumberjack living in the German countryside known to be obsessed with the chainsaw and using it as a tool in his many violent crimes. Notoriously well known was a pair of brothers, Dieter and Schmitz, who spent their entire lives together in the hills and were known to have a fondness for the consumption of live human flesh and brains.

Many of the others were just as demented, perverse and socially challenged, and many believed that these men deserved to be locked up.
But things went horrible one late, foggy October night when the moon was full. A new treatment was set in place to solve the “inmate problem” – shock therapy. The prisoners organized and escaped the asylum, killing nearly every guard in their path. Breaking through the barbed wire fencing that surrounded the asylum, they fled to the woods surrounding the building where they were chased on horseback.

 However, what happened after that was unknown. Perhaps the woods took them all, but the prisoners and the asylum workers were never found. Almost immediately, the institution was shut down and the story covered up in the local newspapers.

The building is now being used for a much different purpose, but the bars on the windows and the barbed wire on the fence still remain. One thing is for sure, every October, strange things happen in the woods surrounding the complex. The escape happened exactly 50 years ago, and this October seems to have the most dreadful reports coming in of any year before. One worker reported the sound of horses galloping and the flickering of tiny fires out in the woods. Another reported the distant sound of a chainsaw going off and screams. Others have heard barking of many dogs and the dragging of heavy iron chains.

It is said that the woods are cursed and haunted. Are the spirits of the old asylum prisoners still out there? What of the asylum workers who chased after them? Do they still wander the woods as well?

Many believe that they are all cursed to remain in those woods until the end of time. Recently, many explorers have come to the woods to find out the mystery behind the madness and travel the trail of terror reported to be there. For  more information on the haunted woods, visit www.fearthe426.com.
(Story courtesy of the 426th Network Warfare Squadron)