Climbing the Stairs in the Forest
But first, a book trailer...
Somewhere out in the woods, they stand alone, a set of stairs, usually stone. Some are slightly weathered, some look as though they were built yesterday. They lead up... into the middle of the air, no destination in sight, but walking up them may affect you. It could lead you to an unusual dimension. Or it could invite something to follow you down.
I first encountered the Internet legend known as the Staircase in the Woods, or the Staircase in the Forest through the Youtube creepy story community, ie. young folks reading true creepy stories or creepypastas (nothing to do with scary Italian noodles, but rather... the Internet's answer to campfire scary stories, shared copy-paste - or copy-pasta - style, originally through emails, now through forums and even wiki pages). One involving a park ranger discovering the Stairs while on a rescue mission grabbed my attention and wouldn't let go. I live a town over from a Massachusetts State Forest, one I've hiked in with friends and with my dad, and naturally, my vivid imagination imagined one of these eerie staircases lurking in the shadows under the trees there.
I hope this doesn't take some of the mystery out of the legend, but I've wondered if it might have its roots, or one strand of said roots in reality, or at least a very strange reality. In a public forest/nature reserve in Chesterfield, New Hampshire stand the ruins of what the locals call Madame Sherri's Castle , the home of a fascinating woman who'd moved up from New York City back in the Jazz Age. After she had to move out of the house once she'd grown too old to live in it alone, it allegedly burned a day or two following her departure (or so the story goes).
Then last spring, I discovered a call for submissions to an anthology inspired by just this Internet legend. Here was my chance to take a stab at a story that had intrigued me - and this time, I'd put a Weird Fiction twist on the legend: perhaps the stairs served as a secondary conduit for the King in Yellow? Perhaps the manifestation of the stairs had everything to do with someone performing The Play of the King in Yellow. Then the male protag of "The Witch Who Blew In On the Storm" in One Night in Salem turned up in this new tale, fitting, as he's a news photographer and thus a great seeker of mysteries. I won't say this story wrote itself, but it flowed from my mind to the pencil to the page pretty quickly. If I remember rightly, I had it finished and submitted shortly before I wended my way to NecronomiCon Providence.
It wasn't until the end if January, when I'd almost given up hope on this (I'd even considered withdrawing it to put it into a chapbook of KiY stories that's been tickling at the back of my mind) that I heard back on the fate of this tale, and that it had been accepted into this ambitious project. Now, at last, my story "Grand Staircase to the Yellow Court", is in print alongside thirty-three authors' takes on this Internet myth. You can find it On Amazon, where it hit #1 in Horror Anthologies , and even appeared in the Kindle Store's featured Horror selections! My third time getting into the top ten on Amazon and the first time I've seen a book with one of my stories rank this high!
Somewhere out in the woods, they stand alone, a set of stairs, usually stone. Some are slightly weathered, some look as though they were built yesterday. They lead up... into the middle of the air, no destination in sight, but walking up them may affect you. It could lead you to an unusual dimension. Or it could invite something to follow you down.
I first encountered the Internet legend known as the Staircase in the Woods, or the Staircase in the Forest through the Youtube creepy story community, ie. young folks reading true creepy stories or creepypastas (nothing to do with scary Italian noodles, but rather... the Internet's answer to campfire scary stories, shared copy-paste - or copy-pasta - style, originally through emails, now through forums and even wiki pages). One involving a park ranger discovering the Stairs while on a rescue mission grabbed my attention and wouldn't let go. I live a town over from a Massachusetts State Forest, one I've hiked in with friends and with my dad, and naturally, my vivid imagination imagined one of these eerie staircases lurking in the shadows under the trees there.
I hope this doesn't take some of the mystery out of the legend, but I've wondered if it might have its roots, or one strand of said roots in reality, or at least a very strange reality. In a public forest/nature reserve in Chesterfield, New Hampshire stand the ruins of what the locals call Madame Sherri's Castle , the home of a fascinating woman who'd moved up from New York City back in the Jazz Age. After she had to move out of the house once she'd grown too old to live in it alone, it allegedly burned a day or two following her departure (or so the story goes).
Then last spring, I discovered a call for submissions to an anthology inspired by just this Internet legend. Here was my chance to take a stab at a story that had intrigued me - and this time, I'd put a Weird Fiction twist on the legend: perhaps the stairs served as a secondary conduit for the King in Yellow? Perhaps the manifestation of the stairs had everything to do with someone performing The Play of the King in Yellow. Then the male protag of "The Witch Who Blew In On the Storm" in One Night in Salem turned up in this new tale, fitting, as he's a news photographer and thus a great seeker of mysteries. I won't say this story wrote itself, but it flowed from my mind to the pencil to the page pretty quickly. If I remember rightly, I had it finished and submitted shortly before I wended my way to NecronomiCon Providence.
It wasn't until the end if January, when I'd almost given up hope on this (I'd even considered withdrawing it to put it into a chapbook of KiY stories that's been tickling at the back of my mind) that I heard back on the fate of this tale, and that it had been accepted into this ambitious project. Now, at last, my story "Grand Staircase to the Yellow Court", is in print alongside thirty-three authors' takes on this Internet myth. You can find it On Amazon, where it hit #1 in Horror Anthologies , and even appeared in the Kindle Store's featured Horror selections! My third time getting into the top ten on Amazon and the first time I've seen a book with one of my stories rank this high!
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