Mysterious Things in the Woods; Mysterious disappearances, missing people; sometimes found... What really is out there in the woods? ....Sometimes the scariest thing is evidence we can plainly see, but can’t completely understand... Mysterious deaths in a forest said to be controlled by Satanists; Mountain climbers found inexplicably mutilated; large numbers of college aged men found dead in creeks; a hiker walks over the top of a hill in front of the rest of the hiking party and has vanished by the time they crest the hill, moments later; the little boy who says he was taken by a ‘shimmering woman’ in the forest; the village of native Inuits that ‘disappeared’; a child playing near their parents in a forest, disappears in the blink of an eye without making a sound; hunters found dead in strange circumstances; experienced climbers disappearing, their bodies never found; missing bodies found, placed as though deliberately intended to be found. No screams for help, no signs of the missing person; vanished into thin air. No trails or tracks left, no clothing found, no smoke, no shelters, no clues...These and many other mysterious incidents in rural locations in America, Canada, Australia, England and indeed worldwide, have sparked debate by many into what could possibly be the cause. There are many theories....and with these theories comes the visceral, primal fear that comes from the thought that we humans may be victim to a predator, that in the blink of an eye, outsmarts us very easily. Stalked as prey and snatched without warning... Never to be seen again. Or found, in the most horrible of circumstances...
Steph Young began writing with the pen name Stephen Young, until she was asked to appear on National Radio show 'Coast to Coast AM'. Quickly, she had to explain she was a female! She had never expected anyone to read her books, let alone be asked on a national radio show ( which happened to be her favourite one) Since then she has been a regular guest on many podcasts and radio shows of the paranormal and unexplained. She has a website now too: https://www.stephyoungauthor.com/ And her own podcasts, called Masquerade podcast with steph young, on iTunes or exclusive member's only episodes on: https://www.patreon.com/stephyoungpod...
Steph is an independent Researcher addicted to researching all Paranormal, Supernatural, Esoteric & Enigmatic Unexplained Mysteries, Unexplained Disappearances, the dark history of Lore and Monstrous Creatures of the Unknown. Steph also particularly likes to write about Creepy things in the Woods, Strange encounters in the woods, & Scary things in the woods.....her books include Lore and Folklore and Mythology - but don't let that fool you...many of the readers who contact Steph now to tell them of their own strange encounters with the Unknown provide ample evidence that perhaps these creatures and monsters from our darkest nightmares, seem to well and truly exist...Lore becomes reality and as they say, the truth is often far scarier than fiction or folklore. As for the many cases of the Unexplained Disappearances that Steph investigates in her books, these Unsolved disappearances are all too real - but they often have very baffling circumstances and very cryptic clues.
Each book Steph writes seems to lead to further questions & searches for answers as the mysteries inevitably deepen & develop into ever more complex riddles in the spectrum of the Unknown.
Conspiracies, hidden secrets, the truth from the Lore, the connections between the paranormal and the missing, these are just some of the enigma's Steph investigates to find the new, the unexpected, and the surprising possibilities that might just tie all of this together....
If you have had a Creepy encounter, i would love to hear from you, & would be very interested in your experience. https://www.stephyoungauthor.com/ my email is; Stephenyoungauthor@hotmail.com
Steph Young's books also cover the case of 'the Smiley Face Killers'; true stories of scores of mysteries & unexplained abductions & drownings of college-age men across the United States, Canada, and England's 'The Pusher', investigating these deaths and the cryptic clues left behind and who may be behind these abductions and drowning deaths.
A frightening set of bizarre, unexplainable occurrences
I think this book best serves as a very good, entry-level guide into paranormal disappearance stories. There are many things to highlight and return to, and to research later. It's very good for late-night reading, and describes enough horror to make you jump at the very slightest noise. It covers the whole gamut of the paranormal, from UFO's to inter-dimensional shape shifters to Bigfoot.
This is a great book for anyone that likes the Missing 411 type books. It has numerous stories about real disappearances in remote places such as national parks, where people often seem to just disappear off the face of the earth.
Stephen Young has put together a mystery that is beautifully told, and intertwined to create a marvelous mystery. If I were to explain this further, it would definitely be a spoiler. The characters - all interesting - are developed slowly and fully. This is a page-turner, and I've been up until 3 AM for the last two nights to read how it "turns out." I wholeheartedly recommend Mysterious Things in the Woods; Mysterious disappearances, Mi... by Stephen Young Mysterious Things in the Woods and I'll be looking for and at more of young's books
Young packs a lot of interesting incidents into a very short book, including a few I had never heard of. It's a concise summary of weird unexplained incidents. As another reviewer said, it's a good source of ideas for creepy stories!
Unfortunately, that's about all that's good about this book. It's very poorly written, as though there were no proofreading or editing whatsoever. There are loads of misspellings, random unrelated remarks, and unneeded repetition. Not a good book. Not at all.
Each of us has at least one guilty indulgence, something we really like, though we know we shouldn’t. I’m not talking about actual sins, just sins against good taste: a trashy novel or a wonderfully stupid TV show that we just can’t get enough of. I have several of these, and “Mysterious Things in the Woods” is the latest in the collection.
As the title suggests, this is an (allegedly factual) reporting of bizarre and creepy occurrences in woodlands throughout the world: sudden vanishings, grisly murders, mutilated carcasses, hairy wild men, radioactive shadows, robot duplicates of grandma, and the like.
No, I’m not exaggerating. Each of those is an actual example from the book.
I love it.
But the book, judged from the perspective of the craft of book writing, is bad. The editing is simply atrocious. Let me give you a half-dozen examples.
Many of the blunders are likely the work of a very slipshod use of autocorrect as a substitute for a good proof-reading. Late in the book, the author makes a series of hilarious mistakes like substituting “cryptozoologist” with “cryptologist” and “cryptid” with “cystoid.” The very next chapter, the author proves that he has actually heard of the term “cryptozoology” before and uses it correctly, so I must assume it was an overzealous use of the spellcheck. Same goes for when he mentions that many attacks have occurred “where bears do not habituate [sic]“. And no one involved with the book has any idea how to spell Dyatlov.
But there’s more than just sloppy editing: the storytelling itself gets a little delirious in places. The book starts out with the fascinatingly creepy topic of the Clapham Woods in Sussex, England. By the very next chapter, the author starts referring to it, inexplicably, as the “Crawley Woods.” When talking about the various disappearances in Vermont’s “Bennington Triangle”, the author repeatedly confuses the names and sexes of the victims, eventually conflating Middie Rivers, a 74 year old man, with Frieda Langer, a 53 year old woman, and turning his name in to “Maddie”.
And throughout, the author sprinkles in enticing stories without bothering to explain any of the salient details, as if he forgot that you were reading this book because you hadn’t heard of this stuff before. For instance, he talks about : “The ‘Presque Incident’ of 1966, involved witnesses seeing a strange craft descend into a wooded area” and disgorging Bigfeet. I would very much like to know where this occurred (Presque Isle near Erie, Pennsylvania, perhaps?) and the larger context, but the author didn’t bother to mention. The author is likewise inclined to go off on inexplicable tangents, such as the section on the notorious secret underground base in Dulce, New Mexico. Not only does this have little to do with the woods, but after going on for several pages about the horrific experiments, reptile-men, and human/alien hybrids kept captive here, he tosses in a paragraph about a Swedish farmer-cum-prophet who says that the aliens told him no such bases exist. Oh, well, OK then!
So why do I love this book? To be sure, if my primary interest in it were as a scholarly investigation, I would be disappointed. But, while I don’t dismiss out of hand the possibility that these stories are true and that there is some unconventional, if not paranormal, phenomena involved, my interest in the book was that it would provide ample fodder for fiction. It delivers those in spades.
Several of the stories, such as the Clapham Wood Mystery and the Bennington Triangle, I was familiar with before, but even to these it introduces a few intriguing wrinkles (such as that radioactive shadow) that I was unaware of. The chapter on the Smiley Face Murders was chilling and entirely new to me, likewise the section on the Guarapiranga human mutilations in Brazil. In the same vein as Jacques Vallee, the author delivers some surprising information on the long history of mysterious animal mutilations (just like ‘UFO’ and hairy hominid sightings, they go back deep in time). There is a Shaver-esque tale of a young boy who disappeared in the woods and, after being safely recovered, reported that he had been taken by an evil robot duplicate of his own grandmother deep into a cave near Mt. Shasta. There is a shockingly up to date reference to a May 2014 article in the Daily Mail about the discovery of a 7 foot dog skeleton that may be the infamous “Black Shuck.” And there is this dandy: "Higdon claimed that as he pulled the trigger on his rifle, the bullet shot in slow motion, falling into the snow about fifty feet away. Going to retrieve the bullet, he found it strangely mangled. This jacket was examined by a Dr. Walter Walker, a Consultant in Metallurgy, who could only say that it must have struck something incredibly hard and with great force to be in the state it was. As Higdon retrieved the bullet, he claimed he was overcome by a strange sensation throughout his body, and to his utter astonishment, came face to face with a humanoid being, over 6 feet tall in a black jumpsuit outfit. He said that the being spoke to him, saying that if he took the pill he offered, he would not feel hungry for four days. Higdon duly swallowed the pill."
So this book is clearly terrific in terms of providing story fertilizer for SF, paranormal, or horror fiction, not to mention campfire ghost stories. My brain is already marinating in its flavorful offerings. At $2.99, it’s worth buying for your Kindle.
The book itself is a brisk read. It is simply written and facts and stories are set out but not explored in depth. I like the anecdotes and the interview clips and it encouraged me to Google research more into the stories laid out. I found myself wishing the book was denser and meatier.
I recommend it however ! I'm now down the rabbit hole of reading about mysterious disappearances and cant wait to read the author's other books.
This is a book that will have you thinking twice before taking that leisurely stroll through the woods. It's a motley assortment of the bizarre and downright unbelievable; winged beasts kidnapping the unsuspecting, aliens, dimensional portals - Stephen Young has got it all going on between each and every page.
Generally, the book was written extremely well, and he's done his homework on this profound subject rather concisely, which keeps the reader interested, never wanting to put the book down, from the beginning to the 'thought provoking' end.
If you really want to read this book, please, keep the lights on, and share it with a friend...
This book was a mish mash of news stories everyone has read about too much. Like the story of the UFO abductee who had a movie made about him. This book was just, ok. Too bad, the author's other book was much better, Something in the Woods is Taking People.
That's his is a very interesting book, and short in length. Some of stories I haven't d not heard before, but the dialogue of what does it all mean has been said in other books..many of stories I did read about in other books.h still if you love this topic, the on this is fun to read with the only complaint then being it is to short.
I enjoyed reading this book. The disappearance of so many young men in the woods mixed with all the different creatures and beings that people have seen makes me a little Leary of even going outside!
A poorly edited dog's breakfast of all the usual paranormal tropes (slightly heavy on the Satanism) that ultimately peters out as the author loses interest.
This is an odd little book that blathers on for quite a while without saying anything. Not sure why I read it, actually. I guess it just wasn't for me.
I give this a three star review because approximately 50% of this amazing book is copies of sections of other books written by this author. That's an excessive amount of "previews" IMHO. However, the contents make this book both compelling and strange: hundreds of unexplained disappearances, perhaps hundreds or thousand each year. He reports that some observers believe there is some sort of predator, world-wide, preying on human beings...
RECOMMENDED, WITH CAVEATS: DISTURBING IDEAS, UNEXPLAINED ACTIVITIES