The Wood Nymph

I wrote a ghost novel called Dredging the Choptank, a combination of Dorchester County folklore mixed with my personal spectral experience and my friends’ personal phantom experience.

This past May, my videographer Anthony, three actors, my buddy Raine and I traveled east to the Green Briar Swamp by Blackwater Wildlife Refuge in the belly of Dorchester County to film the book’s trailer.  The Native American Indians call the Green Briar Swamp a thin place or an area where the curtain between us and the spiritual world is flimsy.  Dogs don’t go in there.  People disappear there, their footprints just stop.  Much of the county’s ghost folklore stems from that tangled web of briar and marsh.  Anthony first thought that we could film anywhere but I insisted that we film somewhere in Dorchester where the water table rises up to your ankles.  That water soaks the stories of the county and its energy is palpable.  We drove past Cambridge and off a country road onto a weeded track leading through the woods.  The world fell away and flocks of dragonflies and mosquitoes followed us.  We stopped by an emerald green pond. When Anthony did the sound check, the wind ruffled my skirts.  The sense of being watched was so intense that we finished filming in less than two hours.  Hornets circled us.  Poison ivy grew hip high.  Quicksand pockets bubbled.  Something wiggled in the murk of the pond water. 

Anthony got good footage, including some shots of the forest floor.  In the video, something in the wind moves the vegetation and makes it seem alive.  Branches and marsh grass seem to reach for me.  After viewing the first cut, Raine suggested that Anthony layer some footage over a section where her husband Dana was pretending to be dead with fake blood dripping out of his mouth.  So Anthony layered the forest floor footage over Dana and something amazing happened.  In that second version not only was Dana mottled with the floor texture but a tiny perfectly beautiful head of what seems to be a woman floated right next to his right ear.  She seems to be listening with her pixie head tipped.  She looks porcelain.  She looks like a doll.  When I first saw her, I freaked out and didn’t want to use my home pc for a while.  I didn’t want to watch the trailer again but I showed it to Raine, Dana and Dave.  I told Anthony.  He’s surprised as I am.

I’m loading the trailer onto YouTube this week.  Look in the video for the wood creature who is grinning at Dana.   My friend Korinne thinks that the nymph is looking at him and thinking:  yum, food.

I took this photograph of Dana right before Anthony filmed him.

When the trailer is uploaded, I'll add a link.