The Unexplained: Stairs in the Woods

*The Unexplained is a weekly series documenting strange and unusual phenomenon that inspire my writing.

You are on a hike through the woods.  This isn’t the first time you walked through this forest.  Being in nature brings you peace and every morning you go for a five-mile hike along the various trails through the woodland.  This time you take one of the three main paths, and after the first couple miles you get an unexplained sense of dread.  You slow down and check your surroundings.  Teen feet away from the path to your left you see an immaculately kept staircase randomly in the forest.  You cautiously approach it. With each step your heart beats just a little bit harder.   You see the staircase clearly, but your mind had difficulty processing it.  You cannot believe that something like this could be here, especially since you have walked these woods before.  You pass it off as a building that has rotten away and only the stairs remain.  It is an oddity, but nothing paranormal.  When you try to return and show your friend the staircase it is gone.

This is similar to what some people claimed to have experienced.  Some people claimed to have climbed them and have strange feelings come over them.  The more extreme stories claim they experience time slips after ascending one of these staircases.  Personal accounts range from benign and uneventful to extreme.  There are also photos of these alleged random staircases that are found on the internet, particularly on Reddit.

One story person’s story featured on the “Let’s Read” YouTube channel, claims to have found and climbed one of these staircases and ended up transported back in time.  To his amazement he ended up near the house he owned, but when he went inside something was off.  The storyteller claims the things inside were not his and there was a different family living there. The homeowner confronted him, mistaking him for a robber before the storyteller fled.  He claims at the end of his tale that the man was the same one who sold him the home, only younger.  In order to return to his own time, the writer said he had to ascend the staircase again.  He swears it to be true whether or not other people’s tales are true.

What are these staircases?  Are they made up stories that accompany ordinary stairs in the woods?  Is there an otherworldly component to them?  Finding random stairs that lead to nowhere would be off-putting, no matter what their origin.

According to the first person known to write about this phenomenon, he is a park ranger and was told coming across random staircases was common.  As skeptics have rightly pointed out, the origin for staircase in the woods phenomenon is in a section of Reddit for fictional stories.  However, the legend has expanded to folks seemingly wholeheartedly believing they came across real staircases with paranormal connections.

What do you think of it?  Fact or fiction it is an interesting and inspiring phenomenon, nonetheless.  Have you saw random stairs that lead to nowhere in the woods?

 

References:

https://www.mamamia.com.au/abandoned-staircases-in-national-forests/

https://slappedham.com/stairs-woods-phenomenon/