I love wilderness areas, and find it deeply comforting to escape to places where the only sounds one can hear aren’t human. But when I began researching the lost Roanoke colony for this story, one of the first things I realized was that, for European settlers who’d maybe never seen a place that wasn’t pruned and tended, the wild trees of North America were not comforting — they were terrifying. (Rated PG.)
You can also listen to an audio version of this story from the horror podcast Pseudopod.