Shhh, don't wake the forest

Let me tell you a little story. And for you to fully understand it I need to say two things first, I am working completely alone outside of the office hours and, I use to love to watch horror movies. By love I mean that Halloweens, Screams, Elm Streets and Ring use to be my favorite movies. The more frights I got watching, the better.

That said, this happened couple of years ago. I was at work, shifting gas bottles, the big ones which are taller than me. It was dark and I saw something in the corner of my eyes. Naturally, I jumped ten feet in to the air while turning my head to see better. There it was, standing perfectly still, exactly where I had left it mere minutes ago, one of the gas bottles. This was when I realized that with my vivid imagination it would be better if I stopped watching scary movies. I had given my self several frights during the years but being scared to death by immobile object which I should have known being there was the tip of the iceberg so to speak. Bye bye horror.

This incident of mine came in to conversation one day not so far ago when speaking of movies and one co-worker asked if I had visited the ghost village in Alavieska. Which I haven’t. Of course I got intrigued by it.

The village is built in the middle of the forest and is completely uninhabited. Former farmer made it in span of three decades. He had to stop working at the farm so he started to fill his time with constructing buildings at the piece of family owned land.
He wanted to keep the forest mostly untouched so he brought the woods out side of the village. You just got to admire the work and effort he put in making this ghost town. There is church with working organ, café, several places to roast something over fire and almost all of the buildings have its own fireplace, they are probably still in working order. And of course in Finnish fashion there is sauna.

Defying my somewhat skittish nature I braved in to the ghost village. And even tried to amplify the mood by playing horror movie theme songs but my companion said that it wasn’t working, Halloween went already (John Carpenters/ Halloween) and it wasn’t likely to get attacked by a shark in the Finnish woods (Jaws). But the grey weather was appropriate.

We set to explore our surroundings. The village was bigger and smaller than I expected it to be. There was more buildings but they were smaller. One thing was just what I thought, the surroundings were eerily quiet. And there the horror ended I am afraid. My spouse who was with me said that the most terrifying thing was the lack of spiders and ants which usually are galore in the woods. That we can explain with up coming winter though.

With the dry ice I brought with me I tried to get fog in to the photos. I quicky discovered that it was too windy for that. I would have needed to put a mountain of dry ice to get fog thick enough to be seen in the pictures. And then there would be white mountain visible in the photo and that looks just cold, not spooky so I opted to do without the special effects. Which was fun too.

If it would situated a bit closer I would be sorely tempted to visit it at night. Just with my flash light..