Balladeer’s Blog presents another neglected American horror legend for Halloween Month.
THE SOUL GEM OF THE WHITE MOUNTAINS
On the former peak of Mount Monroe in New Hampshire’s White Mountains there used to glow a large light as if from a gigantic ruby or carbuncle. The Native Americans claimed it was a huge stone that fell from the sky one night in the far-distant past. They called it the Soul Gem in their language and they believed it ate the souls of anyone who touched it.
No one within living memory had survived an attempt to reach the Soul Gem. Over generations multiple expeditions were mounted but all ended in horror. Stories spread that the souls captured by the gem knew new lives as the living trees which at one time were said to grow there.
Those living trees had living branches which would seize passersby like tentacles and the mouth-like knots in the tree would open wide to devour them. These trees bore fruits ripe with blood and their leaves smelled of sweat and urine. (In the next tale I’ll relate the legend about the lumberjacks who cleared away the trees.)
Quicksand pits were said to prey on foolhardy adventurers all year long, even when the ground should have been frozen solid. Flowers with eyes were another bizarre feature of the unholy topography of the trail to the Soul Gem.
Sudden snows would strike in summer, accumulating so quickly that those daring the heights would suffocate as the snow piled up higher than their heads. Immediate melting would wash their corpses down the mountain in small flash-floods.
Clouds near the peak would shower down boiling rain-drops as blood red as the Soul Gem itself, and those rains would eat away at the bodies of mountain-climbers like acid.
At one point in the 1800s the peak which bore the Soul Gem shook and collapsed, rolling all the way down into one of the Lakes of the Clouds, from which the Soul Gem’s red light would sometimes fill the night sky for years after. The gem supposedly fed on the souls of anyone who drowned in the small lake.
No more grisly deaths resulted from expeditions up to the new, slightly lower, peak of Mount Monroe and all traces of supernatural activity faded away. Some speculate that the Soul Gem was really a form of meteorite containing unearthly forces that spawned all the horrors.
One thing is certain – to this day the trails along Mount Monroe contain plant life found nearly nowhere else on the entire planet. Hikers are even prevented from traveling in some areas to preserve the rare – possibly extraterrestrial – vegetation.
FOR MORE HALLOWEEN ITEMS CLICK HERE: https://glitternight.com/category/halloween-season/
© Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
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