It finally happened: for the first time since I started this project, I've drawn a complete blank.
The Haunted Forest is a tale of temptation and trickery in the gothic style, set in a dark forest in Normandy. A virtuous widower and his three children live on the edge of an "extensive, dark, and almost trackless" forest. One day the father is tricked by a distress call into entering the heart of the forest, where he nearly falls prey to dark powers. He prevails against them, but will his children be as lucky?
Despite its French setting, "The Haunted Forest" feels quite German. Like the two German tales, "The Magic Dice" and "Der Freischutz," the story concerns avarice and an infernal bargain. Like the probably German-originated "The Boarwolf," it also features a lover who isn't quite what she seems. And like those three tales, it's probably based on old folk legends, albeit layered with a generous dose of pious moralizing (the moralizing feels more Victorian English than German to me, to be honest).
It's a pretty good tale, I think. And I can't find a thing about it. Nothing shows up on internet searches except its appearances in Tales of Terror and Evening Tales for the Winter. I can't even find a reprint of it in a literary digest.
So, since I can't tell you about it, I transcribed it instead. The first link in this post goes to my clean PDF transcription of the story. I've somewhat modernized the paragraphing, to make it more readable.
Enjoy.
And with this post, I've wrapped up Volume Two of Evening Tales for the Winter.
Volume Three is quite a different beast from the first two; none of the stories appear to be supernatural, or very interesting. I'll be covering those stories, but not as in-depth as I have the tales from the first two volumes. Stay tuned.