Officially the woods have Totally Normal Local Wildlife - Exactly What You'd Expect To Find, Especially If You Were Looking For Typical British Countryside Creatures. Unofficially it was a panther, it was a demon shaped like a dog, it was the ghostly remains of plague victims all tangled together like they were still stuck in a plague pit.
Depended on who you asked.
Most folks went with the panther theory, the one that made the most sense and explained why the corpses of deer, cats and dogs were found strung up in the trees sometimes. Allegedly there'd been pawprints to further back this up but nobody's willing to say if they're panter-prints, if they have photos or share them if they do.
The older folk prefer to talk about the old demon dog and how the claw marks it left on the old church in Ash Fettlethrop still smell sulphuric. They say it came, because of course it did, on a stormy night when the entire congregation was caught up in frantic prayers of safety from the invaders when all the candles went out, the demon dog damn near broke the doors in half and killed an altar boy on the way out as it ran for the woods.
My favourite story, however, is the plague-pit ghosts. When the council were building houses nearby, they ended up uncovering what they thought were eight separate burial sites... only to dig deeper and find out they were all interconnected into the largest mass grave the country's ever known. Before that discovery, people had reported seeing weird groups gathering about the place, coughing and collapsing but they were "probably drunk" or something. The fact that they leave a trail of pus behind them is apparently just another natural phenomenon.
Depended on who you asked.
Most folks went with the panther theory, the one that made the most sense and explained why the corpses of deer, cats and dogs were found strung up in the trees sometimes. Allegedly there'd been pawprints to further back this up but nobody's willing to say if they're panter-prints, if they have photos or share them if they do.
The older folk prefer to talk about the old demon dog and how the claw marks it left on the old church in Ash Fettlethrop still smell sulphuric. They say it came, because of course it did, on a stormy night when the entire congregation was caught up in frantic prayers of safety from the invaders when all the candles went out, the demon dog damn near broke the doors in half and killed an altar boy on the way out as it ran for the woods.
My favourite story, however, is the plague-pit ghosts. When the council were building houses nearby, they ended up uncovering what they thought were eight separate burial sites... only to dig deeper and find out they were all interconnected into the largest mass grave the country's ever known. Before that discovery, people had reported seeing weird groups gathering about the place, coughing and collapsing but they were "probably drunk" or something. The fact that they leave a trail of pus behind them is apparently just another natural phenomenon.
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