{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","title":"The Finnish Forest Hides People","description":"NIGHT TWO — FINLAND\n\nNight two: Finland has a word for a person who isn't lost, isn't taken, and cannot be found — while standing right in front of you.\n\nNight two of Mørketid is out. Finland.\n\nMetsänpeitto\n\nIt translates as \"the forest cover,\" and it describes something Finns believed happened often enough that the language needed a word for it.\n\nA person walks into the forest they've known their whole life. They don't come back. The village searches properly — small community, everyone knows the ground, they go out in a line and call.\n\nAnd the belief isn't that the person wandered off. The belief is that they are still there. Six feet away. Possibly standing directly in front of the search line. And the forest has put something over them.\n\nHere's the part I had to stop reading and walk away from: in the collected accounts, from people who said it had happened to them, the person under the cover is awake the whole time. They can hear the search party. Some of them describe watching people walk past. They can't be seen, can't be heard, and can't make their legs carry them toward the voices.\n\nNo creature. Nobody arrives. Nothing hurts you. You are simply removed from the category of things that can be found.\n\nAnd then there's the cure....\n\nTurn your coat inside out. Put your shirt on backwards. Take your shoes off and swap them onto the wrong feet.\n\nThat's it. That was the remedy, believed all across Finland and into Karelia and Estonia. And it makes an awful sense — if the forest has taken the shape of you and put a lid over it, stop being that shape.\n\nBut picture actually doing it. A grown adult in failing light who has been shouting for three hours and has stopped shouting, sitting down on the pine needles and very carefully swapping their shoes over, because it is the only thing left in the world that they can try.\n\nThat's the cover art for this episode, by the way. Just the boots.\n\nThe other half...\n\nThe Lemminkäinen section is the saddest thing I've written for this show. His mother rakes the black river of the underworld until she has all eight pieces of him, sews him back together, wakes him — and he stretches and says he's been asleep a long time and slept well.\n\nHe never knew. She never told him.\n\nNext Episode...\n\nNorway. An old woman walking up a valley path carrying either a rake or a broom, and everything depends on which.\n\nThe candle stays lit. 🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️","author_name":"Stories Fables Ghostly Tales","author_url":"https://audioboom.com/channels/4909061-stories-fables-ghostly-tales","provider_name":"Audioboom","provider_url":"https://audioboom.com","width":480,"height":95,"thumbnail_url":"https://audioboom.com/i/43823636/600x600/c","thumbnail_width":600,"thumbnail_height":600,"html":""}