Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-4893169-20150414041052/@comment-4849011-20150418132117

For those of you who don't know what we're talking about, here's a short article from page 119 of a book I got for Christmas a couple years ago, ''Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Unbelievable True Stories'' (2012, Ripley Publishing).

''Japan's suicide forest

When Seicho Matsumoto wrote his 1950s novel Kuroi Kaiju (Black Sea of Trees), where two characters committed suicide in the Aokigahara Forest at the foot of Mount Fuji, he started an unfortunate trend. Since then over 500 people have taken their lives there, prompting signs to be erected in the forest bearing messages like "Life is a precious thing! Please reconsider!"''

Like I said, creepy stuff. I thought, "A lot of the people who commit suicide there probably think, 'Oh, my death will be romantic and poetic just like in the book, and that's how people will talk about me after I'm gone!'" In reality people will think, "Oh, someone else killed themselves in that forest," and turn to the sports section. Whatever their thoughts, it's a tragedy.

You offered that it might be cursed. That brings up a question. If places can be cursed, can they become cursed through the actions of people? My aunt has taken trips to Europe, and one of them involved a visit to one of the cities which housed a death camp during the Holocaust. My aunt reported, "You could just feel an air of oppression." She later asked a member of our church, who had also been there, about it and he replied that he felt the same way. Whether or not you believe in curses or the supernatural, I think a lot of us, at one time or another, have been somewhere and things just didn't feel right.