Do Not Go Into The Waldock Woods

No one remembered who first said it.

Only that everyone did.

At Waldock College, warnings moved the way ivy did—slow, persistent, clinging to stone. They were whispered during orientation tours, scribbled in bathroom stalls, passed between upperclassmen with the gravity of inherited sin.

Don’t go into the woods.

The guide would smile when a freshman asked why.

“Oh, just superstition,” they’d say, gesturing vaguely to the dark tree line behind Waldock Hall.

“Local legend.”

But legends didn’t press themselves against the windows at night.

Waldock Hall was the college’s oldest dormitory, a gray-stone monolith built when the campus was little more than a clearing carved from forest. Its back-facing rooms overlooked Waldock Woods—dense, ancient, and unnervingly close. From certain windows, the trees seemed close enough to touch, their branches interlacing like grasping fingers.

Room 314 was one of those rooms.

That was where Eli Mercer lived.

I. The Warning

Eli had been warned three times before midterms.

The first came from his RA, Mara Klein, during move-in week.

“If your room faces the woods,” she said, handing him his keycard, “keep your curtains closed at night. It’s just… better that way.”

Her tone was light, joking, but her hand lingered on the desk a moment too long, fingers tapping as if remembering something unpleasant.

The second warning came from his roommate, Jonah Price, who was prone to jokes but not about this.

“People say Waldock Woods messes with you,” Jonah said one night, lowering his voice despite the empty room. “Like—really messes with you.”

Eli laughed. “It’s a forest, man.”

Jonah didn’t smile back.

The third warning came from the woods themselves.

It was subtle. Easy to dismiss.

On the third night after move-in, Eli woke just before dawn to the sound of digging.

Not construction. Not footsteps.

Digging.

He sat up in bed, heart thudding, listening to the scrape of metal against earth. When he crossed the room and parted the curtains just enough to look out, the sound stopped.

The woods were still.

Too still.

II. The Legend

They told the story during late-night study breaks, when caffeine made courage cheap.

There had been a man.

No one knew his real name anymore. Only that he arrived in the town bordering Waldock College in 1946, under papers that smelled of ink and lies. He had been a Nazi officer—an accountant, some said, others whispered worse. He came with a box.

Inside the box was gold, jewelry, heirlooms taken from a young Jewish woman whose name had been erased with deliberate care.

She had been clever. She had hidden part of her wealth. But not well enough.

The man found it. Took it. And fled.

He buried the box in Waldock Woods, certain no one would ever come looking.

But the woods remembered.

And so did she.

The legend said that decades later, a group of Waldock students unearthed the box while drunk and daring one another to trespass past the trail markers.

One of them took the jewelry.

Only one came back alive.

They said she smiled as she described what she’d done.

They said she wept as she finished.

They said she walked back into the woods afterward and was never seen again.

III. The Dig

Eli didn’t believe the legend.

Not really.

But belief is a weak thing when curiosity sharpens.

It was Sasha, a history major with a fascination for war crimes, who first suggested they look.

“Do you know how many Nazi assets were smuggled into the States?” she said, eyes bright behind thick glasses. “It’s not implausible. And Waldock College was founded in 1912—plenty of old land records.”

Jonah objected. Mara flatly refused.

But Eli listened.

He told himself it was academic interest. A thought experiment.

He told himself that when he found the shallow depression in the woods—barely noticeable, shaped like an old grave—it was coincidence.

The shovel hit metal on the third night.

Eli froze.

Then he dug faster.

The box was smaller than he expected. Iron-bound. Rusted shut. When he pried it open, the woods exhaled.

Inside were rings, necklaces, loose gold teeth wrapped in cloth.

And a locket.

Inside the locket was a photograph of a young woman with dark hair and solemn eyes.

The moment Eli touched it, the woods leaned closer.

IV. The First Death

Jonah died three days later.

Officially, it was an accident.

A fall from the library’s upper staircase. A broken neck.

Eli knew better.

He had dreamed of it the night before.

In the dream, Jonah stood in the woods, his mouth full of dirt, eyes wide and pleading. Behind him stood the woman from the locket.

She wore Eli’s face.

Eli woke screaming.

At the funeral, Mara noticed the blood under his fingernails.

V. The Change

It started with small things.

Eli stopped sleeping.

He stopped using contractions when he spoke.

His reflection lagged a half-second behind his movements.

When Sasha confronted him—voice shaking, demanding to know what he’d done in the woods—he felt something shiftbehind his eyes.

Her fear tasted like iron.

She died in her apartment two nights later, wrists slit cleanly, expression peaceful.

The note wasn’t in her handwriting.

It was in Hebrew.

VI. The Truth

Mara was the last.

She found Eli in Waldock Woods at dawn, kneeling beside the empty hole.

“You let her in,” she whispered, tears streaking her face. “Didn’t you?”

Eli looked up.

His smile wasn’t his own.

“She waited so long,” he said, voice layered, echoing. “And they forgot her name.”

Mara ran.

She didn’t make it far.

VII. The Cycle

When the police searched Waldock Woods, they found nothing.

No box. No jewelry.

Eli Mercer vanished.

The woods grew thicker.

The warnings grew sharper.

And every few years, a student hears the legend and laughs.

Every few years, someone digs.

And every few years, the woman finds a new name to wear.

A Pandora’s box of revenge. Cold. Hard. Calculated.

That’s why they tell freshmen never to go into Waldock Woods.