Human beings have been telling stories about spirits in the woods for almost as long as we have been telling stories at all.

They have been called dryads, leshy, fair folk, hidden people, guardians, tricksters, demons, ancestors, and countless names that never made it into books. Sometimes they protect the forest. Sometimes they punish those who disrespect it. Sometimes they help travelers.

And sometimes they call to them.

That last possibility has become attached to an especially eerie piece of wilderness folklore: if you hear a familiar voice—or even your own name—from somewhere you cannot see, think twice before following it. Versions of that warning survive in regional folklore today, while older traditions such as those surrounding the Slavic leshy contain remarkably similar stories of forest beings using voices and sounds to lead travelers astray.

If you hear your name called from somewhere in the woods, don't follow the voice.

The Forest Was Once Another World

It is difficult for us to imagine what a forest meant to people hundreds or thousands of years ago.

Today, we visit forests.

We hike through them. Photograph them. Camp in them. Follow marked trails through them and use our phones to find our way back to the parking lot.

For much of human history, however, a forest was something entirely different.

Beyond the edge of the village was a place where familiar rules disappeared.

Trees blocked the horizon. Paths vanished. Animals moved unseen through the brush. Sounds traveled strangely between trunks and hills. A person could walk only a short distance and completely lose sight of home.

The forest provided food, fuel, medicine, shelter, and materials necessary for survival.

It could also kill you.

Perhaps it isn't surprising that people began imagining that something lived there besides animals.

The surprising part is how many cultures did.

Why Would a Spirit Call Your Name?

This is where folklore becomes wonderfully unsettling.

A nameless sound in the woods can be ignored.

Your own name is different.

Humans are extraordinarily sensitive to it. We can notice our name in a crowded room even when we weren't consciously listening to the conversation.

So imagine hearing it when you are alone beneath the trees.

Not shouted.

Just called.

Maybe from somewhere a little farther down the trail.

Folklore frequently treats names as powerful things. To know someone's true name is to possess something intimate about them. Names appear in charms, fairy tales, religious traditions, legends, and magical practices across centuries.

A voice that knows your name therefore feels fundamentally different from an ordinary unexplained sound.

It knows you.

And if the voice belongs to something attempting to lure a person away, there could hardly be better bait.

The Rule: Don't Follow

Folklore from different places is full of wilderness warnings, although the details vary enormously from one tradition to another. 

Don't follow strange lights.

Don't leave the path.

Don't accept food from unfamiliar beings.

Don't answer something you cannot see.

Don't follow music deeper into the woods.

And especially:

Don't follow a voice simply because it sounds familiar.

From a practical standpoint, these are excellent rules.

Forests distort sound. Birds and animals can produce astonishingly human noises. Wind, water, echoes, distant hikers, and rustling branches can create sounds our brains desperately attempt to interpret.

There is even a neurological reason we sometimes hear meaning where none exists. The human brain is an enthusiastic pattern-finding machine. When sound is ambiguous, it may assemble something recognizable from it.

Like a word.

Or a name.

It is easy to imagine that some folklore also helped preserve very sensible wilderness rules by turning them into stories people would remember. 

"Stay where I can see you" is good advice.

"The forest spirits may steal you if you wander away" is advice a six-year-old remembers forever.

Frankly, folklore understood marketing.

Folklore as a Survival Manual

That experience changed the way I think about stories like these.

Modern people sometimes dismiss folklore as primitive superstition: charming stories invented by people who didn't understand science.

I think that seriously underestimates our ancestors.

Folklore often carries practical information disguised as story.

Don't wander away from the village.

Don't approach unfamiliar animals.

Don't go near dangerous water.

Don't eat plants you don't recognize.

Don't trust strangers.

Don't enter caves alone.

Don't wander into the forest after dark.

A supernatural creature makes the warning memorable, but underneath it may be generations of accumulated experience.

Somebody once wandered away.

Somebody didn't come home.

Eventually a story grew around the empty chair.

And the next child listened.

But What If There Is Something More?

Of course, this is Edenglow.

We are allowed to leave one little door cracked open.

Because forests really are strange places.

Stand quietly in an old forest long enough and something changes. The modern world disappears remarkably quickly. Buildings vanish behind the trees. Traffic fades. Your sense of direction becomes less reliable.

Then you begin hearing things.

Branches snapping.

Leaves moving when there seems to be no wind.

Something walking somewhere you cannot see.

Most of those sounds have perfectly ordinary explanations.

Probably.

But human beings have spent thousands of years walking beneath trees and feeling that peculiar sensation that something might be walking there with us.

Science can explain why a forest makes unusual sounds.

Psychology can explain why our brains recognize voices in noise.

History can explain how legends evolve.

Folklore asks a slightly different question:

What if our ancestors weren't trying to explain the forest?

What if they were trying to warn us about it?

I don't know what called Paisley's name that day.

I don't need to know.

I only know that when a three-year-old standing beside you in the woods suddenly asks whether you called her name—and you didn't—there is one ancient piece of folklore that still seems remarkably sensible.

Take the child's hand.

Stay on the path.

And whatever is calling from deeper among the trees can keep calling.

We aren't following it.