Secret in the Woods

“Secret in the Woods” is the story of a man who is one day faced with the reality of having to place his aging father into senior assisted living. To make matters worse, his father is fast moving beyond the onset of dementia and is now exhibiting a pattern of consistent forgetfulness….including an occasional inability to even recognize those he loves.

Once set up in a local senior ‘home’, his son visits him regularly. On doctor’s advice, to help keep his Dad’s mind active during their time together he often reads to him or reminisces about past occurrences. Told this will keep him more in tune with reality, as the visits continue the conversations start to include his father’s recollections about his childhood.…with even decades-old memories seemingly coming back to life to put smile after smile on his increasingly sullen face.

It’s in one of these long-forgotten memories that he’s able to recall a clearing….a makeshift camp (of sorts)….that his close-knit group of friends used to frequent just to hang around and goof off. Through some prodding, the son learns that his father was approximately 13 years old at the time and that only his closest friends ever knew of this place. When asked about how he had come across it to begin with, his father presented him with an innocent enough story. However, truth be known, the history of the very location that brought back so many wonderful memories, endless stories, and laughter was far from being the innocent ‘playground’ his father was portraying.

As bits of additional information surface over time, the son’s curiosity gets the better of him as he decides to do some research of his own dating back to the period in time his father relished so much. As the stories continue, the tales become more like clues….pieces of a much darker puzzle that the son begins to put together pointing to the possibility of an alarmingly sinister event. But with his father’s faculties rapidly falling more and more into question, which clues are real…..and which ones are products of a man who is slowly losing his mind?