Chapter 5 #2
“If it really happened, how come I’ve never heard about it?
” I asked, lips twitching with amusement.
“I mean, not to sound like a total weirdo, but I went through a huge true crime phase when I was a teenager, and I must’ve researched every single serial killer or spree killer case that’s ever happened in this country.
And I never heard the name Edmund Stryker, or anything about people being massacred at this camp.
” I hesitated for a beat, lifting a palm.
“Also, given the way things are these days… if that stuff really happened, where’s the Netflix documentary about it? ”
“Exactly!” Caitlin said, throwing her hands up. “It’s total nonsense.”
“It’s not. The locals just covered it up, including all the cops,” Zach shot back.
“Why would they do that?”
“Because they didn’t want all the tourism in this area to stop. So they made sure the media never picked up the story,” he replied. “But, of course, stuff always leaks eventually.”
Caitlin let out an irritated sigh. “Even if the Woodsman was real, he’d probably be at least seventy by now,” she said. “Maybe even older. Or dead. So it doesn’t make sense that people act like he could still be out there searching for more victims. It’s just stupid.”
“Well, maybe he has a son. Or even a grandson.” Jensen raised a brow. “Maybe they’re carrying on his legacy. Roaming the woods and getting revenge on anyone who dares to be out here.”
Something made me look to my left at that exact moment.
Rhys was looking at me. Not at Zach, not at the kids, not at the beanie sitting abandoned on the log. Right at me.
For a second, neither of us moved. Then the corner of his mouth lifted, just slightly. I had no idea what it meant, but it made something twist in my chest, so I yanked my gaze away.
“Oh, shut up, Jensen,” Caitlin snapped. “You’ll scare the kids.”
“They’re not even listening to us. They’re too busy looking at the scavenger hunt clues.”
“What do you think, Rhys?” Caitlin asked. “Obviously Zach and Jensen aren’t going to listen to me or Alissa, but maybe they’ll listen to a man telling them it’s a pile of bull.”
I took a deep breath and looked up at Rhys again. He was still looking at me, lips slightly curved at one corner, but then he finally dragged his gaze away and focused on Caitlin.
“You’re right,” he said. “The Woodsman isn’t real. But it is very loosely based on a real case.”
Her forehead wrinkled. “What case?”
“Edmund Strake and the Blackpine Rites.”
My eyes widened. “Wait, I’ve actually heard of that before,” I said, sitting up straighter. “I didn’t know it was this Blackpine, though.”
Rhys nodded. “Sometimes people mix it up with a town called Blackpine Lake. That’s about four hours south of here. In the Catskills, I think.”
“Right, yeah.” I nodded slowly. “That’s what I read.”
“Well, it was actually this Blackpine. Or this land, anyway. Before it was ever a summer camp. Which, by the way, opened in 1990 and was always for kids,” Rhys said, giving Zach a pointed look.
Zach grinned and raised his palms. “Okay, okay, you got me. The Woodsman isn’t real.”
“Wait, what’s this Strake case about?” Caitlin asked, eyes skating from me to Rhys and back again. “I’ve never heard of it.”
I shrugged. “I can’t remember all the details,” I said. “Only vague stuff.”
“It’s a pretty long story,” Rhys said, brows rising. “Let me see if my phone has any signal out here. I’ll find an article for you.”
A moment later, he passed his phone across to Caitlin. I shuffled over to her so I could read over her shoulder and refresh my memory of the case.
What the Woods Remember: Edmund Strake and the Blackpine Rites
Edmund Cornelius Strake was born in 1901 into old money; the kind of wealth that had been accumulating since before the Civil War and had insulated the Strake family from every consequence that ordinary life tends to produce.
He was educated at private schools in New England, briefly attended Yale before being quietly asked to leave under circumstances that were never made public, and spent the following decade traveling through Europe and North Africa with what contemporary accounts described as a ‘tireless appetite for forbidden knowledge’, which was the polite 1920s way of saying he was pursuing occultism with the focused intensity of someone who had both too much money and too much time.
He became loosely affiliated with Aleister Crowley's circle in London in the late 1920s, though accounts suggest the two men disliked each other.
Strake reportedly found Crowley too interested in performance and not sufficiently committed to the actual practice.
Strake was, by all indications, the more dangerous of the two in that particular way: where Crowley enjoyed being infamous, Strake had no interest in an audience whatsoever.
He returned to the United States in 1931 and purchased a large tract of land in the Adirondacks—land that would eventually become Camp Blackpine—and built a private residence there that he called Erebus Lodge.
He brought a small rotating group of followers there over the years; people he'd collected from the fringes of occult communities in New York and Boston.
Wealthy, educated, and sufficiently detached from conventional morality to follow him into the woods without asking too many questions.
What he was doing out there was never fully established, because the surviving documentation is incomplete and deeply strange.
What is known comes primarily from The Strake Codex, a handwritten book of roughly 340 pages that was found in the Lodge after his disappearance, bound in dark leather and written in a mixture of English, Latin, and a cipher that has never been fully decoded.
The portions that have been translated describe an elaborate system of ritual practice centered on the idea that the land itself sat on what Strake called a ‘meridian of consequence’: a place where actions carried disproportionate weight, where the boundary between intention and outcome was thinner than elsewhere.
He believed that rituals performed there could enact permanent transformation.
The murders happened in 1943.
Six of his followers were found on the property, arranged in a configuration that matched a diagram in the Codex.
The method of killing was never officially released to the public, but the local sheriff's deputy who attended the scene reportedly resigned from the force within a week and refused to discuss it for the rest of his life.
A seventh body was found separately, in the tree line, and appeared to have been there significantly longer than the others.
Strake was identified as the sole suspect almost immediately.
He was taken into custody in Albany in November of 1943 and held overnight at the county jail pending transfer.
By morning he was gone from his locked cell.
The guard on duty had no memory of the night whatsoever. He was otherwise completely healthy.
Edmund Strake was never seen again.
The Lodge was demolished, and the Codex was confiscated as evidence.
It was lost within the county records system for several decades, then quietly resurfaced in the early 1980s when a local historian requested access to old case files under a freedom of information request. A partial transcription exists.
The original is allegedly still somewhere in a county records archive, though requests to view it in recent years have been met with responses suggesting it cannot currently be located.
The case never made national news. Local law enforcement at the time actively discouraged press involvement, and the story that circulated in Adirondack communities was vague enough to be dismissible.