The Woodland Embrace, Oxley Park Woods

One of the things I’ve learned while running this project is that stories don’t always wait politely for you to come looking for them. Sometimes they arrive in your inbox at midnight. Sometimes they’re handed to you on a walk. And sometimes – like tonight’s story – they’re spoken over a café table, just when you thought the conversation was finished.

I was sitting in Homeground café, listening to Karen tell me about her own strange experience (you might remember her story from last week). When we finished, the young man working there came over. He introduced himself as Matty, smiled and then said, “I’ve got one for you.”

Matty’s story takes us to the edge of Oxley Park, near the dip in the Redway that looks across to Westcroft. It’s an area where the houses thin out and the trees start to gather, pressing close around the path. Teenagers use it as a hang-out, and by the time he visited, it already carried a reputation. People whispered that it wasn’t just a place for cigarettes and beer – there was something else in those woods.

That night, Matty admits, he’d had too much nicotine and a little too much to drink. He felt light-headed, unwell. Stepping away from the group, he sat down by himself. And that’s when it happened.

“I felt an arm wrap around me,” he said. “A full, solid pressure. Completely real. Indistinguishable from an actual person.”

He turned his head, but there was no one there. Still, the sensation lingered. A weight across his shoulders. A presence leaning close. He was so alarmed he beckoned his girlfriend over, urging her to sit down and place her arm around him, as if she might shield him from whatever invisible thing was already holding on.

Only then did the feeling begin to fade. Not instantly, not like smoke blowing away. Slowly. Reluctantly. Until all that remained was the memory of it.

At the time, the experience left him shaken. But later, reflecting on it, his perspective shifted. “I think it was female,” he told me, “and I think they were trying to console me. If I’d been in a different mindset, I might have just accepted the hug.”

There’s something profoundly eerie about that – a moment balanced on the knife-edge between comfort and fear. Was it a haunting, or was it care from the other side?

Matty isn’t the only one to feel something uncanny there. He later learned that others had their own stories of the woods, whispered and half-joking, but persistent enough to build a reputation. Oxley Park looks so ordinary – until you step into the trees, where the shadows wait.

I know that part of the city well, and have often walked the paths into the woods. They’re unsettling, not just for the shadows of the trees but because they run behind HMP Wood Hill, the prison whose floodlights and high walls loom just beyond the branches. It’s a strange place to walk – so close to a site built to contain what society fears, while in the same moment treading through woodland that locals whisper hides something else entirely.

When I went to take these photos it was a rainy, gloomy Saturday afternoon, our long hot summer finally giving way to the mistiness of autumn. Perfect timing, really – the woods felt restless, the air colder, the brambles heavy with fruit already turning to rot.

And because I can never quite resist tipping the scales, I had my headphones in, listening to something suitably eerie as I walked. It added an extra weight to the silence between the trees, the kind of atmosphere where every drip of rain and crack of twig makes you look back and wonder if you’re really alone.

Out there, it was easy to believe Matty’s story, to imagine how it would feel to have that invisible arm slipping across my shoulders…

Easy to believe there was something in the darkness between the trees…

Listening to me hopping across puddles and dodging brambles…

Watching as I paused every now and then to take pictures…

Waiting for night to fall.

Thank-you to Matty for trusting me with this story, and thank YOU for reading! 
If you have a story of your own to share, I’d really love to hear it.