The following excerpts were taken from the diary of Jake Suderland, born February the 20th, 1983 in Perryville, Maryland. The diary was recovered in an estate sale in 2021 by an anonymous donor. The events therein have not been verified and therefore must be taken subjectively.
May 2nd, 2011
My name is Jake Suderland. I’m writing this as a record of what happened to my friend of thirteen years, Ethan Mabry. There have been a lot of rumors going around about how Ethan died. Some of them even point the finger at me. To be honest, I almost wish I’d been the one to do it. At least then I’d know for sure what happened to him.
May 3rd, 2011
I still remember the day I met Ethan. We were in tenth grade and he’d just moved to town, so I’d only heard about him from the other kids. Everyone kept saying he was hilarious, fun to be around, but when I ran into him in gym class—actually, I should say he ran into me, quite literally during basketball—I found him more annoying than anything else. Something about him just irked me. Maybe he wore me down with his constant talking, but by the end of the year we were best friends. Funny how sometimes the people you like the most start off as the people you like the least.
Whatever it was, it was enough that when we graduated high school, I nearly followed him into the army. He enlisted and then urged me to go, and I came pretty damn close but backed out at the last minute. He went off and served his time while I met Mara and had our daughter, Lucy. Ethan and I kept in touch the entire time, either by phone or when he was in town between tours. He told me about all the places he was deploying, and I told him how Mara left me because of the drinking and took Lucy with her. If it wasn’t for Ethan, I wouldn’t have gotten through that time in my life, that’s for certain.
In a blink eight years passed, and Ethan’s time in the army came to an end. Seeing as he didn’t have a place to live anymore, and I wasn’t doing so good on my own after skipping from town-to-town, he moved in with me. We spent our time fishing and working odd jobs to keep food on the table, and although we weren’t exactly getting ahead in life, we were surviving well enough, and having a pretty good time of it.
One day, Ethan heard about a new lumber mill opening up on the other side of town and decided we should go check it out. We talked to someone on the construction site who directed us to a trailer where Mister Finley, the big boss, had set up his temporary office. Mister Finley dismissed us, saying they had their own men, but Ethan smooth-talked the guy about his army training and my landscaping experience. Ten minutes later we walked out with jobs at a lumber mill that hadn’t even been built yet. I guess he still knew how to wear a guy down.
If I’d known then that Ethan would be dead within the year because of that job, I would have dragged him screaming from that trailer.
May 7th, 2011
I got a call today from Detective Peterson about Ethan’s case, asking me a bunch of questions about our friendship, did we ever fight, that kind of thing. Of course we fought. Friends fight, then they apologize and get on with it. That doesn’t make them murder suspects, and it definitely doesn’t explain all the events leading up to it.
No one has been more torn up about losing Ethan than me, not even his own parents, who couldn’t be bothered to fly in for his funeral. Meanwhile I’m the one who people talk shit about and question like I-
I’m sorry, I have to stop talking about this before I do something I regret.
May 9th, 2011
It took a couple of months for the mill to open, and money was getting pretty low at the time. Between what Ethan got from the army and my side work, we were just barely scraping by. Needless to say, we were thrilled when we got the call to show up the following Monday for work. One more week and I was getting ready to pawn the TV.
Right off the bat, none of the other guys at the mill liked us. They were a tight crew, and had been working together for a few years. We were the weirdo amateurs that had somehow conned their boss out of two spots on the crew, so gaining acceptance from them was an uphill battle from day one.
Naturally it took us a while to learn the job in that kind of environment, and it would have taken longer if it weren’t for Ethan’s charms working on one or two of the guys on the crew. It wasn’t long before the two of us were sorting, cutting, loading, moving, stacking, and feeding lumber through the planers like we’d been doing it for years. A few times they even grabbed us for the chainsaw crew to cut down trees, what they call ‘felling’. The guys still didn’t like us much, but at least they knew we could do the job. They stayed out of our way, and we stayed out of theirs.
The job paid good, and we were good at it. We even saved up enough money to buy a nicer fishing boat and some fancy gear. The whole thing was almost too good to be true, so we kept our noses clean and didn’t ask any questions except how high to jump.
One Thursday in March, though, it all fell apart.
May 13th, 2011
I’ve started writing this four times now. It stirs up too many negative emotions whenever I try to remember things as they happened. It’s like a dark wave surging at me, trying to swallow me. I made a promise to Ethan, though, a promise he never got to hear, but a promise I’m doing everything in my power to keep.
What happened was, the company figured out pretty quickly that Ethan was damn good with a chainsaw—he told me it was from his time in the army, but I didn’t see the connection—so eventually they transferred him full-time to the cutting crew. I was still mostly cutting and stacking, so for a while we barely saw each other at work. It bummed me out, but I kept my head down and did the job. Besides, I lived with the guy, it’s not like we didn’t hang out every damn night plus the weekends. To be honest I was just happy he was being recognized for his skills. I’d been more or less living in his shadow since the tenth grade anyhow.
One day in February, Ethan came back with the cutting crew and was acting a bit off. Not totally strange, but quiet. And if it’s one thing Ethan wasn’t, it was quiet. I asked if something was wrong, but he just said he was feeling tired. I told him he should see the boss about calling in a medic, but he brushed it off and got back to work.
I tried to forget about it, but that night he still wasn’t himself. He was pacing a lot and kept wanting to go outside and check the driveway, almost like he was waiting for someone. When he finally sat down, almost midnight by that point, he asked me an odd question.
‘How many trees do you think we’ve cut down?’
I told him I had no idea, but it had to be thousands by that point. I couldn’t read his reaction, but it didn’t seem to ease his mood any. Soon after that he went to his bedroom. Based on the pacing I heard, I doubt he slept.
I’ve thought about that question a lot since. I still don’t know if he liked the answer.
May 14th, 2011
From the time he first started acting weird, Ethan was going out with the cutting crew every day. During that time his behavior went from bad to worse. He looked like he wasn’t sleeping, and he barely talked to me or any of the crew. One time he even blew up at the boss about some comment he’d made, which was unheard of for a guy like Ethan even before he went into the army. Luckily Finley knew how good a worker Ethan was and let him off with a warning.
At some point, I remember asking one of the other guys on the cutting crew to keep an eye on him, or to see if he was taking drugs or something, but that didn’t get me anywhere. He said something like ‘I don’t have time to babysit’, and after that I didn’t bother asking anyone else for help.
What I did, though, was request to go out with the cutting crew, to see if I could figure out for myself what was going on out there that had Ethan acting so differently. The boss didn’t care much for the request, since Ethan had used up every ounce of our combined good graces, so I figured that was a dead end, too.
That was, until a few weeks later when one of their guys called out sick with the flu. Either the boss was feeling generous or he didn’t have much choice, but he let me go out with the cutting crew.
Maybe it was naive of me, but I actually expected Ethan to be happy to see me on the logging truck with him, as if everything was back to normal and he’d just been missing his old buddy. He didn’t react, not so much as a hello. If I were to really think about it, I would say he didn’t even recognize me.
I jumped off the truck at the site more determined than I’ve been about anything. I needed to figure out what was going on, even if it meant getting fired. I’ve always figured it was better to regret something I have done than to regret something I haven’t done. At least then I could say I tried.
As hard as I tried to keep tabs on him, though, within an hour I lost sight of Ethan. One minute he was marking trees and the next he was gone. None of the other guys saw which direction he went, so I started looking around for him. I searched for probably ten minutes, wandering around in the forest, when I heard the strangest noise I’d heard before or since.
It began as a low, distant murmur, like a tortured moan, but it grew, echoing through the trees with a kind of rhythm. Almost as if the ground itself were exhaling long breaths but never inhaling. The sounds did something to me. My legs went numb with fear. But I knew, somehow I knew that wherever those sounds were coming from was where I’d find Ethan, so I ignored every instinct and went toward them.
They only became louder as I walked. Them and the whispers, though I might have imagined those. I’m still not sure.
I nearly pissed myself when a man appeared ahead of me, running directly at me with a horrible, angry face. I was ready to either hit him or run when I realized it was Ethan. I didn’t know if he recognized me or if he was about to attack me, but at the last moment he veered out of my way and continued running back to the cutting site. By the time I regained my senses, the noises in the forest had stopped.
That had to have been a Wednesday, because the next day was Thursday. That was the day it all came crashing down.
May 18th, 2011
You probably noticed I ripped out a few pages. I’d rather not talk about it if that’s alright.
What was I talking about last time? Wednesday? So Ethan didn’t talk to me the rest of Wednesday, not on the truck back, not on the way home, nothing. He didn’t even stick around back at the house, he just dropped me off and went back out, and as far as I can tell he didn’t come back until morning to change his clothes and drive us back to work.
I tried talking to him, honestly, I did. He just wouldn’t answer me back. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. Maybe because I need to hear it.
Anyway, Thursday we were still short a few men on account of the flu going around, but this time the boss didn’t want to send me out with the cutting crew. I stopped just short of begging him. He wouldn’t change his mind, so I was stuck back at the mill instead of keeping an eye on Ethan. Maybe if I’d been there, it wouldn’t have gone down the way it did. That more than anything has stuck in my head these last few months.
It was just after one in the afternoon when one of the pickups came back early, and believe me when I say it was hauling ass. It nearly crashed into a tractor before skidding to a halt out front. Two guys came spilling out, dragging Ethan behind them wrapped up in rope like he was a prize pig. The way he was screaming everyone thought he’d gotten hurt, but in all the shouting and chaos the two guys explained that nothing of the kind had happened.
Apparently, the cutting crew were all working when they heard the most awful scream they’d ever heard coming from the forest. Mind you, these were guys who’d seen most of their buddies either fall from a hundred feet or cut off a finger, and they all looked shaken by it. It didn’t take them long to figure out it was Ethan not accounted for. Not one minute after that, one of the guys found him all tangled up in some brush absolutely losing his mind. They say he was trying to claw his own eyes out, claw their eyes out, rip his ears off, grab their gear, you name it.
It took four guys to finally restrain him. Four guys. The only way they managed to get him into the pickup was one of the guys decked him, hard, and even that only subdued him just long enough to tie him up. The whole way to the mill he put up a fight, shouting such crazy things that to this day no one will even talk about it.
When I saw Ethan and heard his screams, I went running over to help. Together we managed to get him inside and into one of the bathrooms. We were hoping to keep him contained and not upset everyone at the mill, so I volunteered to stay with him while someone ran to find a doctor, or at least a handful of Xanax.
At first he kept screaming the way he had been, like I wasn’t even in the room. It was rough to hear, and to see the way his face was contorted in pain. But then, like a television that’d been turned off, he just stopped screaming. He looked right at me, tied up there on the bathroom floor, and for a second he was the Ethan I’d known since we were kids.
Calm as anything, he said, ‘Hey, Jake. Have you ever seen a black tree?’
I was stunned. He acted like he hadn’t been losing his mind for the past half-hour. Fumbling over my words, I told him I’d seen some darker trees.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Black. Black as a deer’s eye. Blacker than that.’
I couldn’t think of any.
‘That’s good, Jake,’ he said. ‘Don’t go looking.’
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I checked the door to see if anyone was coming back with help. I didn’t see anyone. Meanwhile, every second I waited with Ethan felt like an hour.
‘You have to get me out of this rope,’ Ethan said. ‘It’s getting hard to breathe now.’
This next part I’ve thought about more times than you could understand, probably more than you’d believe. Because while what I told Ethan was ‘I don’t think that’s such a good idea, just try to calm down and breathe slowly,’ when I looked down at my hands, they were already untying the ropes.
Before I could stop myself, Ethan had gotten loose. He shoved me back, knocking me into the wall. My head hit the tile and I saw a great flash of light. I was only down for a few seconds at most, but it was long enough for Ethan to get to his feet and slip out the bathroom door.
I chased him, fast as I could, but he was faster. Before I could stop him he’d run halfway across the mill and out the door. I went out to look for him, shouting for someone to help, and was just in time to see him duck into one of the storage buildings.
By the time I got in there he’d already grabbed one of the chainsaws and was starting it up. I tried to reason with him. I tried to get him to look at me, to listen to me, but he had the wildest expression on his face, a look of animal desperation I’d never seen before and hope to never see again.
I swear to you, I wasn’t able to stop him. Not from powering the chainsaw on. And God forgive me, not from turning it on himself.
May 31st, 2011
It’s been two months and the cops won’t stop harassing me. I’ve tried answering their questions, but every time I do the image of Ethan in that storage building comes back to me and I can barely speak. I keep telling them to look in the woods for whoever got to Ethan, but they just look at me like something’s wrong. Either that or they’re too scared to hear what I have to say.
July 19th, 2011
The past few months have been dark. I don’t know what else to do at this point. Everyone seems to have just moved on, like Ethan never existed. Detective Peterson has stopped calling me, and everyone seems to have made up their minds that I killed Ethan. All I can think about are those sounds I heard in the forest. How Ethan walked in one person and came out another. I spend all my free time in the woods searching for what could have done it, but so far I’ve found nothing.
October 3rd, 2012
I heard a word today that I’ve never heard before. Not a word but a name.
The mill finally hired a guy to replace a few of the ones that left after everything with Ethan happened. One of them is a slightly older guy, a local named Chuck who I sized up as having a drinking problem within about ten seconds of meeting him. None of my business, though. I certainly can’t talk.
Chuck is a talker and a barfly, and he’s lived in this town his entire life, which makes him an endless supply of local gossip. I was stacking lumber, keeping my head down as usual, when I overheard him talking to one of the other guys about, as he put it, ‘The poor idiot we lost.’ It killed me to think he was talking about Ethan like that. I was about an inch from going at him with a hammer when he said something that stopped me cold.
‘That right there’s the work of the Dreadwood’.
The guy he was talking to hushed him up and told him to get back to work. It sounded like one of those urban myths you hear a lot in small towns, but it was one I didn’t know. I’d only grown up a few towns over, after all, and myths tend to travel.
I know it’s a stretch, but it’s been months since Ethan died and I haven’t gotten any closer to figuring out what the hell happened to him. I knew better than to start asking Chuck about it at work, however. All I have to do is pick a bar and wait for him to walk in.
October 12th, 2012
I’ve spent the last few nights after work hitting the bars, looking for Chuck, but never asking for him. Not that people line up to talk to me, but I didn’t want to raise suspicions.
The first few nights he didn’t show. Finally, last night he walked into Grady’s about an hour before last call. I waited about ten minutes and then pretended to notice him as I was walking to the bathroom. The moment he recognized me from the mill, he made me sit down and buy him a drink. I was more than happy to, and it only took about ten minutes to steer the conversation toward Ethan. Of course he’d heard all about me, how Ethan and I were friends, how some people thought I’d done it just because they walked in on me holding the chainsaw.
‘Folks who’ve lived here long enough know the truth,’ he said. I played stupid and pretended I hadn’t overheard what he’d said at the mill, until finally he leaned in and said the words I wanted to hear. ‘The Dreadwood’s killed men twice as strong as your buddy Ethan, God rest his soul.’
I sat in shock as he told me about a place in the trees, a place that wasn’t a place, more the echo of a place, where all nature of abominations lived. It never seemed to be in the same location twice, and it had a habit of either killing a person or driving them mad with promises.
Being a practical person, I didn’t want to believe a word out of this dirty drunk’s mouth, but I’d also seen what happened to Ethan, and I couldn’t think of anything that could do that. I asked Chuck if he would help me find this Dreadwood place. He outright refused, telling me I was insane if I was trying to go there on purpose.
Now I admit, the conversation did get heated, and I did rough up Chuck a bit, but anything he tells you about me following him around are just the delusions of an old drunk looking for pity. Besides, why would I waste my time breaking into his trailer? He told me everything he knows, which boils down to this: The Dreadwood always wants something.
Tomorrow I resume the search. I’ll update this diary every step of the way.
Note: Jake Suderland was reported missing in November of 2012. Three searches were performed by local police, one in conjunction with the FBI, however all three failed to locate any trace of Suderland. He was declared dead in absentia by the courts in July of 2018, as requested by Mara Greenwood, Suderland’s estranged wife. There are approximately two-hundred pages in what has been dubbed “The Black Tree Diary.” These excerpts were chosen as offering the most coherent timeline leading up to his disappearance.
The Black Tree Diary