By Steve Roark
Volunteer Cumberland Gap National Historical Park

Trees and spookiness kind of go hand in hand, and you won’t have to try hard to think of movies with a scene of a terrified person walking alone among trees with branches swaying in the wind like arms with long grasping fingers. Scary looking trees show up a lot in artwork, especially clip art caricatures that often give a gruesome face to the tree. I got to looking at these scary tree silhouettes and scratching my head, because they looked familiar. Then it hit me….. they all in profile look like a black walnut, a common local tree that produces very tasty nuts that are dropping from the branches as we speak.

So why are walnut trees depicted as frightening on a dark and stormy night? I think their growth habit and appearance provides the answer. First of all, the trunk of mature trees is black, a sinister color, especially at night. The bark is also deeply fissured, giving the tree a rugged, ancient appearance. Trees in general look dead when the leaves fall off in autumn, and black walnut drops its leaves very early and so has the look of death longer. Once the leaves drop off the branches are revealed, which are sparse, giving each branch an arm-like appearance, and the twigs tend to form more on the end of those arms and look like long fingers. So overall their silhouette takes on a skeleton like look, a stereotype for scariness.

One other local tree has earned the name “ghost tree” and so also carries a scary tree stigma. Sycamore has a thin bark because it sheds off the outer brown layer regularly, leaving a thin layer of bark that is white. This occurs more in the top branches, leaving the lower part of the trunk brown. On nights when the moon is bright the white limbs and branches really stand out brightly, lending to a spooky appearance.

Old houses and old forests seem to naturally take on a sinister look, so if you want a good scare, take a walk in a graveyard that has black walnut and sycamore trees growing in it on a windy night under a full moon. Oh, and just outside the graveyard is an old, dilapidated mansion with broken windows and doors creaking in the wind. That ought to get your adrenaline going. Have a spooky Haloween!