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Paper short abstract

Aren’t forests, lakes, and roads not merely backdrops, but active forces in encounters with the supernatural? The Smiltene legend corpus suggests seeing landscapes as relational environments where humans, supernatural beings, and places co-constitute experience.

Paper long abstract

In Smiltene, a small town in northern Latvia, a dense demonological legend heritage was recorded a century ago. These narratives describe encounters with beings tied to specific sites – forests, roads, lakes, hills, etc. – whose actions are recurrent and repetitive. Local taxonomies gave them names derived from how they express themselves: the Wailer, the Scratcher, the Twitcher, the Growler, etc. Often imagined as restless spirits of the violently dead, they were not encountered everywhere but precisely somewhere; their recurrence is anchored in place.

The experiences these legends recount suggest that the environment itself is never a passive backdrop. Forests and other sites of encounter appear agentive – they lend the beings persistence, enable encounters, and create unease in presence. Walking through these landscapes, with knowledge of their demonological background, alters perception. But not only that. Expectation interacts with auditory impressions, tactile sensations, shifting visual qualities, and the temporal atmosphere of particular hours, such as dawn or night. Together with the narrated encounters, these elements combine into a perceptual intensity – at times so strong that the environment itself seems to generate the experience, even without a supernatural figure manifesting.

In this sense, the Smiltene corpus does more than preserve a forgotten demonological tradition. It points to how landscapes participate in supernatural encounters: as relational environments where humans, beings, and places co-constitute experiences through affect, repetition, and situated conditions.