North Woods

A young married woman, along with her infant, is captured during an Indigenous massacre of her Puritan settlement. When she grows ill, she’s taken to the cabin of the elderly woman, who nurses the girl back to health. In the process, she grows fond of her protectress. When the scouts arrive and threaten the Indigenous community, the woman explains that poisoning the scouts is necessary to bring an end to all the bloodshed in the region.

After one of the scouts kills the woman, the girl buries her and the three scouts they murdered. Then, she records all these events in the margins of the woman’s Bible and, leaving it behind, disappears from the story, her fate unknown. Her record in the Bible remains undiscovered for many years but later becomes known as the “Nightmaids” Letter.

A major in the English Army during the French and Indian War of the 1750s, Charles Osgood survives a bayonet attack because of an apple and then resolves to devote his life to apple cultivation. He buys a parcel of land in western Massachusetts and moves there with his two small daughters. The family eventually develops an apple variety known as the Osgood Wonder and runs a thriving orchard business. When the Revolutionary War begins, Osgood joins the British but dies in an early battle. He leaves the orchard in the care of his daughters and reappears several times in the novel as a ghost.

Alice is Charles’ daughter and the identical twin sister of Mary. Despite the sisters’ identical looks, she’s widely regarded as more beautiful than Mary. Alice is romantic by nature and dreams of falling in love, marrying, and raising a large family. However, Mary’s interference thwarts Alice’s various romances. Alice’s guilt at leaving her sibling behind keeps her tethered to the family business. Late in life, she has a sexual dalliance with a neighbor that provokes her sister into killing her. Alice is buried in the root cellar of the house alongside Mary. In the novel’s final chapters, she encounters the ghost of Morris Lakeman and finds true love at last.

Mary is Alice’s twin. Far more practical than her sibling, Mary is an able business manager and keeps the orchard going even during economic downturns. She’s aware that men are attracted to her sister and greatly fears being abandoned if Alice marries. In her later years, sometime around 1813, Mary, infuriated by Alice’s romantic escapades, kills her sister with an axe. Now assured that her sister can’t run away, Mary places Alice’s corpse in a rocking chair in the parlor. When Mary becomes terminally ill herself, she takes Alice’s body and places it in the root cellar of the yellow house, crawling inside to die beside her twin. As a ghost, Mary exhibits sympathetic behavior toward Esther’s plight and keeps Phelan from returning the girl to enslavement in the South.

In the years before the Civil War, Phelan is a bounty hunter whom a Maryland plantation owner hires to recover a woman named Esther who is a fugitive from enslavement. Phelan cautiously tracks her whereabouts and discovers that she’s hiding out in the Osgood house. On the verge of capturing her, Phelan is stopped by Mary’s ghost. His ultimate fate is unknown, but the novel suggests through Alice’s perspective that Mary attacks him with her trusty axe. Years later, Teale finds Phelan’s hat in the parlor, but no other evidence of him remains.

Age 18 at the time she runs away from enslavement in Maryland, Esther travels covertly with her infant, intending to reunite with her husband in Canada. On her way north, she hides for a brief period in the Osgood house. While there, she draws comfort from a copy of the Bible that originally belonged to the woman who built the cabin on the site. She may or may not have read the “Nightmaids” Letter contained in the volume’s margins, but she takes the book with her for moral support when she leaves Massachusetts.

After establishing a life with her husband and child in Canada, Esther passes the Bible on as a family heirloom for generations. One of her descendants has the “Nightmaids” Letter transcribed before the Bible itself is destroyed in a fire. This document spurs interest in finding the bodies buried near the Osgood home.

Landscape artist William Henry Teale’s work becomes well-known during the mid-19th century. He’s drawn to the beauty of the north woods and buys the old Osgood property so that he might paint in the area. He immediately begins renovating and expanding the house. In the process, his workers renovate the original cabin as well, and Teale claims the space as his studio. Aside from his passion for painting, Teale develops a passion for a writer named Erasmus Nash. The two men carry on an affair on the property until their spouses learn of their illicit relationship. Their wives leaves them, but Teale breaks off his relationship with Nash, sinking into oblivion, to avoid compromising Nash’s writing career.

Driven to despair, Teale attempts death by suicide but survives. He spends his last years alone in the yellow house, tended only by a Portuguese nurse to whom he leaves the property in his will. In later chapters of the book, Teale resumes his affair with Nash after they’re both ghosts. Their amorous activities frighten the house’s subsequent occupants, the Farnsworth family. In the book’s final chapters, Nora sees Teale as he paints the north woods landscape.

Ana is a Portuguese nurse in her fifties who comes to work for Teale and restores him to health when he’s in his seventies. They develop a close friendship, and she falls in love with him and vows to remain with him until the end. When she intercepts a letter from Nash proposing that the two men rekindle their romance, she destroys the note before Teale sees it. Her sense of guilt over this action causes her to dig a hole in the earth and confess her secret to the land. Thus, she’s one character who closely represents the theme of The Land as Silent Witness.

A celebrated medium at the turn of the 20th century, Anastasia is summoned to the yellow house after the Farnsworth family acquires it because Mrs. Farnsworth has experienced disturbing visions of the cavorting ghosts of Teale and Nash. Although Anastasia is a charlatan, she’s astonished when she channels an actual psychic experience during a séance, summoning the ghosts of not only Teale and Nash but also Charles Osgood, who demands to know what became of his apple trees.

A wealthy button manufacturer, Mr. Farnsworth acquires the yellow house with the intention of converting it into a private hunting lodge. He’s an avid sportsman and kills many local animals, decorating his new lodge with their mounted heads. He doesn’t believe his wife’s claims about ghosts in the house and conducts a brief affair with Anastasia. However, after witnessing the apparitions for himself, he becomes a believer. His plans for the hunting lodge never materialize because he loses much of his fortune in the stock market crash of 1929.

Farnsworth’s granddaughter, Lillian, inherits the yellow house and moves there with her son and daughter. When her son, Robert, is a young man, she consults a doctor about having him lobotomized but later changes her mind about the procedure. Because Lilian is emotionally fragile, she frequently gravitates toward men and, after failing to seduce the doctor begins corresponding with men in prison. Her gullibility leads her to trust a prison inmate who poses as her son. After he learns her address, he arrives at the yellow house intending to rob and murder her but is killed by a phantom catamount instead. Lillian lives out the rest of her days caring for her son in the increasingly dilapidated yellow house.

Lillian’s son and Farnsworth’s great-grandson, Robert, exhibits symptoms of “schizophrenia” as a teen and becomes increasingly eccentric and paranoid in later years. His mother consults a doctor about performing a lobotomy on him, but the operation never takes place. Robert spends much of his time walking in the north woods, convinced that he’s mending a rupture in civilization. Robert describes seeing an evil gang that he calls the Harrow and benevolent spirits whom he calls the Soul Heirs. Nears the end of his life, he tries to capture the many ghosts he has seen on film. He knows all the previous inhabitants of the north woods by name and labels his film canisters accordingly. Unfortunately, the films capture only the rocks, trees, and animals of the forest.

Robert’s younger sister, Helen, doesn’t experience any of the mental challenges that her brother does and establishes a successful career as a university professor in California. After Robert’s death, she returns to the yellow house and discovers his film canisters. She watches what appears to be nothing but tree stumps and squirrels, and she doesn’t recognize the names that Robert wrote on his film reels. Still not understanding the significance of her brother’s ghostly visions, Helen takes the film reels home with her anyway and passes them on to her descendants.

A widower in his seventies, Morris Lakeman stumbles across information about the Puritan bodies buried on the Osgood property. However, his sexual misconduct bans him from the historical society where he hoped to announce his findings. Instead, he travels to the yellow house to unearth the body of the elderly woman but has a heart attack before he can complete his mission. The ghost of Alice Osgood arrives to greet him, and they carry on a posthumous romance.