Tucked in the woods across the road from the Montessori school that once bore the name St. Matthew in the Woods, a narrow path slips into the trees and immediately feels older than anything around it. The trail winds up and down the hillside, steep in places, overgrown in others, as if the forest has been trying for decades to reclaim whatever humans once placed here. Scattered along the way are fourteen Stations of the Cross — small stone shrines built from stacked rock, each holding a dark metal relief that has weathered into a somber, almost funereal sheen. Some stand crooked. Some are sinking. Station XII has given up entirely, collapsed into a ravine like it finally let gravity win.

At the entrance, a concrete basin — once meant for holy water — is now completely swallowed by moss, a soft green altar to abandonment. A small stepbridge crosses a creek deeper in, the kind of detail that feels too quaint for how unsettling the rest of the trail is. The whole place feels like a roadside oddity that wandered too far from the road.

The church across the street adds its own layer of strangeness. Built in 1874, later clad in stone, it’s rumored that some of that stone came from repurposed cemetery headstones once located on the property. Whether fact or folklore, it’s the kind of detail that makes you look twice at the walls — and fits perfectly with the forgotten monuments dissolving in the woods nearby.