What Is A Thin Place?

I went through a few titles for the next book in my Shadows Of Miskatonic series.

 The Madness of Solomon Reye

Architecture of Dreams

The Raven King

 I finally landed on Thin Places.

 So what exactly is a thin place?

 A thin place is a location where the distance between heaven and earth collapses, a place where people go to catch a glimpse of the unknown.

The term originated in Celtic Christianity.

Heaven and earth, the old Irish saying goes, are only three feet apart, but in thin places the distance is even shorter.

Iona Abbey, Scotland

The island of Iona (home to one of the oldest abbeys in Scotland) is believed to be the first location designated as a ‘thin place’. But over time the term has moved away from its Christian roots. It now describes any place that jolts people “out of time” and away from their “the old ways of seeing the world’.

The vibes these places give off are intense.

Stonehenge is a thin place.

The entire island of Iceland is considered a thin place, as are parts of New Mexico and Arizona.

The Pine Barrens in New Jersey is the thin place I featured in my book.

I got the chance to visit the Barrens in 2007, when my husband and I lived in Washington D.C.

Getting there was a unique experience.

Just like my characters, Andrew and Ellen, we headed away from the traffic-clogged urban arteries of the Northeast corridor and onto a narrow road winding through 1.1 million acres of scrubby wilderness.

The place was so remote our GPS eventually gave up. Our display showed our car hanging in blank space with a cryptic message: “unknown road”.

Appropriate, no?

Still, I was prepared to be disappointed. Thin places are a lot like haunted houses. People visit expecting things to happen. More often than not, they walk away from the site unsatisfied, convinced the whole thing is fake.

Sometimes, the sheer crush of people hoping to experience a thin place can get in the way of any transcendent experience. Travel writer Eric Weiner described the holy city of Jerusalem as so “freighted with history and our outsized expectations that any thinness lurking beneath the surface doesn’t have a chance.”

We had none of these problems in the Pine Barrens.

The moment we stepped out of our rental car, the place felt different.

First, there was no noise. I didn’t realize how noisy modern life is until I went to the Pine Barrens. The place was utterly silent. No sounds of traffic, no music leaking out of apartments, no people walking by yammering on cell phones. There was a stillness in the Pine Barrens that was eerie.

It got even weirder as we hiked the trails. The place is littered with the remains of old buildings, some of them dating back to the 1700’s. They stood as grim sentinels to a lost time. Like the battlefields at Gettysburg (another ‘thin place’), I half-expected to see a Revolutionary War soldier step out onto the trail. But we ran into no one as we walked the paths, not even ghosts.

Our destination was the memorial dedicated to Emilio Carranza.

He is the historical figure whose fate formed the central ‘what-if’ question of Thin Places.

NEXT TIME: What I Found At Ground Zero

Until then, enjoy this clip of Eddie Izzard expounding on the wonders of Stonehenge.

From his award-winning special Dress To Kill