TIME looks back on a year in portraiture

We’ve told this story before, many years ago. But it’s worth revisiting, especially in the context of today’s world, where courage, secret or not, seems so rare. When we were kids, my brother, cousins, and I loved to roam through the forests and fields, hills and valleys of our rural home area. Back in those long-ago days, it was perfectly safe. Except for one dense, bleak wooded area. That place, it seemed to us, was haunted by a dark spirit.