A stub originally written by Leo S. 🙏🏼 in 2021. Published June 2026
It was 1929 when Neal Forsling began telling stories of the witches who live on the mountain, revealing themselves only on this day, Midsummer’s Eve.
She took inspiration from a variety of ancient, nature-centered pagan cultures and Europe’s Midsummer’s Eve traditions, where bonfires performed on summer solstice are said to help ward off evil spirits, even if the Casper Mountain witches are more friendly than frightening!
The writer and artist had just moved to a remote one-room cabin on Wyoming’s Casper Mountain with her two young daughters, Jean and Mary.
Located near a red sandstone butte that overlooks the valley, the 640-acre homestead, surrounded by aspen and pine forest, was a new beginning for the family of three after a difficult time and, unable to bring most of the family’s books, a sweet mother used her own imagination to entertain her girls, who were 11 and 9 at the time.
Before relocating to the cabin on Casper Mountain, the family lived in downtown Casper with her first husband. There were allegations of abuse, and the couple eventually divorced. Neal, who was born Elizabeth Paxton but preferred to go by a pseudonym she created from her parents’ middle names, wanted a safe place to raise her children, and she loved the mountains and, it seems she was inspired during an early morning walk by the deep red color of the sandstone, and came up with the idea of a world called Crimson Dawn and, from that moment, the tales started about the Cardinal Witch, who lived in a crystal cavern beneath Red Butte along with her sister, the Topaz Witch. Soon they were joined by the Star Witch, the Black Witch, the Lavender Witch, the Emerald Witch, and Undine, the Homesick Sea Witch.
Then she added other characters, including the Phantom Woodchopper, Blind Minstrel, and Moon Maiden, as well as a leprechaun and three elves, building an entire fantasy world around a story about seven witches that she kind of pulled out of a hat.
The friendly residents of the mountain, however, were active only on Midsummer’s Eve and, on that short June night in 1929, her first audience was small, just her daughters and two of their friends. After the tale-telling, a bonfire, and a walk through the woods, the party commemorated the event by building small shrines, scattered across the homestead’s land, for the different characters, but none of those present at that first small gathering could have imagined what the tradition would become: a large community celebration of family, summer, and the best kind of magic.
In June 1930, Neal Forsling invited a few more friends for the Midsummer’s Eve storytelling and, as a result, in the years that followed, word of mouth brought more locals, and she began dressing up as one of the witches to lead the traditional forest walk.
On the same year she remarried, but her second husband, Jim Forsling, died tragically in 1942 while getting supplies during a harsh winter storm.
And that was the last winter that the family stayed at the cabin as, from then on, they lived in town in the cold months, only spending summers on the mountain, where Neal continued to host the annual Midsummer’s Eve event.
Over the following years, the celebration continued to grow, with many of the volunteers and other community members which have participated for decades.
And now, nearly a century after the Cardinal Witch and friends first came to life, the annual Crimson Dawn Midsummer’s Eve celebration attracts more than a thousand people from the Casper community and beyond, some of whom grandparents and great-grandparents bringing the younger generation.
Luckily, when Neal donated her homestead property to Natrona County in 1973, it was with the condition that the community maintain the land and continue the annual event—or the property would revert to her descendants.
An avid conservationist, she wanted to preserve the land, now the Crimson Dawn Park & Museum, from development.
As you can imagine, there’s a lot of politicians who would like to built something there but every year, on June 21, a procession of magical characters return to Casper Mountain to share their stories.
Volunteers dressed as cheerful witches and friendly forest folk hand out flowers and bedeck the small, homespun shrines of gathered stones and wood scraps with fresh blooms. A trail leads visitors past several of the shrines as the stories come to life during the night. After leading the walk as chief storyteller for several years, Neal Forsling passed the tradition to her daughters Jean and then Mary.
The author, who didn’t write down her stories until the 1960s, passed away in 1977, and her collection of tales was published posthumously in 1980 as Crimson Dawn: The Story of the Casper Mountain Witches. An even decades later her legacy remains as vivid in the Casper community as the colorful scenes she painted from those stories, artworks that adorn the walls of her old cabin, still standing on the land forever linked to her friendly witches.
Images from web – Google Research