Hoodoos are fantastically shaped stone pillars in deserts and badlands out West. Here is a classic hoodoo grouping in Bryce Canyon National Park about 45 minutes from my house.

About seven miles from Bryce is a place called Red Canyon where I have often hiked. It is a place of wonderful solitude and beauty. Only once have I encountered another human being there. This is a typical hoodoo one sees there.

Hoodoo groupings are formed by sporadic, intensive rainfall erosion on steeply sloped but horizontally layered sedimentary rock, leaving freestanding pinnacles, sometimes with an overhanging cap of resistant stone. Smaller specimens are often called goblins, such as can be found in Goblin Valley State Park in southern Utah.
The word HOODOO has more than one meaning. It also can be a synonym for voodoo or witchcraft, which may be how they got their name in the first place. You can see how they could be considered as suggestively spiritual forms, whether taken as malign or whimsical, capable of exerting spells to which we short-lived humans might be susceptible.