In any given My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fanfiction involving humans in Equestria, it's a sure bet that the characters are going to end up somewhere in the Everfree Forest, an untamed woods where Equestria's most dangerous creatures live.
This is usually done to establish danger for the protagonist, and to more easily transition into the fantasy setting before introducing the characters to the magical talking ponies that are even more ridiculous by real life standards than the monsters of the Everfree. However, there's almost never any explanation as to why this is. After reading many such fanfictions (some of them better than others), I've come to a conclusion.
It's a well known fact that in the Everfree Forest nature takes care of itself, where in other places in Equestria nature has to be managed (pegasi move clouds and create the weather, the princesses raise the sun and moon, and the ponies work together to change the seasons and take care of the animals). As mentioned previously, it's also home to some extremely dangerous creatures, though compared to the creatures of Felarya they're downright tame.
My theory is this: the Everfree forest is actually a part of Felarya that somehow ended up permanently "transferred" to the realm of Equestria in the ancient past (as in, hundreds of thousands of years ago, possibly more than a million.)
The many dangerous creatures of the Everfree are the biological descendents of the vastly more dangerous creatures of Felarya, made steadily less large and ferocious over thousands of years due to the influence of Equestria's magic. Becoming part of Equestria also stabilized the chaotic fabric of space that was present when the Everfree was part of Felarya, but some instabilities still remain. Connections to other worlds still do happen in the Everfree forest, though they are nowhere near as common, happening maybe once every several decades, and most of the beings pulled into the Everfree die before they can reach pony civilization.