Ephemera

The story so far. 

The Remnants and Revenants of the Great Black Swamp

"Here, she will be trapped in her own illusion, because everything in the woods is exactly as it seems."

Angela Carter ~ the Erl-King

Haunting the remnants of the Great Black Swamp with my collaborator and compatriot, Mere Pseud. 

That Was The Story of My Life

I've long had the idea that we come into the world with some vague plan, a faintly drawn map with general directions marked and junctions to be met. I also have the idea that you can the take the wrong exit, or miss a turn-off and get hopelessly lost, stuck with no way back until conditions arise to get you to where you were meant to go. I know what it's like to be stuck, and I know what it's like to stumble, almost accidentally, back onto the path. 

There have been three times in my life that I've been aware of being lost, knowing there was some invisible turn I'd failed to make, leaving my existence to unspool uselessly like a film that had jumped its sprockets. The first two were distinct moments of knowing something had gone wrong, the third was a slower knowledge, a growing realization that all efforts to change my circumstance had come to naught. In each case, the sense of an unlived life haunted me, unseen but present like a prickle down my spine.

In other words, it was a lot like being under a hex, but knowing all the while that I'd somehow hexed myself. 

So it came to pass that, realizing the gravity of my situation, I decided I needed to be unhexed. At first this might seem a tall order, but it turned out to be as easy as waking in the night knowing it could be done. While I didn't have the map of my future, I did have the map of my past, so it was quite a simple matter - methodically, secretly, intentionally unwinding my life from the nodes of fate that had held me fast. (How I did it, I might tell you one day, but not yet, not yet.) As it happened, it felt natural, really; like laughter, a new memory that overtakes old sorrow, the chill of significance now pleasantly warm. No longer haunted, always half somewhere else, for those moments - the tiniest sliver of time - I had an idea of what it must be like to be normal.

Unravelling the warp and weft of my previous life, I see now how teenage dreams were only precognitions of this moment, the eerie chill merely signaling a memory that hadn't happened yet. Not without a certain melancholy do I watch the loose threads blow away, the comfortable discomfort of the familiar past. What is left behind is a path to the truly unknown, and beyond that, a future - whatever it might be - to be lived in the present tense at last. 

Click

The Case Of The Happy Haunting

 

While wandering in a nearby town, we passed this charming old streamline moderne movie theater. While it's not disused as such, I think it's now only used for special events. At any rate, it was empty at the time we were passing by.

I'd seen a few movies here in my youth. Mostly it was my cousins who hung out here. It was their preferred spot for date nights. As for me, though, I don't have any particular memories attached to it, besides seeing one of the less-impressive Indiana Jones films a long time ago.

And as for my husband...well, he's not from around here, so he'd never seen the place before in his life. 

None of this mattered when we walked by and felt what we would call the atmosphere (or maybe the ambience) of the place. We stopped and breathed it in. We compared notes. 

"It's almost creepy, except it's not," said husband.
"It feels energetic, alive" said I.
"It feels as if there are a hundred theaters here, all existing at once"

"It's like...."

At which point I again ran into the problem of not having words to describe such a thing.

Thinking about it later that evening, I realized part of the problem is that I'm a more of a visual person, so these feelings often come with mental imagery. Most of which would sound stark-raving insane if spoken aloud. But I did hit upon the idea of trying to use a collection of images to convey what it was that I felt there (I also discovered  that my computer no longer has a program to create a photo collage. Grr.)

So here goes Some of these may obviously be related to movie theaters, some less so, some extremely not so, but it's as near as I can get to what was going through my mind when standing outside the doors. In no particular order:

Anthropomorphic food, anyone?

I cannot guess what the images above would convey to anyone else, but personally, they seem to suggest a particular sort of happiness, an innocent, giddy materialism. Analogous perhaps to being a child in Woolworth's, knowing that you could buy something in this multi-colored wonderland with your nickel.

I asked the hubs what he thought, if these images reflected what he'd sensed outside the theater.
"Pretty much," he said "though I would have added cars. 1940's era cars."

Middle son hadn't been at the theater with us, but I thought it would be fun to get his opinion anyway. I asked what this collection of images suggested to him.

"Pure 1950's" he said.
"Even though some of these images are from the 70's or later?"
"It's the color scheme. It screams 50's."

He was right about this, although the 60's and 70's had been in my thoughts as well. It does seem, in a way, like a version of "a hundred theaters all existing at once."  Maybe a hundred layers of pop culture, consumer culture, existing all together.

Perhaps decades of happy movie-goers lining up there had left their echo. Always looking forward, always optimistic. A bit like that atomic-age architecture, reaching for the sky.

 I did some research on the theater the other night, and discovered it's said to be haunted. I don't doubt it. After all, there's really no good reason a haunting can't be happy.

What Once Was (Or, Guess What, Victoria Is Still Creepy)

(note: I wrote this back in December. I'm just now dragging it out of draft.)

Last month, I went back to Victoria, returning to a house I once stayed in many years ago. It was a bit sad and nostalgic, because it was at a major turning point that I had come to stay back then, on the eve of starting a new life in a new place. Now that time has long passed, the couple who lived in that house are gone, the people we worked with are gone, everything is irrevocably changed.  

Well, one thing is the same, something I'd forgotten after being away for over a year. In my current town, you couldn't take a spooky-looking picture if you tried. In Victoria, all you have to do is point your camera at random and snap:

See? Which was really the idea behind this blog - my wish to document what made that particular town so very strange, even if the strangeness went unnoticed - or at least unmentioned - by the majority of people (the minority who did mention it admitted to being spooked as all hell). 

It did catch me by surprise, though, after all this time. Snapping away with the camera, mostly out of boredom,.and seeing something very different turning up in the viewfinder than what I'd seen with my own eyes.

Case in point - 

 I don't like posting my own photo on this blog in any recognizable fashion, but it's kind of necessary here. I had entered the bedroom I once slept in, nigh on twenty years ago when I was but a young thing, and I thought, ah, let me take a picture for memory's sake. Here is the mirror I once gazed at, the daybed I once slept in, exactly as I remember it, an ordinary little room in an ordinary little frame house, nothing special or unique outside of personal attachment...

Oh, no, wait a minute. Apparently I had been sleeping in Dr. Dread's Mausoleum of Doom without realizing it. (enlarge to get the full effect)

Sadly, there are no non-creepy photos to compare these against. I took plenty, but some things are just too terrible to bear looking at.

This was all very interesting, so I got a little curious about how the rest of the house would photograph. How would I, product of the 70's, look in the 70's era kitchen? The 70's weren't creepy. They were tacky, but not creepy.

Well, it was fine, except in the photo it looks like a potential crime scene: Or like that bit in a movie right before something bad happens:

After that, I ventured into the room in the house that I did find overtly creepy, the den everyone had always seemed to avoid. I would soon find out why.

While setting up the camera and finding a suitably dramatic pose, I think I manged to tick off whatever was in there, because I definitely began to feel a presence. It was not pleased. The self-timer was set to take three shots, but I was so spooked that I couldn't manage to stay long enough for all three.

I'm normally more curious than afraid when it comes to haunted houses and mysterious presences, but this was a truly awful feeling.

There is something really wrong with these photos, something besides bad lighting and noise. I often take photos with poor light experimentally, to better understand how lighting affects the image. No, it's something else. Something looks wrong with my shadow, like it's someone else, standing behind me...

And another thing, harder to pinpoint. It's as if I don't want to look too hard, because there might be something there I don't want to see hiding in the image. It's like that with all of the photos I took that night, the sense of another presence there, watching the camera watching me.

Maybe that's the thing about Victoria, for those who notice it  - it's not just the sodden air and the swollen ground, the isolation or the tension and angst swirling like a low-lying fog - those things are obvious, only those in deepest denial could miss them. It's something else there - the spirit of the place, immaterial, watching, just out of sight.

Or maybe it's just all those bloody clowns...

The Legend Of Creepy Hollow

The Salem Road Bridge

It was a long time ago now that I first encountered Creepy Hollow, though I didn't know what it was called then. My cousin and I were out for a drive that day. Nancy could drive for hours and she was always looking for a place to go. She'd overheard some of the profs at the university talking about Salem Road and how long it was. "Pack a lunch", they said. That's how we ended up heading out to the country one afternoon, singing along with The Beatles, laughing, smoking cigarettes, back when they were still cheap enough to smoke. It was sometime in the summer, 1995.

Salem road runs though town like any other street - straight and boring - then crosses the highway where it becomes a twisting country lane. Not too many people live on the other side of the highway. There were fields, the occasional farmhouse and some scrubby trees..At first, it seemed fine. There was nothing unusual about the place, and I'm sure I didn't notice anything awry until it was impossible not to notice. Nancy was unperturbed as well. Mostly our minds were occupied with romance and boys and whatever love triangle was happening that week. That's the way it often is when you are young. 

We didn't see the bridge until we were very close to it. A sudden dip in the road and there it was. Nancy slowed the car. Somehow, we hadn't been expecting this. The bridge was very narrow and she hesitated. Her hands were tense on the steering wheel. She said nothing, but I could tell she was thinking hard about whether to cross. I noticed this, despite the vague horror that was creeping through my bones. Knowledge was gathering into an absolute certainty that whatever was on the other side of this bridge was like death, or worse. Indescribably worse. I felt cold all over and wanted to scream at her not to cross, we had to get out of here now but I did not - there was no obvious reason, you know? It was just a low bridge on a country lane and there was nothing visible to be afraid of.  

Nancy drove slowly onto the bridge, then stopped the car. We seemed to stay there for hours though it would have been no time at all. "Hey" she said in a high, artificial voice, "you know what? I think we'd better turn around now."  I agreed, we backed up, turned around and drove back the way we came. Nancy's face was as white as a sheet. 

It's funny, when I remember this incident, I could swear it took place at twilight, with a chilly wind and a violet tinge in the air. That's not possible of course, it couldn't have been later than four in the afternoon. But the memory is so hazy now. That's another funny thing - despite being scared out of our wits, as soon as we got home we promptly forgot the incident. That sounds silly, like something out of a bad novel, but it's true. For years, it was never mentioned again.

underneath the bridge

It was not until 2002 that a talk with a neighbor jogged my memory. She mentioned that she and her brother liked to go fishing at the creek at Salem Road, they would fish from the bridge early in the morning. The bridge? A fuzzy memory took shape in my mind. She began to describe the location, but she'd hardly said a word before the memory hit me. That place! How could I forget it? But not quite forgotten, not really. As soon as I remembered, I realized I'd been dreaming about it for years, dark and eerie dreams about loss.

I mentioned this to my boyfriend at the time. Oh, yes, he said, that bridge! It had taken 5 tries before he managed to cross it, he lost his nerve every time. It's hard to explain, he said,.there's just something wrong with that place.

It was after that that I began to ask questions of the people I knew. What was the strangest thing that ever happened to them? Was there anything about the town that made them uneasy? Had they ever been really scared? While the answers were always interesting, the name "Creepy Hollow" turned up unusually often. It didn't take long to figure out that this was the local name for the Salem Road bridge. The stories were all over the place, but very strange indeed. There were tales of witches and devil-worshipers. Ghosts. Black magic. The fishing neighbor wasn't bothered, but her girlfriend wouldn't go near the place. My friend Lawrence had seen piles of bones on the bridge. Heather had heard tales of a hundred black cats materializing out of thin air. Angela's story was most impressive - she'd been invited to a Halloween party at the far end of Salem Road, but after seeing flickering candle flames and hearing voices in the woods, she turned tail and fled. There was no way she would cross the bridge on Halloween night.

Always present in the stories was a common theme, that they simply could not cross the bridge at first. The fear wouldn't allow it. Tallying up all the stories I'd heard, from more than 20 people, the average number of tries was 5.  If you look carefully at the top photo, you'll see that the grass is worn through on the right side by cars turning around to leave.

I made it in four, though it was Angela who drove me across. She was veteran of the bridge by then. She still wouldn't go near it on Halloween night, though.

The other side

Eventually, I knew that the only way to find out what was happening at Creepy Hollow was to have a look at it myself. Already I'd met several self-proclaimed Satanists who said they had gone down there to perform rituals because the place was a "vortex of negative energy", Well, hearsay was all very nice but after so many tales, it was simply not enough. I went down on a very bright day in the summer of 2005, when these pictures were taken. I'd been across the bridge enough times by then to be prepared. I walked up, looked around briefly then crawled underneath. I saw a snake, but no signs of witchcraft or devil worship, nor anything else that oughtn't be under a bridge. On top of the structure thought, things were a little different. 

About halfway across, I noticed what appeared to be a skein of sheep's wool wrapped around the railing, splotched with red. There was a bloody rag, and a trail of bloodstains on the concrete. There were three cigarette butts lying near the biggest stains, as if someone had leaned against the railing, casually smoking while they bled profusely onto the ground. It was...odd. I didn't take a picture of this, for a now out-dated reason. These photos were taken with an analogue camera, with film that was sent to be processed. I didn't want the person who developed the photos to think I was psycho.

I crossed the bridge, went to the other side and stood there, trying to get a grasp on what it was about this place. After coming here a few times, the fear was no longer intense, but...the place felt dead. Lifeless. No birdsong, no insect buzz, the clouds didn't move in the sky. There was no happiness or sadness, just...nothing. Later, I drove a friend, a practicing witch, out to the place to see what she thought. She also noticed the lack of birdsong, and the second hand on her watch failed to work on the other side of the bridge. She said it felt like time had stopped. I had to agree. After the fear subsided, it felt like time had gone dead.

It wasn't until a couple of years after that that I saw Nancy again. I asked her if she remembered our drive on Salem Road. "oh, gods," she said with widening eyes, "That evil place, I was so scared. Why did you have to remind me?" But she was relieved to know that we hadn't been the only ones. 

...

Searching the internet one day, I came across this short piece of video, made at the same bridge:

It tantalizingly promises "more to come" but of course, it never came. It's the way of things here, I suppose. Even paranormal investigators get stymied, get bored. Despite the rumors of tragic accidents and suicides and other horrible happenings at the bridge, not a one can be proven. There is no dramatic solution. At the end of the day, all that can be said is that a lot of people have been afraid of this place.