[The Wisdom of a Distracted Mind] The signpost at the end of the road...

When walking toward the cliffside end of a long-abandoned road where more than a couple of heartbroken teenagers have hopped in their cars and driven off the edge into oblivion over the years before the passage was closed, when you stumble upon a sign such as this, it's hard not to feel some sort of shiver.

One of my neighbors, growing up, drove her car off the edge of this cliff shortly before her high-school graduation. She was in my older brother's (#5's) grade, and I never really knew her. But, I knew of her, and shortly after that event, the road here was closed with concrete barriers, and mounds of dirt with these barricades were placed in a mad chicane to discourage those drivers from reaching their final destination (of course, if you're ambitious, all you have to do is drive off the road into the vast field on the left and off-road your way to the end).

Nonetheless, there are some ghosts here, and to be perfectly honest, I don't know how many have chosen to meet their end on this strip of pavement. And, before you jump on me for believing in ghosts, I should point out that my definition of ghost is simply the memory of those involved in a tragic and sad event. There are no sheets, rattling chains and things floating around going woooOooo... So, keep your psychics, and those goons from the SciFi Channel away!

On the other hand, there are heaps of people who do honestly believe this strip of tarmac is "genuinely" haunted with all sorts of unexplained noises like squealing tires and what-have-you. And, even better, we've apparently got our own mysterious, potentially man-eating monster carousing the lots and fields, and someone built a MySpace page devoted to their tireless pursuit of the crazed and rabid beastie they've come to call "The Manwolf." They've even got a footprint picture (of course, don't look too closely at it, or you might realize that you're looking at two paw-prints sort of on top of one another in the mud. After all, the place is a pretty popular spot for dog-walkers, and I've got the shit on my shoes to prove it. And, the claw marks on that dude's shirt? Well, when I was climbing around there, I noticed a lot of thorns on a lot of branches).

Anyway, I can see how people could get freaked out running around this place at night. There's nothing there other than what once was. There were beautiful houses and probably some very happy lives that had to be uprooted when it was discovered that the lake was consuming their yards at an alarming and unstoppable pace. Some people put their houses on trucks and hauled them to other parts of town, and others just left them to fall into the lake or to be torn down.

However, once people were gone, something strange happened. The lake stopped its steady diet of earth, and the erosion slowed considerably once the people and their houses were gone 35 years, --or so-- ago (lower lake levels probably contributed to a lot of that). It was odd though, and the timing lends a certain eerie quality to it. It's like the earth there doesn't want any houses on it anywhere west of the train tracks about a half mile up the road away from the bluffs where civilization begins.

Finally, with the story told, you can see that the words in the picture above have a special meaning. It's creepy. And, it's funny in a spooky sort of way. Thankfully, the words are just that: Words. And, the fact that I just sneezed and painted my computer monitor with a field of rainbow speckles while typing this goes a long way in proving that I am still drawing a breath and, most certainly, not dead.

-DP

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Posted By Dan to The Wisdom of a Distracted Mind at 9/13/2008 07:32:00 PM