Now that I am a gentleman land baron, ha-ha, I have, as promised, placed a new geocache somewhere in the wooded valley across the road from my house. It's called "Frankie's Bridge," the title being based on a local legend from days of yore.
Going back many years before I was born, the area that is now my neighborhood
was mostly farmland, and even when I was a kid in the early 1960s, there was a
horse stable and a small wooden bridge across the creek that meanders through
the valley. A horse named Frankie lived down there, though I don't know who
actually owned him.
One night, as Frankie was crossing the bridge, one of the planks broke beneath
him. He toppled from the bridge and broke his leg, which resulted in him
having to be put down. In the years that followed, the neighbors whispered
that they sometimes heard Frankie crying out in pain late at night.
Personally, I never heard any such sounds, but back when, certain neighbors
swore it was true.
Nowadays, I don't know whether anyone around here even remembers Frankie's
story, but it has always stood out in my mind. Sometimes at night, I'll go
outside, gaze at the stars, and listen for any ghostly sounds out there in the
dark, but alas... no such luck.
Anyway, after the cache's publication the other day, friend and fellow
geocacher Skyhawk63 (a.k.a. Tom) came around to hunt the cache,
and he earned the almost-coveted first-to-find honors. Afterward, he and I
enjoyed a nice lunch at
Be Wiched Diner
uptown and then went our separate ways. I ventured over to Danville for a
first-to-find of my own and then moved on to Caswell County, NC, to seek a few
more caches.
In April, I'll be hosting a geocaching event here at home, so I'm sure most or all of the attendees will want to venture into the woods across the road to hunt Frankie's Bridge.
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| Near the cache: all that now remains of Frankie's Bridge |
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In this photo from 2016, one beam of Frankie's bridge still remained
alongside that sewer pipe; below, a couple of views near the cache I took the other day |
