Halloween Is in the Air

Yesterday, I trucked out to Fieldale, a few miles northwest of Martinsville, to set up some new geocaches — an Adventure Lab with five stages, and two physical caches — which afforded me a fair amount of trail hiking. The woods are just starting to look like fall, with a smidgen of color, which I expect will mature a bit by the end of the week.

The Fieldale Smith River Trail is my favorite local hiking spot, as it runs along the scenic Smith River for several miles, and there's lots of interesting terrain on either side. Several of my geocaches lurk out there, so after double-checking the coordinates and clues on my new ones, I took the opportunity to hike out to check on my older ones as well. Happily, all were fine. The best thing about the Fieldale trail is that it passes the old Koehler warehouse, known to me and those in the know as "The Spooky Place," which at one time doubled as the local Halloween haunted castle.

Today, to help establish the proper mood, while I was hiking, I put on my Amazon Music Halloween music playlist. This did the trick; Halloween is now officially in my blood for the season.

On the way home, I noticed that the local First Baptist Church was selling pumpkins, and since their pumpkin patch looked reasonably sincere (probably the best we'll get around here), I stopped in and purchased a couple of nice pumpkins. The Jack o' Lantern I've had out front for almost a couple of weeks is starting to look like a toothless old man, so the replacements are timely.

I hope your Halloween season is looking as awesomely grim as ours is.

A couple of the nearby haunted islands viewed from the Fieldale Smith River Trail

Appalachian Horror Story: The Witch of Ferrum Woods

A little while back, I saw the image above posted on Facebook, which immediately piqued my interest. Ferrum College is my old alma mater, about thirty minutes from Martinsville, out in the boonies of Franklin County. During my two years at the college, I frequently explored the extensive woodlands in the area, sometimes hoping to find interesting critters, such as snakes (which I often did), sometimes to indulge in certain substances of not-necessarily-legal status (at least at the time). In more recent years, as an aficionado of hiking in deep woods, I've returned to those old stomping grounds many times, particularly when fellow geocachers have set out new caches.

I had bought tickets for a 9:00 p.m. starting time, so about an hour in advance, Brugger and I hit the dark, isolated backroads that lead to Ferrum. Little about that drive has changed since I was a student there, forty-plus years ago. Once we arrived at the parking area, a short distance from the campus, we found ourselves a little bamboozled — as did several other folks who had arrived at about the same time. The instructions were to park and follow the lights to the registration tent... except that we could find no lights! Eventually, we decided to follow the nearby paved road into the woods, and there, finally, we spied a line of glow sticks along the roadside, which led us where we needed to be, about a quarter-mile down.

The event info indicated that hot dogs, popcorn, and drinks would be available, and since we suffered from the Great Starvation, we destroyed a couple of hot dogs while we waited. I got to talking to a couple of the folks at registration, one of whom was a local author, so needless to say, the conversation turned to writing. Several years ago, I gave a talk to one of the English classes, for which I received a respectable stipend, and I indicated that if such an opportunity should arise, I'd love to do it again. Although I didn't run into him at the site, one of the professors involved in the Friends of Ferrum Park group, who sponsored the haunted trail, was a gentleman whom I'd interviewed for the college newspaper back in the days when I fancied myself a budding journalist. It's nice to know that at least one faculty member from back when is still there and going strong. And the Friends of Ferrum Park's mission is one that is near and dear to my heart, for it is devoted to preserving the natural areas there rather than allowing needless commercial development to destroy them.

The backstory for the haunted event was that a couple of students had gone missing, and that weird, uncanny forces might have been responsible for their disappearances. Our hosts gave us the unfortunate victims' descriptions as well as "special" flashlights to help us find our way in the darkness. Our lights indeed occasionally revealed certain sinister entities lurking in the darkness. Some of them were indeed frightening — at least to our companions! At one point, I ended up behind them and inadvertently startled them. After some screaming, one of them whispered in relief, "Ah, it's just the horror writer." That kind of made my night.

While the trail setup wasn't all that sophisticated, it was sure as hell fun, and the decidedly creepy atmosphere helped scare up some much-needed Halloween spirit. I do hope this event will become a regular Halloween tradition.

Once safely back at our starting point, our party still intact — sadly, having found no trace of our missing hikers — Brugger and I returned to Martinsville (passing my favorite Spooky Place along the way) and stopped at Renewal Brewing, where we topped off the evening with a couple of brews.

This is Halloween, this IS Halloween...

The Smith River, a Haunted Island, and the Spooky Place

Almost every day, I walk somewhere between three and four miles around our neighborhood, which has done wonders for my physical and mental health. This afternoon, Ms. B. and I decided to go walking out on the Fieldale-Smith River Trail, which is my favorite of the trails in this area. In 2009 and 2010, I loaded up a mile-plus length of the trail with geocaches, and they're all still active. Yesterday, in fact, a group of geocachers found them all. Just for good measure, I decided to give each of the caches a physical check-up, and I was pleased to find them in decent condition. One of them (called "Haunted Island") involves a little tree climbing, and since that's one of my favorite physical activities, up I went (the view in the photo to the left is actually from up in the tree). I even managed to get back down.

My favorite of the trail's attractions is the view of the old Koehler Warehouse across the river on Route 57, which I've always called "The Spooky Place" because it was the site of the Martinsville Jaycees' infamous Halloween Haunted Castle when I was a teenager and a bit beyond. For a couple of tales of my sordid adventures in the Haunted Castle, you may visit my article at the Horror Writers Association Blog here. Don't be afeared... much.

A view of the Spooky Place without the spooky people in the way

A view of the Smith River from the trail

Tree damage!

A happy little community of mushrooms Ms. B. discovered

From the Spooky Place to the Haunted Island

I was in Martinsville this weekend, and I needed to perform maintenance on a few of my geocaches in the area, a couple of which lurk along the Fieldale Smith River Trail, just outside of town in Henry County. It’s probably my favorite trail anywhere, for it offers a scenic walk along the Smith River, in terrain that isn’t very difficult (unless one leaves the trail to hunt my geocaches). Walking south from either of its trailheads, one will eventually see, across the river, the hulking, ancient shape of the old Koehler warehouse, which, since childhood, I have called “The Spooky Place.” In my early teens and for some years beyond, for Halloween, the warehouse served as the setting for the local Jaycees’ haunted castle. I had a significant hand in that chapter of local history (the highlights of which you may read in the Horror Writers Association Halloween Haunts Blog), and it rates among my most prized memories.

This morning, I set out bright and early on the trail carrying my bag of geocaching supplies. After a while, even from a fair distance away, I could see the smokestack of the old monstrosity rising above the trees along the riverbanks. As I drew nearer, the bare winter trees offered me a relatively clear view of the building across the river. It’s been a few years since I’ve hiked out here, so I snapped a fair number of photographs, a couple of which I’m posting here.

My primary target was a cache called “Haunted Island,” a short distance farther down the trail from the Spooky Place. It does indeed reside on an island — which typically isn’t very hard to access unless the water is running high. Since we’ve had a lot of rain, the water level was pretty high, but my waterproof boots kept my feet dry. If you’re hunting my cache, it’s when you’re on the island that your terrain challenge begins, for the cache may be found some distance above your head. Your difficulty retrieving it largely depends on your vertical stature and upper body strength.

And how a cache in such a location goes missing is a perpetual mystery (if you zoom in on the proper spot, you can see the cache in the photo at left; note that it is tiny). Still, on occasion, go missing it does, so this morning, I performed the necessary acrobatics to put a new container in place. It’s back in play, and I’ll thank Mother Nature and nosy (and/or inordinately agile) muggles to leave the damned thing be, at least for a while.

After “Haunted Island,” I headed over to another of my caches called “Cachefishing,” which also resides above your head, though this one can be retrieved without any extraordinary acrobatics. I was somewhat dismayed to find that, in the recent past, a huge, fallen tree all but obliterated the cache’s hiding place. I expected to find this cache container missing as well, but — much to my surprise — it was still there and in good condition. Happily, it only took a small amount of adjustment to reset it, and it may now be retrieved as I originally intended it.

So, that’s another round of cache maintenance completed. Ordinarily, I find repairing and replacing caches one of the least satisfying aspects of geocaching, but in cases like this, it was downright fun. Not that I want to have to do it again right away.

Cache on.

The half-obliterated setting for "Cachefishing." Do you see the cache's hiding place?

Another view of "The Spooky Place"

“The Spooky Place” at HWA’s “Halloween Haunts” Blog

Every October, the Horror Writers Association posts a series of Halloween-themed blogs written by members. My entry — “The Spooky Place” — is now live. This one chronicles the early days of Martinsville Jaycees’ Haunted Castle in the little community of Koehler, VA, back in the 1970s and ’80s, and how it help boost my fledgling career as a Very Spooky Person.

“As we shuffled forth, I could hear screams, popping, crackling, and other menacing sounds issuing from below. After negotiating a dark, mazelike passage, we began to file through one creepy, expertly rendered chamber after another. There were strobe lights, smoke machines, spiderwebs, tombstones, and roving monsters that crept out of the shadows to grab you. I was enthralled, my little brother terrified...”

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Read the full article at HWA’s
“Halloween Haunts” blog here.

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The Spooky Place, Part II

Halloween 1974: young Mark gets to help design the Martinsville Jaycees’ haunted castle at The Spooky Place and thus has the most exhilarating Halloween of his life. Halloween 1982: somewhat older Mark again gets to help out at the haunted castle, this time playing both a mad scientist and a roving monster.

In 1982, in that period between graduating University of Georgia and moving to Chicago, I lived at home in Martinsville. Happily for me, the Jaycees again set up their haunted castle at the old Koehler Warehouse. I might mention here that each chamber in the castle was sponsored by various community organizations, and the wonderfully twisted mad scientist chamber was sponsored by, of all places, First United Methodist Church of Martinsville, which I had attended since my youngest days. Apparently, the church needed some warm bodies to man the chamber one evening, and they called me to see if I might be interested. Indeed I was. When I showed up to perform the dastardly deed, I met Blake, a young gentleman from the church, who told me he had brought refreshments as well as a few props to add to the authenticity of the set. The refreshments consisted of a cooler full of cold beer, the props a cooler full of warm animal entrails, courtesy of a local butcher shop.

Inside the mad scientist chamber, I found all kinds of scientific instruments, a black light, a lab table, and a hapless victim — in this case, a department store mannikin that had been chained to the table. What we ended up doing was cutting out a section of the dummy’s abdomen, dumping all that lovely offal inside, and covering it with a sheet. A young woman of our acquaintance stationed herself under the lab table, well out of sight of our visitors. We had a huge butcher knife on hand to facilitate the vivisection.

As the first group of visitors filed in, I explained that my experiments required certain contributions from living human beings, at which time I brandished the knife. The young lady under the table unleashed a barrage of blood curdling screams, and I thrust the blade into the mannikin’s abdomen. Joyously, I began scooping out the entrails, much to the disgust of our unsuspecting visitors. Now, I wasn’t wearing gloves or anything, just some scrubs and an apron. We didn’t have hand sanitizer in those days, so once covered in blood and guts, I was covered for the duration.

The first couple of groups seemed enthralled by the show, and I was having a fine time of it. By the third or fourth group, those entrails had begun smelling right pretty, and it wasn’t long before the aroma began to wend all through the various nearby chambers. Blake wanted to take a turn performing surgery, so I handed over the necessary accoutrements and went off to find a roving monster costume. I think I ended up being a werewolf. It was a hoot, of course, but now and again, folks downwind would detect my presence by the slightly tainted air preceding me.

At the end of the evening, Blake and I drank the rest of the beer, swapped stories about our experience, and parted ways happy. However, when I got home, my folks took one whiff of me and suggested I leave and never come back.

That night marked the end of my participation in the Jaycees’ haunted castle. Not as momentous as my first experience in 1974, to be sure, but it was a memorable and wonderfully disgusting evening.

I would do it again in a heartbeat — though, this time, I would make sure to have plenty of sanitizer on hand.

Read “The Spooky Place” Part 1 here.

The Spooky Place, Part I

Because I am reasonably old, I have quite a few Halloweens under my belt (although I am not that overweight), and a long list of favorite Halloween memories. For me as a youngster, Halloween was a special, thrilling time. In certain circles, it might be common knowledge that I was the world’s most terrified kid. I mean, up through my elementary school years, even into middle school, I spent a considerable percentage of my day-to-day life genuinely, heart-poundingly, mind-numbingly terrified. I am certain this innate, inexplicable terror was among the most motivating reasons for my becoming a writer of scary things once I grew up. I don’t know whether Halloween represented a means of making peace with my juvenile fears, but I do recall that dressing up in costumes (the scarier the better) and trick-or-treating was both exhilarating and cathartic. (I still love the costuming and socializing aspects of the season.) As often happens with youngsters, once in my late teens and through my early twenties, Halloween lost some of its shine; however, as a full-fledged adult, my passion for all things Halloween came roaring back, and it has been my favorite holiday for more years now than it hasn’t.

Perhaps my most memorable, most exciting Halloween came when I was fifteen, in 1974. At that time, much to my parents’ chagrin, I spent most of my waking moments immersed in scary, monstrous, otherworldly realms of fiction — cinematic as well as literary. In May of that year, The Martinsville Bulletin ran a full-page feature about me, following my sale of a Godzilla vs. the Thing filmbook to the long-dead but well-remembered monster movie tabloid called The Monster Times (see “Accent on Nerds” from October 6). I have no recollection of how anyone at the Bulletin came to find out about this particular feather in my cap, but the piece caught numerous eyes, including those of the Associated Press, who picked up the article and thus facilitated its publication in newspapers around the country. And as a result of that, WLVA-TV, Channel 13, out of Lynchburg, VA, sent a crew to my junior high school one day to interview me that I might further elaborate on my blathering from the newspaper article. Exciting times. Also as a result, a couple of members of the local Jaycees, who had begun plotting a massive haunted castle attraction for Martinsville, sought me out to recruit my help with the planning, design, and execution of this, their most ambitious community project.

And so, excited beyond words, I attended a series of meetings with the Jaycees to brainstorm ideas for a bona fide castle of horrors, to be set up in an abandoned warehouse in the small community of Koehler, just outside of Martinsville. All the classic creatures would be showcased in their own specially designed chambers: Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, the Wolfman, the Mummy, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde... with a pretty fair budget to boot. Finally, one evening, just about sunset, the redoubtable Dickie Globman (whose wife, Pam, is nowadays a geocacher of high reputation), came by the house, picked me up in his MG sports car (which was a thrill because I had never ridden with a madman in a sports car before) and drove us out to Koehler.

Holy Yog! The warehouse, an old stone monstrosity half-hidden by trees and rising above the nearby Smith River, was imposing and downright scary even before any attractions had been set up. To enter, you had to go through these massive doors and down a long, earthen-floor passageway into a vast cellar with five-foot-diameter stone columns at regular intervals. What a perfect place to set up a maze of horror chambers! I was ecstatic, and to return a few times to contribute to the physical grunt work — sweeping away actual cobwebs and piles of dust, setting up sheets of polyurethane, connecting miles of extension cords, and the like — only heightened my anticipation of its completion. On top of everything, I got to write and illustrate the promos that ran in the Martinsville Bulletin. I wish I still had some of those little ads because, as crude as they might have been, they were among the most fun artistic projects I ever undertook.

For whatever reason, I wasn’t present when the actors for the various horrific roles came on the scene, but on opening night, my little brother and I dared to enter the now-transformed halls of this most haunted of haunted castles.

I couldn’t believe it. I had been in some big, scary, professional haunted attractions before, but this thing blew me away. The rooms, full of sparking, screeching scientific instruments; massive spiderwebs; fluorescent passageways leading to dizzying abysses, all were fantastic. And through it all, expertly made-up monsters roamed, screamed, and grabbed (ah, for those good old days!).

This place... this spooky, spooky place... was Halloween heaven. And from that moment on, to me, the old Koehler warehouse became known as simply “The Spooky Place.” At some later time, one company or another purchased the warehouse and returned it to its more traditional usage, which sadly put the kibosh on the classic haunted castle. The Jaycees moved the attraction to another location or two in Martinsville proper, and I think they were pretty good, but I had no hand in them. The most memorable thing about one of those was coming out of the exit and stepping on a stray roofing tack, which went through my shoe and punctured my sole, so that, upon taking off said shoe, I left a lovely trail of very real blood out to the parking lot. At least I’d had a tetanus shot at the time, and the wound healed up without complication.

Nowadays, the Koehler warehouse is still operating, I believe, but it’s still a spooky, spooky place, and I used to have a geocache placed right out in front of it. That one had to be archived, but I still have an active cache on the Smith River Fieldale Trail, just across the river, that overlooks the warehouse. I doubt the Koehler warehouse will ever again serve its true purpose — as a haunted castle — but the memories it offered me, and many others, are priceless.

In 1982, I made something of a return to the fold for that year’s Koehler Halloween event. It, too, was classic stuff, although the rest of that Halloween season was far from joyous. More on that one tomorrow, or whenever I can get around to it.

Be spooky. Safe, but spooky.

Read “The Spooky Place” Part 2 here.

Haunted, Hurting, and Happy

Oh, my achy-breaky knees. I have surely put in some hiking this past couple of weeks, and the old bones are feeling it. I suppose it's a good kind of ache, except that it's not; oh yes, it means I've been getting back to some pretty serious cardio and overall muscle workouts, but unfortunately, I have the feeling the occasional ache in the knee is more arthritis than exercise related. Still, I'm more than happy to be hiking many miles, climbing trees, adding to my geocache count, all that good stuff. I also had to do some maintenance on several of my own caches the past couple of days, which involved additional hiking and tree climbing. Such suffering!

Now, the caching did take me to some scenic, creepy, and otherwise pleasing locations this week, such as the back roads of Guilford County; Farris Park, near Mayodan, NC; and one of my mostest favoritest trails ever, the Fieldale-Smith River Trail in Henry County, VA. I tell you this, heading out to on the latter trail to replace the log in my cache, "Haunted Island" (GC1P9Z3) — yes, it is on an island, and it is haunted — the wind was a-howling, the trees a-creaking and a-groaning, kind of like my old bones. And from the trail, you get a good view of the old Koehler Warehouse, which served as the area Jaycees' Halloween haunted castle back in the 70s. In my late teens, I had the pleasure of helping the Jaycees out, playing a mad vivisectionist (using real organs from a butcher shop) and skulking around the dark corridors in a monster costume scaring the hell out of the patrons. Ah, the good old days when you could touch, grab, tickle, and otherwise startle folks without worrying about lawsuits. To this day, I think of the old warehouse as "The Spooky Place." It really kind of is....

I did spend the past couple of days helping my mom out, so it was hardly all fun and games, but the time was pleasant enough. Today, back home, but unfortunately, Ms. Brugger is down with a flu bug. She needed some provisions, and while I don't love her enough to go to Walmart for them, I do love her enough to travel miles out of the way to get them at a non-Walmart. And though I almost never drink beer anymore, I noticed that strange brew called Oculto you see in the photo above, and I figured I might as well try it. Nothing to brag about, for sure, though it blends well enough with bloody mary mix (in this case, Clamato juice and scorpion pepper sauce). Now and again, a good old red-eye hits the spot.

Cute little cache guardian I discovered in the woods in Greensboro

Thought I might buy this little fixer-upper out in Guilford County for Ms. Brugger
as a summer cottage. Cozy, wot?

Purty view at Farris Park, near Mayodan, NC

The Spooky Place, in Koehler, VA

Joe, the Spooky Place, and Route 666

I'm seriously bummed this weekend because my friend Joe is in the hospital. By all accounts, it's not a life-threatening thing, but anytime a hospital is involved, I consider it serious. Joe and I were friends in high school; then our ways parted, and we didn't see each other again for twenty years. Once we got reacquainted — eleven-plus years ago — the two of us (and our respective families) have remained close ever since. Joe is one of those infectiously good people. I always feel better for having spent time in his and his family's company, and I have it on good authority that he only rarely projectile vomits after spending time in mine. That's not bad. Please send prayers and good thoughts out to the old dude.

I'm visiting me mum this weekend, so I spent most of this very cold day planting geocaches in and around Martinsville. Several of them have spooky themes. Yeah, I know, what a shock. One of them is at a place I've always called The Spooky Place. It's an old warehouse in Koehler where the local Jaycees used to have their haunted castle attraction at Halloween. Back in high school, and for a time thereafter, I helped them design the rooms and got to be one of the roving monsters that scared the bejezus out of you in the pitch-dark corridors. This was back in the good old days when you didn't get sued if you indavertently touched someone, so I really scared some folks. Probably scarred 'em for life, too.

Yeah, those were some of my favorite Halloweens.

And just up the road from there, we have route 666. You probably won't remember (I blogged about it somewhere), but a couple of years back, I went riding up that old country road to a little graveyard and scattered the pages of my homemade Necronomicon. As you may have guessed, there is now a geocache on route 666.

As there should be.