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.