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I grew up in southern Indiana, right along the Ohio River. If you’ve seen the documentary, “Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” we’re talking about the area around that bustling port town that inexplicably borders the Great Plains. Like just about anyone in the Midwest, I spent a lot of time with friends driving for no reason. There’s things out there to see, a memorial to a plane crash out in the middle of nowhere near a barn where Grandma claims an ax murderer lived 60 years ago, a small cave where the Marquis De Lafayette camped after getting dunked in the Ohio River when his steamer forgot how to float, the cotton mill a confederate gunboat managed to lob a shell into during the Great Nautical Drive-by of the Civil War, and there’s even a cave that goes directly under a cemetery where kids would hang out and do things kids everywhere do. You’d think that’d be the setting for something scary, but really it was just another landmark on the under-30 radar. The caves here generally aren’t that big, certainly not a match for Marengo, Wyandotte or Mammoth, which are all around us, but the land beneath our feet here around here still gets pretty empty. A lot of the caves are man-made, personal mine tunnels made by residents to get at the sweet cannel coal the county sits on. As you might expect, some of those guys wound up entombing themselves. Newspapers from back when reported at least one guy who died when his mine got finicky about an open-flame lantern and exploded, and there was also apparently a cantankerous mother mountain lion that some locals decided to seal inside an abandoned mine system with dynamite. Apart from amateur-mining mishaps and folk tales about a race of vengeful subterranean mountain lions, you’ll also hear about ghosts stemming from people who died on the river, or the popular “race track” streets that run along it. I don’t put much stock in them. Sure it sounds bad if you just list body counts, but the area’s just a place where people live, and anywhere that people live, they’ll find a way to die. My “experiences” don’t really have all that much to do with the area’s lore, but I probably wouldn’t have a story at all were I not a history major. For reasons I forgot to remember, I wound up at the old courthouse museum, most likely to interview someone to prove to a professor I could communicate in English. The museum is less a place of history and more of a communal basement where people dump the belongings of dead relatives and occasionally plan community events. It has some interesting things, civil war relics, muskets, knives and even a few uniforms on coat racks. I remember wondering why they weren’t more prominently displayed, and one of the volunteers flatly said that the mannequins they used to use “didn’t work right.” Eh, that was reasonable enough. I was staring at a bright future of unpaid labor myself so I wasn’t about to blame a volunteer for not caring. Apparently the mannequins were just thrown in the basement with all the other barely catalogued crap unfit for display. Everyone told stories about this place, and for once, I actually believed them. The building was old, its acoustics were insane and it relied heavily on natural light from windows. Most of the stories involved things unseen, old school desks slamming downstairs, a woman in high heels that liked to pace the office hallway on the first floor and on a few girls have screamed that they’ve gotten their hair pulled when alone in the basement. Take one guess where the only working bathroom is. I’ll give the architects one thing, when they decided that sunlight is the best way to light a basement, they committed to the notion. The glass front door faces directly down the stairs into the downstairs area, allowing daylight in a fair ways down the long hall that branches out into different storage areas. There’s modern lighting in all the rooms as well, and the bathroom is directly on the left as soon as you hit the floor, but at night you’ll be fumbling through the hall using ambient light from the various rooms to light your path. The bathroom was covered in old posters advertising medicines of yesteryear and apparently the marketing boys at the turn of the century insisted that the faces of angry, crying children was the ticket to sales nirvana. I had barely made it in the room when I started hearing sharp footsteps, like someone walking in high heels but the rhythm was wrong somehow. Now, I wasn’t alone in the museum, and sound carries weird in there. Still, I knew the stories and I knew there was a restroom at the gas station down the road. I was all but on the steps and into daylight when my lizard brain told me to wait, I’d seen something moving at the edge of sunlight down the hall, something low to the ground. The stories were wrong. I didn’t see some Roaring 20s dame standing there, nor did I see the nothing I expected to see. It was a leg. Just a thigh, knee and a foot wearing a high heel “standing” in the middle of a long empty concrete hallway. It was pale, plastic I thought. I reasoned that it must have been a mannequin’s leg, left out for… reasons, that I hadn’t seen when I went down in full paranoid “check every corner” mode because I’m an idiot. Reptile brain insisted that it had seen the drat thing moving though, and I was through arguing the point so I turned my back on it and made for a swift retreat. I started moving a lot quicker when I heard a tip tap sound in my direction. The man I was talking to that day did not object to finishing our conversation at the Wendy's 5 miles away, reassuring me that weird things happen there. He didn't even ask what I'd seen, I guess my face told it all. Well, that’s a lot of words to explain how I once outraced a disembodied leg. Not much epilogue to offer. I never found an excuse or willpower to go back and investigate. Ghosts, if they exist, aren’t things to be made sense of, but I can certainly see why they’d be around in these parts. The only thing that ever draws my thoughts back there is the knowledge that some people occasionally still work in that building after sundown, and people still hear those drat high heels pacing outside the office door, between whoever’s inside and the exit. A friend said a coworker once decided to climb out the window and crawl through the shrubbery than face whatever was on the other side of the door. I can’t say I blame them. Sometimes places and things just don’t work right and you just have to deal with it as best you can.
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May 13, 2015 01:26
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 10:35 |
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