Ghost Towns

[Gilberticus 374]

I figured that with the new layout and it being "that time of year" again, I'd tell the closest thing I have to a ghost story. Ghost towns are all over the place in the United States. I'm not talking about "boo, bump in the night, walls dripping with slime" types of places, I'm talking about towns of the late 1800s, early 1900s that were part of the boom and bust industries, like mining and milling. For various reasons, the town eventually is abandoned. Sometimes these towns get built over, some of them become tourist hotspots, some of them just remain abandoned and decay. This little story is about a ghost town I discovered while walking in the woods of Ohio. It's not very graphic, but it's the only ghost experience I have

 

One year, one of my shipmates ( who was a dear friend of mine) asked me to go deer hunting with him on leave. I asked him if Ohio even had deer. I mean no offense to Ohioans, I just knew very little about the state. I know the rock and roll hall of fame is in somewhere like Canton, and the inventor's hall of fame is in Akron, but that's the extent of my knowledge back then. He told me that Ohio has some of the densest forests in the US. I'm not sure if that statement is accurate, but it has thicker woods than from where I'm from. Anyway, we're walking through this woods, and I see this thing that resembles a path. He told me that if it was a path, it had to be older than dirt, and that it didn't lead anywhere.He knew most of these woods like the back of his hand, but I had figured that there was no harm in following this thing. That "almost path looking thing" led to an abandoned town.

 

At this point, I was thinking that he was about to play a prank on me. The town was tiny, but he claimed that he knew the woods well. I kept thinking "ok, this looks kind of like a paint ball arena in someone's backyard, I'm about to get peppered". But I look over, and he appears to be genuinely shocked. This place looked right out of a Fallout game. Most of the buildings were skeletal at best, but some were partially intact. Military sometimes erects towns like that for us to do drills and training in, but this place had no footprints or wheel marks or anything, it looked like time had forgotten it. So I asked him about it, and he said that it was no joke, that the town had to be over a hundred years old. That would have put it in like the Wild West time frame. To this day I still have no clue how some of the buildings could look as preserved as they were. My shipmate gave me his word, and while we often had played pranks on each other, it's serious business when the man that watches your back and vice versa gives you his word.

 

After the initial shock wore off, we started to walk through town, talking to imaginary townsfolk in poor John Wayne impersonations. After all, comedy is the spice of life. If you can't laugh once in a while, your head blows off. I saw that in college once, girl blew up right in front of me, had little pieces of goop all over my new cowboy boots (that part's a joke). While walking through this place, my friend says "woo eee, look at the babe walking towards us". I remember saying "Dude, have a little respect, that could be an ancestor of yours. Now my family, however, wasn't in the US for the most part a hundred years ago. The ones that were, minus my Native American lineage, were far south of this state. So, she's fair game for me!" I walked up to the imaginary woman and said "Howdy, little lady, how about you and me getting a Cactus wine and see if we can't screw up my near and dear shippy's family tree?" Cactus wine is the only drink I know that was drunk during the Wild West time period, it was tequila and peyote tea. I'll tell you what, that must have been the wrong thing to say, because the hairs on the back of my neck stood up, the winds suddenly picked up, and there was the most ungodly howl I've ever heard. I looked over to see if this was a joke, and Tim was straight booking it back the way we came. I had never seen him run from anything before. That was the last time we ever went hunting in those woods, or even really spoke about it, other than to laugh when we had ran a safe distance away. And that's the end of this story. Neither of us encountered strange ailments, incurred bizarre events, or received cryptic messages. This is real life after all, not a Steven King novel

[Gilberticus 374]

Oops, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is in Cleveland. Canton's is the Pro Football one