Lacey Bridge - Linden, TX

It will never cease to amaze me how we will manage to create, amongst however many differences and inherently dissimilar environments, patterns and similar stories and pieces of folklore, miles and minds apart.

I have seen throughout America, especially in rural Appalachia and further in the Midwest, what appear to be similarly patterned or cut pieces of Small Town, USA: a small intersection of a main street, a handful of antique stores along the spectrum of ready-for-business and abandoned, and a single movie theater with a marquee marked up, still by all accounts within the domain of the nineties and against all odds clinging to semi-relevance and just-dodging insolvency.

Of course, this odd uncanniness of familiarity is not limited to physical locations. The stories we tell, after all, can all be reduced down to a handful of skeletons. Beyond that, in the realm of the macabre and chilling, it is probably easy to iron out the framework of what makes horror horror and why urban legends remain told. It seems to me that every place I have been to has a "Cry Baby Bridge," and I visited the one hidden away in East Texas one American summer afternoon.

Camp Meta

No, the name is not me being clever (or the horrendously on-the-nose opposite). Once again, I found myself finally exploring a location that I had known of for quite some time, but either could never recall its exact location or if it was even an actual place that had existed. Seeing its entrance in brief passing, talking about it years ago, or even having seen similar locales in my dreams, may have contributed to never coherently pinning down the campground as a place that I could see and document, but I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to see this past spring.

The Frontier

In hindsight, the dismissive mental chuckle I felt in response to having my words received as “world-weary” might have been out of place. Perhaps that is as fitting of a title and label as someone could produce, either as a close companion or a stranger, coming across my thoughts. I have felt that I had moved beyond those fabled and cherished nights of the late teen / twenty-something with near-reckless abandon and equally as flippant of a schedule, yet find myself at four am on a Friday morning going back through the photographs of the day we found the abandoned Frontier Restaurant in the Catskills.

The Porcelain Brother

On a pleasant Saturday drive through the Pine Barrens and later through the farmlands surrounding Lawrenceville and Princeton, we found ourselves in the vicinity of a familiar and favorite past haunt: the House of the Porcelain Incident. On that initial visit many months ago, as we left the area, we saw one other boarded up and forgotten house, but it was strewn with a litany of warning signs were we to inspect the site. On this day, however, it was vacant, of both barricades and signs of recent inhabitance.

Pulling into the long dirt lot and following the crescent along the backyard and ending near the tree line, which opens up to the many acres of fields and farmland beyond, we did not really know what to expect. We found two small shed structures, one modern, the other falling apart and made of blackened wood. Beyond that, against the brush, was a collapsed workshop area, strewn with pieces of hardware, tools, household items, and even children’s toys. Ivy had tossed a Jurassic Park dinosaur head circa 1999 in my direction and we carefully mounted the puppet on a stick, to greet future visitors. We joked that someone had apparently Office Space’d a television monitor, as the electrical detritus and broken glass spattered the lot around the Escape.

The Penn Hills Resort

For New Year’s celebrations, some prefer partying with throngs of lovely strangers in the city; some with many loved ones in a home furnished for social gatherings. This last year, the gang and I decided to do something a little different. We rang in the New Year in a game-laden hotel room, telling horrible stories of fiction one word and a time, eating family-restaurant chain congealed appetizers two hours before the drop, and, of course, trekking into the Pocono Mountains and visiting the fabled Penn Hills Resort.

The Vacant House

One evening, late, driving around the extremities of our county and edging into the unyielding farmland and fields encompassing our stretch of suburbia, we discovered another forgotten home, as we are wont to do.

The House of the Porcelain Incident

More often than not, we find these locations through binges of thrill-seeking and horror-related researches, whether it be through personal accounts or folklore and fiction, but as is often the case, reality is sometimes more terrifyingly impressive than the fiction that has accumulated with time. Normalcy can trump the macabre with the right elements, in terms of creating discomfort and getting under your skin.