It was a nice October day, my friend had just gotten back from taking the GRE test for grad school. I had promised some cool adventure afterwards to relieve her stressed out mind. So we headed out to this place just a few minutes away that I had told her about. I had found it a few weeks earlier. Squeezed between the large cities and the lake there is a very small rural community that has been there for as long as the other cities however when they grew, it stayed the same. At some point right before the recent housing market crash some organization bought a large old farm and attempted to develop the many acres into a luxury community. Large lots, wide streets, culdesacs, fancy streetlights, roundabouts, gently curving sidewalks and paved lake-front walking paths, but that's about the only thing that ever got built, aside from three vacant unfinished model homes. Near as I can tell, they put in a first phase of the streets and utilities right before, or as the market crashed. None of the lots have sold. So the old farmyard sits in partially ruined, abandoned vacancy. The streets, some of them wide, divided, two lanes each way, with bike lanes, sit empty, without any traffic. The empty lots are overgrown with tumble weeds and annual brush that lay over the sidewalks almost totally obscuring their existence in many areas. These two pictures showing a wide empty street and part of the farmyard were taken on a previous exploration in September.
It's a really cool area, I have been there a few times to explore and take pictures, lots of pictures. Oh yeah, I did start this blog to be used with photography projects I've been working on, so I should include that this area has a lot of photo ops for experimenting with my new camera. That's basically what brings us to the story I mentioned earlier. So my friend had just finished her GRE test so we grabbed our cameras and headed out to take some cool pictures right before sunset. The sun drops earlier now and we quickly lost light, but we got enough good pictures to make it worth it.
After the sunset waned, but before it got completely dark we explored the abandoned farmyard and specifically the old barn. As I mentioned earlier, I had been there once before during the day so it was all familiar to me. It was getting darker so we traded our cameras in for flashlights. In hindsight this seems just like how a horror film would start: College age guy and girl out taking pictures at an abandoned farmyard, it gets dark, they switch to flashlights and enter a creepy building then stumble upon something terrifying. Just let your morbid imagination fill in the rest.
The barn had some pretty harmless graffiti in the main level, lots of random garbage and broken glass. About the only place that I hadn't already checked out during the day, was the loft of the old barn, accessible only by climbing a 16 foot wooden ladder. The rotating vents on the roof of the barn were receiving the gentle breeze from the lake and making an eerie metallic scraping and squeaking sound. I don't usually get creeped out easily, I've gone with friends to walk through cemeteries and other old buildings at night, even those with local legends such as Old Ebenezer's church in Dayton, Oregon. None of those places ever truly freaked me out and I suspected that this would be no different. I was proven wrong. This would be a good time to tell the small children to go in the other room, because we did exactly what you should not do if you find yourself in a horror movie. We climbed the 16 foot wooden ladder to the barn loft. In the dark...
In the first room of the loft, we didn't find much. Just a lot of old straw and bird crap, as I would expect to find in any old barn loft. There was also a lot of old papers scattered around and some old barrels. The old papers seemed to be from college homework assignments and reprinted copies of old magazines from the early 1900s. The back room of the loft was separated by a wall and a doorway. There was a symbol spray painted next to the doorway but we didn't pay it any attention, assuming it was just from some dumb kids. My friend was looking at some of the old documents and I was getting kind of bored with the place.
*Insert final warning of impending scariness: Some content may be disturbing to readers.*
I was shining my flashlight over her shoulder to help her see the old papers better, but I moved it down by my feet for a second when I noticed something unusual. I quickly scanned the rest of the room and realizing what we had walked into. I calmly but firmly announced, "Uh, I think we should go now." My friend being involved in the old papers asked why, to which I repeated, "We need to leave. Now." She stood up and turned around and I pointed with my flashlight, first at the floor next to us, then a couple feet away at a few different things while stating each time what I saw as the flashlight shone upon it. "Fur, skeleton, pentagram, bones. We Should Go." I am not making any part of this up.
Growing up on 75 acres in the country with no fences, I've seen my share of dead things in all sorts of situations. This was different. The fur was in chunks on the floor next to a blue plastic storage tub. The skeleton was about two feet away and split in two halves on a sheet of plywood that was laid on the floor with a 5 foot diameter pentagram painted on it. Another skull was off to the side and there were other bones scattered around the room and a few more symbols painted on the walls. My friend studied anthropology and archaeology so immediately she was distracted by the presence of bones and not the reason for why or how they got there. The skeleton had clearly been something canine related, but in just a few moments she was able to identify that the other skull was from a juvenile mammal, non-canine, and that there were two scapulas that didn't belong to either the skeleton or the skull. She knows her stuff, so it didn't take long for her to recognize that there was at least 3 different animals, all of which were too large to have gotten up a 16 foot wooden ladder by themselves. And that's when we proceeded to leave!
While I realized immediately what it was, it didn't sink in with her until we got back to the car. What we inadvertently walked into is often part of creepy local legends about old scary places and devil worship and sacrifices that occurred there. Probably 99% of the time it's just a story told to scare your friends or to get a girl to grab your arm. The symbols used have been around for millennia and have changed meanings over time. Many people will joke around about it and dumb teenagers will do stuff to emulate it because they think it's "cool". But the fact is that some of those dumb kids grow up and start taking it seriously. There are actually sick messed up people out there who do this stuff.
There is good and bad in this world. Many people acknowledge the existence of a God or supreme being. But the bad forces in this world are and can be just as real as the good forces. Why am I saying this? Because I believe that there is opposition in all things. Even though it is often joked about, there are things and practices in this world that we just shouldn't mess with. Besides that, there is the whole animal cruelty side of things. Whether or not whatever "energy" they tried to reach was fulfilled, I strongly disagree with the unjustified killing of those animals.
So that's the story and I will never be back to that barn ever again. I'm just glad that I got all the artistic and interesting pictures from around the barnyard before I discovered what was in the barn loft, because now I don't have to even set foot near the barn again. In the weeks before Halloween, many people were going to haunted houses and paying money to try to get scared. I got creeped out far worse than any haunted house could ever do, and I didn't even pay a cent. Hopefully I haven't given you all nightmares! To lighten things up a bit, I'll write something less dark.
On Tuesday, November 1st at 1am, all Halloween candy at Walmart was marked down 50%. I spent about 12 bucks on various assorted candies and since then I've been consuming more than I should. I have currently massed a large pile of empty candy wrappers. It's gotten to be a problem. At one point I opened a Kit Kat before I was even finished with my Hershey bar and I realized that at that moment I had become the equivalent of a chain smoker! Usually I am good about keeping my intake balanced with healthy foods and lots of water, but I'm already feeling the overload right now so I'm going to wrap this up and go eat something healthy to counteract the candy induced gut rot. I have more I'd like to write from the past month which I'll try and do tomorrow so until then, eat your candy wisely and don't go into abandoned barn lofts!
You forgot to mention the fact that your adventure to Wally world was with the same friend as your spooky barnyard adventure lol. Except on Halloween she wasn't as cool. She was just tired.
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