My son recently started listening to the Something Scary podcast. It's alright. I'm not much into podcast except for very granular niche ones like Limited Resources or The Command Zone. Both are about MTG so like I said, niche.
I appreciate the vocabulary and story telling he picks up albeit reading Reddit creepy pastas seems a bit pedestrian. I realize typing that as the guy with the blog no one reads is SOMETHING but there is a reason I leave my posts here and don't fire them off to be performed. And its not because these are awful! No, it's a conscious choice. This is art!
It remind me of the time I chased an urban legend. I went camping in Jackson Lake State Park in Ohio just over the border from Point Pleasant, West Virginia where….Mothman Lives!
In the 11th grade I read this book….The Big Book of The Unexplained. There is a whole series of these big books….Conspiracies, Freaks, Wild West, etc. All have various comics artists but a single author
This is where I first learned of Mothman and I was fascinated.
A monster like nothing else. Not a lizard kaiju. Or another hairy ape. Or a slithering lake monster breaking the waves in undulating lines.
A new flying monster that beats the air at nearly 100 miles an hour. With dagger headlight red eyes and an ability to spook and shudder. There he is crawling hanging above the street lamp just barely seen. Then he swoops over the joist and lunges at you. He has that feather flutter creepiness like how people are afraid of things with a a lot of holes. He is dusty (like a moth!) but also slick like the skin of a seal.
It's the eyes which even in the black and white of the comic pierced me. I don't have the book (If it still exists then it is buried somewhere in my mom's possessions) but maybe ill get it on the secondary market. I did find another blog with a scan and it is linked here.
Eyes do it for me. Black eyes like the almond inkiness of a grey alien put all my hairs on end. My sister's room with the dozen porcelain dolls each with a glistening glass eye. Unnerving.
They can do it in reverse. Big Sailor Moon eyes? Those are nice. All the primal responses to baby animals? Oh, those get me.
Jackson Lake State Park was disappointing. I learned on pulling up that while this was in a sleepy part of Ohio it was by no means isolated. The park itself is a glorified city park with decent acreage and a lily pad choked lake. Maybe it has more grounds but where you could camp? Well you could cross the whole grounds in 5 minutes. The nearby town of Oak Hill, OH had a Subway that was half gas station AND had a drive thru. When I lived in Cleveland proper we used to go to the Walz branch of the local library and that building was donated by a former doctor who ran his practice from there. And you could never shake the "Yeah this was an office building" feel. That was Jackson Lake. This used to be a city park and maybe they wanted to stop mowing it.
Jackson Lake did have plenty of ticks. They crawled over the inner fly of my tent in brigades of 6 to 8. They never got it but I watched them roll and pull in the yellow calcium light of the single pool that lit the outdoor shower shack. I avoided both Lyme Disease and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever but also burned myself on my camp stove. I had not brought any vegetable oil or Pam on which to grease the pan but did bring a vial of sesame oil. Because, oil is oil oil, right? I didn't even know something could light on fire that fast! A mound of oily rags on top of a malfunctioning space heater set in a pool of gasoline would ignite slower.
During the day, because there was no hiking on which to get lost, I read. I read a book on Somali pirates and John Keel's The Mothman Prophecies. As research, you see. That book is pulpy but has a paranoid travelogue vibe that is very 70s but also somewhat salient.
After a day of sitting I decide to head across the river to Point Pleasant
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