Humberstone Ghost Town

Well that was a cheerful little piece of journalism.  :/ 
 Ghost towns are fascinating but dangerous.  Not just from the hazards of tetanus or having a building collapse on you, but from critters or people who might not have completely moved out.  I remember a camping trip I took with some of my fellow photog majors.  We took a detour to see what we had been promised was a remote and beautiful abaonded mining town.  It was beautiful in a weathered sort of way, but not abandoned.  A crazy old guy on a bicycle with a shotgun strapped to the handlbars chased us out of town before we could get a word in edge wise, we never went back.

And the winner is not nachista (big girls blouse!) but the student with an always ready camera who got a shot of the crazy old coot on a bicycle with a shotgun strapped to his handlebars. I suspect it was the group of photog majors who were framed.

'Just like an old time movie
'Bout a ghost from a wishin' well
In a castle dark or a fortress strong
With chains upon my feet
You know that ghost is me
And I will never be set free
As long as I'm a ghost that you can't see ...'

Love that Gordon Lightfoot.

For me...It's the flesh and blood menaces that are to be feared.
I doubt that ghosts real or imagined hang out in eerie places to entertain humans when the Ritz would do nicely and not having to pay. Casper was cool.

The concept that time and space is more complex than we currently understand will no doubt lead us to a greater understanding someday. Love legends, myths and folklore and old places with new memories.

Good morning, everybody. I see the old gang is a little slow coming out of the chute this morning, which is a cold and rainy Saturday in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains around here. I think that I actually have encountered my share of reclusive individuals who ride bicycles with shotguns strapped across the handlebars. Doing voter registration before the last presidential election down the more remote addresses meant following "roads" that could properly only be categorized as trails. Job #1 was assuring the "locals" that we weren't with the Alcohol Tobacco & Firearms Agency (looking for moonshine stills) or Human Services (formerly called the Welfare Department). Much of America isn't too different in some ways from a foreign country.....

Gordon Lightfoot: arguably Canada's best export, unless perhaps you consider Ian & Sylvia. Not sure who's from Canada among contemporary balladeers & musicians.

Hahaha Hazel you're right I didn't get that shot but I know at least one person did.  I only had my medium format with me that day and it isn't exatly a "run n gun" camera.  TT and Bert, I like Gordon Lightfoot as well.  A lot of people my age don't know who he is unless you say "The guy who sings The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald", and even then it's a gamble on whether or not they recognize it.  Song For A Winter's Night is one of my all time favorite songs.  Bert if you ask them, Great Big Sea would like to tell you that they are Canada's premier balladeers these days.

In high school, my chums and I went to an abandoned sanitarium. It had been used from the early 1900s to the '50s.

It was super spooky.

One of the room's doors was bricked closed, but I had found another hidden entrance. So I snuck inside after leaving instructions with a friend to goad somebody into knocking on the bricks blocking the door.

So the "toughest" girl knocked on the bricks and joked, "Hey anybody home?"

You can imagine the screams when I pounded back and yelled, "OH MY GOD, LET ME OUT!" One of my favorite high school memories.

Hanging around here lately one begins to believe in ghosts, starting with Mr.P. (rimshot). No disrespect for our esteemed Host, just being a wisenheimer.

I hope I still have a GHOST of a chance at the $$$

It is an hour past midday and I can almost hear the echo of my thoughts in this usually busy neighborhood that has only born witness to a handful of contributors today,  greetings to those who have poked their noses out of the rabbit holes to voice the thoughts.

I hope the low turnout is not the result of the storms havoc on the East Coast.  May they all be safe.

So many horror stories gave been written about ghost towns or great cities that have been left lifeless and in the process of being reclaimed by the nature they once shared.

These cities and towns didn't just happen.  They began as a 'leap of faith', the prosperous hopes, wishes, and dreams of their founders that then grew and thrived as long as their reason for birth either held true, or they were able to adapt and succeed at other ventures, other reasons to believe that new hopes and dreams will renew its past glory.

It's no wonder that deserted, decaying, hopeless towns and cities are such great fodder for scary mystery and horror stories.  They have become nothing more than the memories of the founders now encased in the dead air and decaying structures that were built on the hope of good things to come.

They frighten us even though they may still offer incredible picturesque scenes of beauty in their own way.....like old barns do.....these places are not for living things with a future in their hearts. They resent your being there and make such eirie noises as creaking doors and groaning walls to bid you to hasten your departure.

Peace out

In agreement with PL.  I have a determined belief that abandoned structures absorb into their walls part of the lifeforce of those who lived within them.  A sort of imprint.  Not necessarily spooky, not exactly ghostly, not in the stephen king sense, but there's remainders inside, even if only one wall stands, remainders of lives once lived there.  ...  Not bad energy, not even energy, just absorption into the walls...can't explain it.  but I am fascinated by older houses, not the grand kind, but the houses that housed families with a life going on in them, for decades preferably...it's not the architecture that gets to me, per se, more the why of that choice of architecture or design by a person or persons long gone...the answer is in the walls, I think.  You just have to look hard, and the stories tell themselves... 

PARK4~ You are right about houses somehow absorbing memories of occupants past and present. When we moved into a ramshackle old farmhouse, one of the upstairs rooms was HUGE and I had this 'flash' of rows of beds like something from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Some years later I called the Doctor to visit my son - my Doctor was on holiday and had roped in his retired Doctor father as locum. The dear old Doctor picked his way through the Scalextric tracks and Leggo bricks and sat on my sons bed ..... "Last time I was in this room, I was a young man and there were eight beds in here with children who had chicken pox!" A previous occupant had fostered children on a grand scale. "Hmmm~" said the Doctor, "This is Rubella (German Measles) I'm glad you didn't bring him to my surgery." All sorts of strange things happened in that house, tales to save for another day.
I love old places, especially if they are abandoned. In Wales there were plenty of abandoned industrial settlements and agricultural buildings as times changed. Deep underground in the slate caverns of Wales, the krew on each level would build themselves a 'Caban' - a stone-built hut to brew tea and eat packed lunch and tell stories and READ out loud or recite poetry, sing hymns and traditional songs. There was a real brotherhood down there among those men who worked by candle light and did not have a great life expectancy. Those long abandoned Cabans are haunted, I'm sure.

Twice a year, in April and November, one may participate for a fee in the Old Homes tour on the Bull Run Mountains with breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon included.  Park, you would really enjoy it.  You hike about the mountain visiting old home sites. Sometimes it's a just a foundation and graves, some of which on one property we know are slaves.   Somtimes it's an the entire abandon house and shed, and in one case a few standing, stone walls that are really beginning to lean and a grave site further up the path.  The young man who leads the tour has made a well researched and extensive study of the people who lived on the mountain and is most entertaining in his presentation.   There is, indeed the "sort of imprint" that you feel at each place. 

Miss Park and Peter Lake, you bring to mind one of my favorite poems. Would you mind if I copy it here?

You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of
the next moment. All the immense
images in me -- the far-off, deeply-felt
landscape, cities, towers, and bridges, and
unsuspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods--
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house-- , and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me.
Streets that I chanced upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and,
startled, gave back my too-sudden image.
Who knows? Perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening...

Rainer Maria Rilke

Hello all! Just in from a day of taking the granddaughter (age 10) to the Booth Western Museum Cowboy Festival since 10 am....[Speaking of old abandoned ghost towns, and the old West. We saw an abandoned town in the edge of Death Valley in California last month. Again, some kind of eerie to think of all those who once moved, ate, laughed, loved, lived and died in those few buildings. ] Today, however, lots of people, cowboys, and Western themes.

As we passed the small cemetery in my development (family of those who once lived here where the dam and lake are now), g'dau. said, "Hold your breath!" I had never heard that you must or else the spirits of the unhappy dead might enter your breath and take over your body...! Who makes up this stuff?!

Today, we were taken back to the 1880's in Cartersville, GA with recreations of camps, crafts ( spinning, blacksmithing, bow making -with a target in a bale of hay for the kids to try their aim), chuckwagons, fast draw shoot outs, Indian dancing and legends, many booths/tents/leanto's of leather, jewelry, hats, food, and children's activities. Kids could paint a plywood cut out shape of a horse, buffalo, teepee; a real rock, or do watercolor, ride a pony, rope a steer's head plastic model, throw horseshoes, or have a face painted.

The museum itself is chock full of some of the great Western paintings and sculpture ( we were told - I do not know "great" any kind of art), and the lovely modern design is first class with a see -through glass elevatior, huge interactive children's area, and large bronze sculptures outside in the courtyard of the bucking bronc, Native American women and children, and many horses.

For TT and Nachista.....

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/6982506/gordon_lightfoot_if_you_could_read_my_mind_youtube/

Paolos, well done. Thank you.

Hello all, is anyone affected, or will be affected by Hurricane Sandy? I hope Julia is okay. I had the idea that NY doesn't get affected much by hurricanes but I see there was a major one in 1938

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7b21g-5YBLs

Nice stories from all today! SAJ! Very funny! Now I have to adjust the image I have of you. This is going to sound weird, but I believe the house I owned just before I moved to Tassie was inhabited by a destructive tree spirit. The large banyan tree in the school field behind my house was cut down and I think that released it. It gave my family alot of trouble.

Here, Port Arthur, about an hour + drive from me, is spooky. Now an open air museum, it was a convict settlement, during the 18th and 19th century when England sent all their convicts over. If walls could talk it would tell of the sad history of criminals, some as young as nine. Mum who has a heightened 6th sense, hates visiting here and will not go into the enclosed areas. Neither did the boys when they were very young. In 1996, Port Arthur was the scene of a "top-5 global list of massacres by an individual" when Martin Bryant went on a rampage. He is behind bars, never to be released; I can't confirm it but remember reading somewhere that it costs $500,000 a year to keep him there.

On this day, in 1858, Teddy Roosevelt was born ... and became one of the few Great Presidents we have had ... One of his most poignant Legacies, was an answer he gave about his young cousin, in which he said, "He is a stinker, and bears watching ..."  Teddy, it seems ... was adept at understatement, very early on .......

Peter, Paolo...Giants 3-0 series lead. Will history be made tomorrow? I don't think so. I think the Giants will win. Whoohoo!

Jane, they have to sell more hot dogs so the series has to go to at least 5 or six games with the Giants winning, What a great story they have become.

000000000!

I have lived in a couple different houses over the years that have made me question "hauntings". I always manage to disregard these things at bedtime though, in order to sleep...
The house we bought prior to our current home, was built by a man who suddenly dropped dead from a heart attack in the living room. His wife sold the house to another couple who eventually sold the house to my husband and I, complete with the warning "we think we should tell you that we've seen a ghost". Not long after we moved in, we were rushing around the house preparing for dinner with the in-laws. I was heading to the basement for something and my oldest son was downstairs, about to run up the steps so we met simultaneously at opposite ends of the stairwell. We both stopped dead in our tracks (no pun intended) when we saw the brightest, whitest, flash of light suspended between us. It was like an explosion without sound. It was like lightning without a bolt. It was unexplainable but we both saw it. There was no sound. It wasnt near the ceiling, nor near the floor...just right before our eyes. My husband saw the reflection of light against the backdoor and thought it was about to storm, but there wasnt a cloud in the sky...no lightning. That's the only time we all saw it at once. There were other unexplainable "things" but I fear repeating the stories may lead to the villagers referring me to SAJ's sanitorium...HA!

I believe you Graygoose.

According to String Theory, there are 10 dimensions, according to M Theory , eleven. I say ghosts just inhabit another dimension and every now and then, our worlds/dimensions collide. That's what I'm going with ! :)