Eerie Exit
Kym Kemp / Monday, March 17, 2008 @ 5:57 a.m. / Family , Humboldt , Our Culture , Rural
Salmon Cr. Exit at Night
As a society we have a fascination with the ghostly world. The idea that something lurks outside of Real makes the hair stand up on our neck and bumps crawl across the flesh of our upper arms. Even those of us who don’t ‘really’ believe seem fascinated by the possibility. But when we experience first hand something eerie, we tend to move along, get out of there fast.
I don’t believe. Mostly. Even though I grew up in a haunted house. Even though I can remember the Grey Lady bumping in her rocking chair. I was just a kid. I believed a lot in those days.
I don’t believe in ghosts or spooky spirits anymore. But, there is a place where I don’t park my car and meet my mother any more either.
Occasionally, when time was tight on my drive from Eureka to marital arts in Garberville, my mom would drive to the Northern Salmon Creek freeway entrance and pick up my littlest so she could watch him while my older boys and I worked out. One or the other of us would get there first and wait in the dark shaded corner still in sight of the freeway.
For some reason, the area collects trash. Most of our road is nearly pristine but this one pullout close to the freeway, lush with thick trees and primeval ferns, is splattered with the trash of decades. People have tried to clean it up. I have seen orange trash bags stuffed full one day and old tires and newspapers there the next. And, eerily, the refuse never looks new but is always caked with decaying leaves and rotting vegetation.
Still, it was a good cool place to meet on hot summer days. We did this several times. I had a noisy carload of boys. Mom was alone.
I didn’t like the place. The pasty streamers of toilet paper slid from beneath decomposing plants. An ancient mattress with rusty stains leered at me from beside a severed stump. No matter how noisy the boys, they always quieted as we sat there. Waiting. The air pushed down hard against the car windows and somehow, no matter how hot, I wasn’t comfortable with the glass open. I tamped down those feelings. I tried to ignore them.
But one day Mom said, “Why don’t I meet you on the other side, next to the Holmgren Homestead?” Abashed she added, “I know it’s silly but I just get the creeps in the other place.”
Not long after that, I saw the local rescue squad there. “What’s up?”
The leader shook her head and laughed, “Oh, some guy roaming the woods swears he saw a body up there. But after we got out here, he couldn’t find it again and neither could we. Probably just smoked too much of his product.”
I smiled. Nodded. Maybe. Maybe not.
Nothing happened there to us. No evil spirit showed its severed head. No ghostly apparition intoned hollow voiced warnings to us. But, nonetheless, I’m glad we meet on the other side now.
I’m glad we moved along. I’m glad we got out of there.
And, I wonder if they’ll ever find that body.
Related tags: country, freeway, ghost, haunted, salmon-creek, spooky
Firstly, because the existence of ghosts and the like make things more interesting.
But also, from a scientific standpoint, the human brain is one big electric engine and, as physics tells us, energy can be neither created nor destroyed, just transformed. So, when a person dies, all of that brain energy has to go somewhere, right?
The Afterlife?
I know what you mean though. I don’t really believe but, somehow, I don’t really not believe either.
But, if you look at any of the “evidence” of hauntings, it always includes some kind of weird electro-magnetic energy.
When I lived up the Mill Creek watershed outside of Fortuna city limits, I had a feeling there was someone living in our woods and watching us. One evening I noticed there was a trail off Mill Street. I followed it and found a camp in the woods. I called the sheriff’s office and a deputy came out and checked it out. they found a journal of the camper, a parolee according to his writing and he was camping in our woods.
By the way, Grandma has always felt the same way about that particular corner. She often comments about her feelings when we pass that way.
The people who owned our home before us lived here for 40 years. They had eleven children who scattered all over the U.S. The first night we stayed here, I was awoken by a sound in the living room.
“Mama! Mama!” The little voice cried. I thought one of my sons had woken up.
But no. They were both sound asleep and the sound still called even as I looked in on the boys.
I followed it and the minute I entered the kitchen, it stopped.
I’m convinced the family that lived here still keep a watch over our home. It doesn’t creep me out. They are benevolent and kind.
Your story DID creep me out, however.
That is also near to where the “bad guys” lived- the ones the police told me to forget about when we figured out that they were probably the thieves that broke into my car, and stole a bunch of things I’d been planning to take with me when I moved into the dorms for college. I was warned that it wasn’t worth risking my life for. I have always had a bit of anger there at that spot as well…