- Joined
- Nov 6, 2013
My cousin and I went to a couple abandoned places today. This marks the third time we've been to them, but today's incident was so WTF-worthy that I have to tell you what happened all three times, because I've posted all the material in a blog on another forum.
First entry: April 3, 2010. I was 15 at the time and my cousin was 13. This is a direct copy-paste from the original blog post.
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So, several months ago, I discovered a book in my grandfather's guest bedroom about odd local legends. I decided to read it and was spooked, because one of the scary local legends was of a supposedly "haunted" abandoned road (which was purportedly closed off to the public, so you'd have to walk most of it). This road had quite a few pages dedicated to people's tales about it and the like. And the location? The same neighborhood where my cousin, whose house I am at currently.
So we were interested in this story! I showed my cousin the story, and she was like "Irwin Road! I've seen that name before - it's around here!"
Not that I was surprised; it was in the same neighborhood, after all. But the fact that she had seen it made it even creepier. It didn't help that I had been scared out of my wits from the rest of the book and only got like two hours of sleep the previous night.
Well, yesterday I reminded her about the existence of the road, and we managed to convince my mom to drive us down there to check it out. We found a map of the neighborhood with the abandoned road on it, although it didn't really help to show us where to go, so my mom Mapquested it. Apparently there are a lot of roads called that in her city. So we looked at a local map and zoomed in.
Upon zooming in, me and my cousin began to get frightened. The road intersected a more popular road, and went a little ways and appeared to stop. My cousin told us to scroll up, since she thought she'd seen another road with the sane name. So we did, and... there was! There was another road with that name coming from another street. It went southeast a little ways and then abruptly turned north. But the portion that went southeast, before this more-than-90-degree turn, appeared to head directly toward the first road! My mom reasoned that this whole non-existent stretch between the two roads was where the road had been closed to the public... and this really freaked my cousin and me out. What reason could there have been for such a huge stretch of road to be closed? So we went to check it out.
It was still daylight out, although the sun was sinking and we were worried it would get dark before we returned. I don't think a haunted road is a good place to be at night when you and your cousin are complete scaredy-cats. But it only took us like ten minutes to get down there. We saw a the road, which was marked with a street sign announcing it as such, and turned left onto it. Almost immediately, the pavement was transformed into a wide dirt path. A sign at the entrance to the road read "Authorized Vehicles Only" - which freaked my mom out, because really, what was so bad about the road that they had to put such a sign up?
But we continued along. The dirt gradually turned to pavement, but it was hard to tell it was pavement, since the road was pretty much abandoned to everyone except joggers (one of which we saw near the start of our journey down the road). It was worn by time and weather and faded - and I wondered: when exactly had this road been built... and subsequently abandoned?
As the main street disappeared from the rearview mirrors and there was nothing except dead winter forest on both sides (with wetlands mixed on on our left), my cousin and I began to freak out: I had mixed the tales of the original book together and associated the tendency of cars to break down and refuse to start to Irwin, despite the fact that such legends went with other roads. If the car broke down, we certainly didn't want to be walking back through a "haunted" road at dusk!
So we hysterically begged my mom to turn around. But she said to us "You're going to kick yourselves tomorrow, when you say 'I went down to the abandoned road but didn't even bother going on it!'" We agreed, and continued, tensely, down the road.
Where the road became blocked off to the general public, there was a metal barrier across the road and a sign which read "Authorized Motor Vehicles". An alternate path branched off to the right. Instead of following it, we turned around and retraced our path.
... Well, we were kind of freaking out when we were down there. Because, to our left, there was something of interest.
A single brown mailbox.
No house, no foundations (the book wrote of the existence of house foundations along the road), just a single, desolate mailbox.
It was certainly ominous to two hyperactive, easily-scared teenagers; we became hysterical once more and on the way back up the road I couldn't help but keep casting glances out the back window at road behind us, my imagination telling me that perhaps there would be something we missed out there.
But no, just a mailbox.
Well, and a birdhouse on a tree behind the mailbox. Despite the fact that there was no house and no house remains anywhere nearby. The birdhouse freaked us out a bit more than the mailbox, even.
On the way back to my cousin's house, she suggested we go by another house she'd always thought of as "haunted": it was in the dense forest across the lake and there didn't appear to be any point to it at first glance. My mom said we could check it out, so we drove around the edge of the lake and through a road that went through the forest. Upon approaching the house, we realized that the road veered away from it; we could see it through the trees, but there didn't appear to be any way to get to it.
Or wait, that's a lie. To our left, appearing to head down to the house, there were a couple stone trails - you know the kind; old dirt roads end up having dirt/stone trails where car wheels would roll and then grass everywhere else - heading toward the house, but they stopped and turned into grass. It looked as if it had been a dirt/stone road at one point, but it hadn't been used in even longer than the abandoned road; the trail had literally vanished under grass. But the trees in the forest were cut away in a very path-like fashion, which is why we believed it was ever a trail at all. My mom didn't want to follow it, for fear she'd be trespassing on private property.
Also of note was the cross and the gravestone a few yards down from the nonexistent path. It was most likely the site of a death from a car accident, but the fact that it happened to be so close to the house kind of spooked me and my cousin.
We turned around and my cousin suggested trying it from the other side; so we crossed the lake and headed onto the same road we'd been on earlier, from the other direction. There was a large grassy field to our right; there were a couple faded stone trails coming from the woods, and my mom reasoned that that was where the nonexistent path we'd seen earlier came out from the house. We didn't follow those paths, but we kept going along the road - and found a more consistent stone path that led right down to the house!
As we approached, we saw something we couldn't see from across the lake: A large fenced-out rectangle with a depression inside - which was something like ten feet deep, and had a single tree growing in the very center of the area. My mom reasoned that it was probably some sort of pump, and the house itself - which was on our right; the fence was on our left - was perhaps some sort of office building. Well, it certainly was an unused office building: the door was rusting and there were moss and plants growing all over the place. We couldn't go all the way around the path - there was a ridiculously muddy section in front of us - so we turned around (which was an ordeal, considering we were in a minivan and there was a slightly-longer-than-minivan width between the fence and short but steep cliff, and we had to turn around in that margin) and drove off. Then we went back to my cousin's house.
---
I updated the blog again a few months ago (in July most likely, although a database crash means I lost the exact date of the second blog post) with the following picture of the abandoned mailbox:
---
Then today we went back to the abandoned house and road and I took a shitton of pictures. More copy pasting:
My cousin and I returned to both the house and Irwin Road today. I think this'll be the last time we attempt it for a long, long time.
My cousin drives now, so we decided to head over to both the house and the road while her mom and sisters (and my sister) were off ice skating. Both places are very close to her house, so it's not that much of a problem. We go to the house first, and not having been there in four and a half years I'd forgotten how "visible" the house was - you can see it right from the road, especially when it's as late in the year as it is now and all the leaves are off the trees. One of my main motivations this time around was to take a ton of pictures specifically for this post, so:
Approaching the house from the main(ish) road running by it.
Closer view.
The fenced-in pit thing described in the initial description of the house. You can see some red graffiti - there was a small amount of graffiti on the house itself.
I'm 98% sure that the first time we went, there was an actual door, rather than boarded up panes. Perhaps the graffiti is evidence of people breaking in and that's why the door was boarded, or something?
The inside of the pit thing. I'm standing up right next to it to take the pic, to give an idea of height.
The other side of the house. You can see the lake in the background - the lake we originally saw this house across, and had to cross to access it.
Another angle, and my cousin turning her car around.
Stairs leading up to what looks like a rusted walkway running alongside the fenced-in area? I'm not quite sure.
The other side of the walkway-thing, taken to illustrate how long nature has been reclaiming this area.
Then we went off to the abandoned road, where I got ample pictures. The pictures will illustrate what happened this time around.
Approaching the road. You can see the main road heading off to the right, and the marked difference between the shoulder that leads to the abandoned road and the main road.
Pictures taken at various stages of progressing down the road.
Approaching the place where the road ends. Straight ahead is a barricade that would prohibit vehicle movement and thus require us to walk the length of the road. Supposedly, the house foundations spoken of in the urban myths are down that way, and I was hoping we would get to walk down it.
... We didn't. You'll see why.
But in this picture you can also see the abandoned mailbox, and the road running off to the right. The one that runs off to the right is crazy narrow and long, with no places to turn around, so we've never tried it because we didn't know where it would end up.
This is a shot of said narrow road as it winds away from us at the crossroads.
And the barricade in front of us.
Now, my cousin is interested in seeing what lies off to the right. We're not in a minivan anymore, so we might find better places to turn around later on, or we might come out on some sort of main road, so we decide "why the heck not?" and begin down it.
The rest in the next post because image limits.
First entry: April 3, 2010. I was 15 at the time and my cousin was 13. This is a direct copy-paste from the original blog post.
---
So, several months ago, I discovered a book in my grandfather's guest bedroom about odd local legends. I decided to read it and was spooked, because one of the scary local legends was of a supposedly "haunted" abandoned road (which was purportedly closed off to the public, so you'd have to walk most of it). This road had quite a few pages dedicated to people's tales about it and the like. And the location? The same neighborhood where my cousin, whose house I am at currently.
So we were interested in this story! I showed my cousin the story, and she was like "Irwin Road! I've seen that name before - it's around here!"
Not that I was surprised; it was in the same neighborhood, after all. But the fact that she had seen it made it even creepier. It didn't help that I had been scared out of my wits from the rest of the book and only got like two hours of sleep the previous night.
Well, yesterday I reminded her about the existence of the road, and we managed to convince my mom to drive us down there to check it out. We found a map of the neighborhood with the abandoned road on it, although it didn't really help to show us where to go, so my mom Mapquested it. Apparently there are a lot of roads called that in her city. So we looked at a local map and zoomed in.
Upon zooming in, me and my cousin began to get frightened. The road intersected a more popular road, and went a little ways and appeared to stop. My cousin told us to scroll up, since she thought she'd seen another road with the sane name. So we did, and... there was! There was another road with that name coming from another street. It went southeast a little ways and then abruptly turned north. But the portion that went southeast, before this more-than-90-degree turn, appeared to head directly toward the first road! My mom reasoned that this whole non-existent stretch between the two roads was where the road had been closed to the public... and this really freaked my cousin and me out. What reason could there have been for such a huge stretch of road to be closed? So we went to check it out.
It was still daylight out, although the sun was sinking and we were worried it would get dark before we returned. I don't think a haunted road is a good place to be at night when you and your cousin are complete scaredy-cats. But it only took us like ten minutes to get down there. We saw a the road, which was marked with a street sign announcing it as such, and turned left onto it. Almost immediately, the pavement was transformed into a wide dirt path. A sign at the entrance to the road read "Authorized Vehicles Only" - which freaked my mom out, because really, what was so bad about the road that they had to put such a sign up?
But we continued along. The dirt gradually turned to pavement, but it was hard to tell it was pavement, since the road was pretty much abandoned to everyone except joggers (one of which we saw near the start of our journey down the road). It was worn by time and weather and faded - and I wondered: when exactly had this road been built... and subsequently abandoned?
As the main street disappeared from the rearview mirrors and there was nothing except dead winter forest on both sides (with wetlands mixed on on our left), my cousin and I began to freak out: I had mixed the tales of the original book together and associated the tendency of cars to break down and refuse to start to Irwin, despite the fact that such legends went with other roads. If the car broke down, we certainly didn't want to be walking back through a "haunted" road at dusk!
So we hysterically begged my mom to turn around. But she said to us "You're going to kick yourselves tomorrow, when you say 'I went down to the abandoned road but didn't even bother going on it!'" We agreed, and continued, tensely, down the road.
Where the road became blocked off to the general public, there was a metal barrier across the road and a sign which read "Authorized Motor Vehicles". An alternate path branched off to the right. Instead of following it, we turned around and retraced our path.
... Well, we were kind of freaking out when we were down there. Because, to our left, there was something of interest.
A single brown mailbox.
No house, no foundations (the book wrote of the existence of house foundations along the road), just a single, desolate mailbox.
It was certainly ominous to two hyperactive, easily-scared teenagers; we became hysterical once more and on the way back up the road I couldn't help but keep casting glances out the back window at road behind us, my imagination telling me that perhaps there would be something we missed out there.
But no, just a mailbox.
Well, and a birdhouse on a tree behind the mailbox. Despite the fact that there was no house and no house remains anywhere nearby. The birdhouse freaked us out a bit more than the mailbox, even.
On the way back to my cousin's house, she suggested we go by another house she'd always thought of as "haunted": it was in the dense forest across the lake and there didn't appear to be any point to it at first glance. My mom said we could check it out, so we drove around the edge of the lake and through a road that went through the forest. Upon approaching the house, we realized that the road veered away from it; we could see it through the trees, but there didn't appear to be any way to get to it.
Or wait, that's a lie. To our left, appearing to head down to the house, there were a couple stone trails - you know the kind; old dirt roads end up having dirt/stone trails where car wheels would roll and then grass everywhere else - heading toward the house, but they stopped and turned into grass. It looked as if it had been a dirt/stone road at one point, but it hadn't been used in even longer than the abandoned road; the trail had literally vanished under grass. But the trees in the forest were cut away in a very path-like fashion, which is why we believed it was ever a trail at all. My mom didn't want to follow it, for fear she'd be trespassing on private property.
Also of note was the cross and the gravestone a few yards down from the nonexistent path. It was most likely the site of a death from a car accident, but the fact that it happened to be so close to the house kind of spooked me and my cousin.
We turned around and my cousin suggested trying it from the other side; so we crossed the lake and headed onto the same road we'd been on earlier, from the other direction. There was a large grassy field to our right; there were a couple faded stone trails coming from the woods, and my mom reasoned that that was where the nonexistent path we'd seen earlier came out from the house. We didn't follow those paths, but we kept going along the road - and found a more consistent stone path that led right down to the house!
As we approached, we saw something we couldn't see from across the lake: A large fenced-out rectangle with a depression inside - which was something like ten feet deep, and had a single tree growing in the very center of the area. My mom reasoned that it was probably some sort of pump, and the house itself - which was on our right; the fence was on our left - was perhaps some sort of office building. Well, it certainly was an unused office building: the door was rusting and there were moss and plants growing all over the place. We couldn't go all the way around the path - there was a ridiculously muddy section in front of us - so we turned around (which was an ordeal, considering we were in a minivan and there was a slightly-longer-than-minivan width between the fence and short but steep cliff, and we had to turn around in that margin) and drove off. Then we went back to my cousin's house.
---
I updated the blog again a few months ago (in July most likely, although a database crash means I lost the exact date of the second blog post) with the following picture of the abandoned mailbox:
---
Then today we went back to the abandoned house and road and I took a shitton of pictures. More copy pasting:
My cousin and I returned to both the house and Irwin Road today. I think this'll be the last time we attempt it for a long, long time.
My cousin drives now, so we decided to head over to both the house and the road while her mom and sisters (and my sister) were off ice skating. Both places are very close to her house, so it's not that much of a problem. We go to the house first, and not having been there in four and a half years I'd forgotten how "visible" the house was - you can see it right from the road, especially when it's as late in the year as it is now and all the leaves are off the trees. One of my main motivations this time around was to take a ton of pictures specifically for this post, so:
Approaching the house from the main(ish) road running by it.
Closer view.
The fenced-in pit thing described in the initial description of the house. You can see some red graffiti - there was a small amount of graffiti on the house itself.
I'm 98% sure that the first time we went, there was an actual door, rather than boarded up panes. Perhaps the graffiti is evidence of people breaking in and that's why the door was boarded, or something?
The inside of the pit thing. I'm standing up right next to it to take the pic, to give an idea of height.
The other side of the house. You can see the lake in the background - the lake we originally saw this house across, and had to cross to access it.
Another angle, and my cousin turning her car around.
Stairs leading up to what looks like a rusted walkway running alongside the fenced-in area? I'm not quite sure.
The other side of the walkway-thing, taken to illustrate how long nature has been reclaiming this area.
Then we went off to the abandoned road, where I got ample pictures. The pictures will illustrate what happened this time around.
Approaching the road. You can see the main road heading off to the right, and the marked difference between the shoulder that leads to the abandoned road and the main road.
Pictures taken at various stages of progressing down the road.
Approaching the place where the road ends. Straight ahead is a barricade that would prohibit vehicle movement and thus require us to walk the length of the road. Supposedly, the house foundations spoken of in the urban myths are down that way, and I was hoping we would get to walk down it.
... We didn't. You'll see why.
But in this picture you can also see the abandoned mailbox, and the road running off to the right. The one that runs off to the right is crazy narrow and long, with no places to turn around, so we've never tried it because we didn't know where it would end up.
This is a shot of said narrow road as it winds away from us at the crossroads.
And the barricade in front of us.
Now, my cousin is interested in seeing what lies off to the right. We're not in a minivan anymore, so we might find better places to turn around later on, or we might come out on some sort of main road, so we decide "why the heck not?" and begin down it.
The rest in the next post because image limits.
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