A Solstice

These wooded ridges and valleys are old. They are old in a sense generally understood in common conversation; old relative to known historical events; old in terms of their first recorded settlement. Yet these shrouded peaks and vales are far, far older than most can imagine. Secrets sleep here that are best left uncovered.

My very first introduction to the Woolly Booger "legend" came in the course of casual conversation. I heard some older teens talking about going to park "up at Woolly Booger". I'd never heard of it and I wasn't supposed to be listening in on their conversation, so I didn't ask them. Later I asked someone else that I already knew if they knew what Woolly Booger was. "Thats the cursed pond over on the old Taylor place. People go out there to party or make out, or... whatever. Not at the pond, but there's a lane out there where the house used to be." In the years since I still have to consider this as the simplest and most honest answer to the question.

Little by little over time I heard more details, all of them vague, but sharing a theme of foreboding. There were never specifics, but always an air of something sinister underlying. Someone had died there. Numerous people had died there. The place was haunted by Maidred's Ghost. These were the exchange of urban, or in this instance rural legends, common among young people in every age. Among young people of that day a trip to park up at Woolly Booger overnight was akin to accepting a dare to spend the night in a haunted house. Thus was the limit of my understanding of Woolly Booger in the summer of '76.

It was a busy summer. There was an election campaign, the looming bi-centennial celebration, and the summer Olympics. But those came later. There was something bigger than all of these things that was going to happen first. You've just never heard about it.

After that first weekend on the bridge we had excitedly shared the news of the National Guard maneuvers. During the week that followed  a scheme was hatched to hold a bonfire party at the old Taylor place the coming weekend. Saturday the 19th was proposed first, but then it was noted that moon rise on Sunday the 20th actually occurred after midnight, at 12:39 AM on the 21st. Which also happened to be the arrival of the Summer Solstice. To be held on an abandoned estate, which was supposedly haunted. I didn't need to hear more. I was in.

Preparations were started on Thursday and by Sunday afternoon a site had been prepared in what had been the front yard of the old Taylor house. The house had finally been demolished six years earlier, but remnants still cast their shadows. There were bits of the foundation, crumbling and grown over, but showing very plainly where the house had been. At the edge of some brush, maybe thirty feet from our fire circle, there was still a cluster of rhododendrons growing. As one headed further away from the road the land takes a steady rise, up toward the orchards which had been been planted upon a ridge above the home. In those years one could wander about the grounds of the old estate and see all the vestiges of what had once been. The errant lily or iris was common. A lone cheery tree or yew would stand out of place and these may be found still.

The entry lane from the road had never been paved, but the original circle was laid with stone in the 1890s. It had been a lane approximately twelve feet wide, traversing a distance of two-hundred feet and looping back in a circle half that distance. At one time a small carriage house had stood at the far side of the loop; a structure removed years before the house. It was all grown over with grass and weeds by then, but it still provided a clear gravel pathway. There was another lane on the old property, one that went away from the house and parallel with the road. I don't think it was part of the original design. It was a mowed path at the edge of a tree line, heading up onto another ridge. There were ruts worn with the large tracks of tractor tires. It was some path that had been cleared by the Park Service, for reasons unknown, though it did show that it was still in regular use.

Early that afternoon I was informed by a couple of older boys that this lane would take you to the top of the ridge. From there was to be found the "easiest" access down to the dreaded Woolly Booger. Eventually I was goaded into hiking up that trail, accompanied by the two older boys and Becky, a tomboyish girl of 15 who was notorious for her exploits on a dirtbike. It was a spectacularly beautiful  day. Seventy-seven degrees, low humidity and sunny blue skies with loose cumulus cloud. 

When we got to the top of the ridge there was a small opening in the tree line. It looked like a deer trail. It was the termination of this ridge and it's intersection with the orchard ridge which created the steep pocket where the "pond" was nestled. Exiting the mowed path I ducked my head beneath the arch of tangled greenery and into the gloom beyond. I could see that there was a rim of earth for only a few feet ahead and beyond a very steep drop. Becky edged in through the opening behind me and I stepped over to the edge. I grabbed hold of a grapevine and leaned over to look down. I could see that although the path was very steep, it was crossed throughout with roots and stones that formed a sort of natural staircase down to the bottom. I struggled against a wave of vertigo as Becky came to my side. As we looked down together we were both left momentarily breathless by what we saw.

I reckoned it to be a drop of one-hundred to one-hundred-twenty feet down to the water's surface. The water was glowing. I don't know how else to describe it. There was a light from under the water's surface, an intense white light. But that was not all. There were soldiers down there in masks and weird suits. There was a cable fixed down the slope, like a zip line. Maybe for ease of getting down there? Or to bring something up? Becky and I looked at each other and she had already decided she had seen enough. "Unh-uh! Fuck that! I ain't going down there!" We were able to slink away unseen.

Back out at the path we told the two other boys what we had seen. They both called bull shit and we each challenged them to look for themselves. The two of them could not agree on looking, but when the one who was for it ducked into the brush the other then followed. We spent a tense few minutes waiting on them. Becky didn't want to hang around any longer. I let her get started back down to the circle. I remember feeling kind of chicken shit for not going with her, but I wanted to be sure those boys came out of there. I didn't have much longer to wait.

That was Mark and James, both a couple of years older than I. When they came back out into the full light you could see their faces were ashen. I immediately wondered if they had seen anything different.

"Did ya see the light? Did ya see those suits?"

Both of them nodded, seeming reluctant to say more. I never learned whether or not either of them had seen anything more. It was Mark then that said "Let's get the fuck away from here and don't say anything to the others!" 

We set off on a brisk pace down the trail and caught up with Becky just before she had returned to the circle. Mark gave a shrill, sharp whistle to catch her attention. When she whirled around to look he motioned urgently for her to wait for us. We met up and for a few minutes we remained huddled there in our own little conference, about twenty-five yards from the circle. Mark had kind of taken charge of the situation.

"You can't say anything about what you saw..."

Becky interrupted, "I ain't sayin' shit, jack! Who is gonna believe that shit!?"

Mark seized upon this and continued, "...exactly! If you go saying anything people are just gonna say you're crazy."

Then James chimed in, finally. He had remained stoically silent throughout. "Its Woolly Booger, man. Everybody is already creeped out over the place. She's right. If we try to tell 'em all what we saw down there they'll think we're makin' shit up."

Mark went on, looking to close any argument. "The other thing, guys, is what if somebody says I call bull shit? You want anyone else going up there so they can say I told you so?" Becky didn't seem impressed, but she didn't need any persuading. I thought that what Mark had said was true. It had certainly been true with he and James after we had first related what we had seen down there. I had to say what I was thinking.

"Maybe we oughtta just get out of here. I don't think we were supposed to see... that, whatever it was. We might get into trouble with those army guys..."

"Ah come on, man! Don't be such a pussy!", Mark fired back. And then our little meet up in the lane was concluded. There was no further challenge to Mark's position on the subject and we all just filtered back into the larger group. But you just knew someone would tell somebody. Mark would certainly tell his older brother Alan about it. Becky would certainly tell her little sister Debbie about it, and Debbie couldn't keep a secret to save her life. I didn't really have anyone to tell and I really didn't want to. Events would unfold such that none of us had to.

There were a number of hours of daylight still, only a little past four in the afternoon. At that hour there were probably twelve of us there, all neighborhood kids that I recognized at least by their faces if not by name. In the hours before dusk there were three or four who left the party, but another half dozen or so turned up. Around 6:00 there was a rusty, green Chevy pickup arrived. This was a group I was not familiar with. There were five altogether, two brothers I could recognize as being from a nearby village. There was another boy and two girls in the bed of the truck when they pulled up, none of them I knew. Becky had left for a time, but then returned a couple of hours later with her younger sister, Debbie. 

By 8:00 that evening the sun had fallen below the last spiny ridge to the west, it's last rays flickering in the treeline. Our little fold upon the Taylor's lawn was cast into the veil of dusk. It was time to light the fire. In just over an hour the sun would be fully set and the country all around would be plunged into the dark of night. The moon would rise in her last quarter, providing minimal light. From sunset to midnight were the darkest hours before the dawn of the longest day of the year. Just as planned our flames lit the night.

The only true advantage in youth is the boundless capacity for the abuse of one's body. As one ages this capacity survives; regrettably a like capacity for recovery does not. Speaking from my own experience I believe that this is a skill that is honed to a fine point in those crucial years between fifteen and twenty-five. If you succeed in finding a way to pace yourself during these years it is quite possible to go on to a life of continued substance abuse with little or no consequence. I'd say it is possible, though that is for only a select few. You all know who you are.

I had been among the first of those to arrive that day. It had probably been some time around 1:00 in the afternoon, right after lunch. Throughout that day there had been a steady diet of beer and weed. Not the good kind of weed, as one may find today. No. This was that rank, nasty, dried out brown weed from the seventies. The kind of stuff that yielded three to four grams of stems and seeds in every half bag. By the time the flames were lit I was afloat on a cloud of five plus hours in sustained inebriation. Thats when the party really got started. 

After dark fell it was like being within this warm coccoon. The entire world existed within this ball of light surrounding our pyre. There was a whirl of young faces, giddy and laughing. Firelight distorted  faces and movement. There was music playing, but sound was distorted too. And there was beer after beer, somehow still preserved ice cold as they bobbed in pools of water and ice slush in styrofoam coolers. Tall cans, Stroh's 16 oz aluminum. Time seemed to stand still. 

I remember at one point there was an older boy I did not know. I later learned his name was Jay. He came from a good ways north, an exclusive community built surrounding a golf course. Jay was a pretty boy. He was seventeen, but he had the soft face of a thirteen year old, with very straight, shoulder length black hair. Every girl there was enthralled with him. From the other side of the fire he held court, surrounded with them all starry eyed as they hung on his every word. He was imagining out loud for all to hear how he imagined we must look from space. A black sea of wood, with specks of water like glass; where swarms of fireflies sail, and then our orb of warm yellow light shining like a candle flame..., or words to that effect. I wouldn't hazard a guess as to which one, but I'm fairly certain that Jay got him some that night. He was probably the only one that did.

Things were still rocking around the fire when around 10:00 we were momentarily panicked when headlights turned in from the road. It was only one vehicle and pulled up at the bottom of the gravel loop. Once the headlights were extinguished we were relieved to see that it was only one of the National Guard jeeps. Most were relieved. I felt a jolt of panic that froze me in place. The driver of the jeep got out and ambled over to us. It was our red-headed corporal again! He was loose and jocular. It seemed he may have been enjoying a few brews of his own.

"Hey! I ain't gonna rat none of ya's out, but you kids ain't s'posed to be here, ya know. Ha-ha-ha... look like y'all havin' a good time." He nodded, amused as he looked around our circle. Everybody hushed to hear what he had to say. I think he was amused by letting us twist in the wind for minute. He was saying one thing, but he was hanging around. It suddenly dawned on me what he was doing. He was looking around that circle to see if he could spot any of us who had been above Woolly Booger that afternoon! We'd been made! At least that what my drunk and stoned, teen-aged, paranoid mind had concluded. But then it seems I was wrong, when the corporal loped back toward his jeep and called back to us, "We's settin' a bivouac up the top of this ridge. Y'all best not be wanderin' up there!"

And that was the end of it. The corporal didn't say another word, didn't look back and drove away up the tractor trail in the jeep that was packed solid with crates in the rear. To nearly everyone else there his departure was shrugged off and the party resumed. For myself and at least three others present there was the wonder of what was in those crates and what the hell were they doing up there at the end of that ridge? By that hour I was far too intoxicated to do a thing about it. Whatever "it" was. The debauchery continued apace...

Then came the much awaited midnight hour and the vigil for the moon rise. We were a bunch of stupid, drunken kids who didn't know from shit. And yet somehow here we all were together awaiting the dawn of the solstice in a bacchanalia to make the Greeks proud. We had tapped into something primal, ancient. Jay could wax poetic for pussy any night of the week, but Jay was no poet. Jay couldn't capture this. 

Alan shut off the stereo that had been playing from his car for the entire evening. At first the silence was unsettling. One became aware of the pop and crackle of the fire first, but then the symphony of cicada and crickets; the distant, gentle hoots of owls; thousands of frogs all peeping in unison at water's edge. Fireflies danced throughout the thick forests surrounding us. For forty minutes, defying all prior experience, a collection of eighteen teenagers were able to remain silent. Mostly. The minutes ticked by and the tension of anticipation was electric. Becky weaved around the circle to take a seat next to me. Rather surreptitiously she grabbed hold of my left hand and held it tight between our sides. It wasn't weird. It didn't mean anything at all, but it was okay. She was scared and so was I. And neither one of us could explain why.

At 12:40 AM we all stared, mouths agape, to the southeastern sky as the waning quarter moon rose into the night. A muted cheer arose from a few as it first nudged over the horizon. At this stage it had grown mostly anticlimactic. Beer was running low and with the weed available it was impossible to get any higher than any of us were. There were a few, maybe four, who had already chosen their spot on the lawn, curled up and crashed. A core of die hards held on, but the steam had mostly escaped this kettle. The Solstice had come, not much else to see. I still had Becky clutching my hand and I could only wonder what would happen next.

It happened at 1:00 AM. A blinding flash of white light erupted from behind the ridge in our foreground, from the ravines where Woolly Booger is nestled. It did not make a sound, but the light was sustained. Up in the skies above, at least a few thousand feet up, static crackled and lightning flicked across the heavens. A vortex slowly formed and a similar light began to glow from above until two very focused beams of light converged. When the beams met there was an even brighter flash of light, illuminating everything around us like it was high noon. And then the lights just vanished. Except for the nature surrounding us it was dead silent. For only about a minute it was difficult to breath, like the air had suddenly grown thin. There was a negative pressure and I think that oxygen had been drawn from the very air. Some complained that their ears had popped and there was a faint scent of burning ozone in the air. After about a full minute of absorbing the shock of it all there was a mad scramble to every vehicle available and we all hauled ass out of that place.

I don't know where everyone ended up that night. I rode with Alan, Mark, Becky and Debbie up to their corner. I can account for every person that made it out of there that night. Except for one. I never saw pretty boy Jay leave with anyone. I never saw him again, which at the time maybe didn't seem so strange. We didn't attend the same school and I certainly didn't hang out at the country club where he lived. I never had learned of his last name so I've had very little to go on in any attempt to look him up. In the few, and they very few, conversations that I have ever had with anyone who witnessed that night, no one has been able to say that they knew Jay, who had invited him, his last name. Really nothing, other than "that long haired dude with the chics" who was there.

This was like having a UFO experience. Things are certainly different today, but back then one was careful about how much to say about such experiences. In that era the people with these tales to tell would end up on camera somewhere and nearly always end up being mocked and/or discredited. I'm not going to try to tell you that there has been some sort of code of silence among the witnesses. People have certainly talked and the Woolly Booger legend has been further embellished, yet it has remained only a local legend, without being painted broadly in the pantheon of what are often called conspiracy theories. I think that this is mostly because among those of us who were there we do not have one single piece of evidence that would support what we witnessed.

Now here is a strange thing I can tell you. About six months after this event, shortly after New Years, there was a news story on the CBS Evening News about a helicopter crash during a training exercise in North Carolina. Three servicemen were killed in this accident, all of whom were named and their pictures shown on screen. Staring at me from the old Zenith console was the smiling, freckled face of our red headed corporal. Lieutenant Benjamin Higbee, aged 24, of Slippery Rock, PA. Regular Army, not National Guard. I don't think that Mr. Higbee, or whatever his name was, died in that training exercise. I think he died at Woolly Booger and the accident is just cover. Why six months later? I don't know. Time warp?

I may refer to Woolly Booger as one thing or another. An inter-dimensional portal? Could be. A link up to some alien intelligence? Maybe. A gateway to something demonic? Yeah, I wouldn't rule that one out either. I don't really know what Woolly Booger is, but I can tell you what I suspect.

I accept that there are things in the world which we are simply not meant to know. I suspect that Woolly Booger is one of those things. I suspect that it is a gateway of sorts to a different realm, whatever form that may be. It is easy to latch on to the notion of it being something demonic. Whatever forces are there they are certainly malign. I suspect that they are behind Maidred Taylor's hanging, and many others at the same location. In addition to these there have likewise been an inordinate amount of suicides in the general vicinity, not only at the bridge. I suspect that whatever it is it is best left alone and is not something that anyone should be fucking with. Least of all our federal government. Whatever was there before was bad enough. After the feds started poking around they just pissed it off. And now they don't know what to do about it. That is what I suspect, not what I can prove.

So now I hope that you may all understand the urgency of this mission. I shudder to think what should become of us all if Kevin Crabtree and the Deaf Kids should somehow harness the dread power of Woolly Booger. If Crazy Jay is who I believe he is then Crabtree may possess the ability to do just that. While there are rumblings of nuclear war around the Ukraine or the Middle East, there is indeed a far greater peril at hand should I fail.