This is a primer. For some of you this will certainly be necessary to follow the continuing saga of the Deaf Kids from New Guinea (hereafter referred to simply as Deaf Kids). In our last installment the enigmatic spectre of Woolly Booger was introduced. It may very well figure more prominently in this tale than any of us can know. For those of you who pray, pray that I am wrong. I will still take some care that the location is not revealed, yet I must elaborate further that our audience may understand the significance of this fearsome place.
In the physical sense Woolly Booger is a pond. At least that is what it appears to be on it's dark and murky surface. The surface at least is a pond. It is not very large; not even as large as a football field. It's shores are mucky and filled with reeds, nettles and moss. It is only upon one small corner, a length of no more than twenty yards, that there is any solid and open shore upon which one can stand. It's approach is heavily cloaked on all sides by steep, rocky ravines, centuries old trees and wild, forbidding thickets. It's the sort of place that you don't find if you're not looking for it. It's the sort of place that if one were to have, quite literally, fallen into it by accident this would be certain to entail gross bodily injury. Likely even death.
Despite the outward appearance, Woolly Booger is something more than just a tiny, isolated pond. It is in fact a geological anomaly; a bizarre remnant of a great glacial retreat occurring between ten and eleven thousand years ago. The pond surface is merely the tip of a deep, deep fissure into the rock. Though it may have assumed a bog like identity at the top, the water source below is fed from a mineral spring. It is very heavy in iron, as betrayed by the orange hue found at water's edge.
It is believed that the Shawnee people may have stumbled upon this place some time around five-hundred years ago during their southwestern migration. There are some who hold to the notion that the Shawnee, as well as the Creek, Cherokee and Mingo, shared in an oral tradition of it being a sacred place. I've never been able to obtain a qualified confirmation of this. It is simply one of many legends that form from the mists of time. At it's root I can believe that place might well have been noted simply for it's oddity, but the ensuing legend is much embellished. Part of the alleged oral tradition is to have described an older race of peoples inhabiting the land surrounding. It was from those people that the history was preserved to tell of what can only be understood as an active geyser. They considered it to be the wrath of an angry spirit; the waters only calmed by an appeasing sacrifice. Maybe there is some kernel of truth in it, but as I have said, this is only legend. There has never been any archaeological evidence uncovered to support this.
The Woolly Booger site and the lands surrounding it went largely ignored through the age of America's westward expansion. In the late 1800s the site was surveyed as part of a large tract of property sold to a man by the name of Taylor. Mr. Taylor was apparently of some considerable means by way of inheritance. He acquired the property, built a large home approximately two miles from the site, and by all accounts lived the leisurely life of a country squire. There does not seem to be any evidence to indicate that Mr. Taylor ever visited, indeed, was ever even aware of the Woolly Booger pond on his property.
It was a quiet life, with time spent gardening, tending many flowers, shrubs and ornamental trees, and cultivating a small orchard of fruit trees. After a little over a decade tending his idyllic niche Mr. Taylor grew restless. He was a bachelor in his early forties, but apparently something still stirred in his loins, when at the tender age of forty-four Mr. Taylor took a bride. He was a full quarter century her senior; indeed, old enough to be her father. The age difference, though not so uncommon as one might think for that period, was certain to foster some gossip. It does not help that there are no concrete details as to how the two ever met. We do know that the young lady, Maidred, was a Welsh immigrant and that she had previously served as an au pair for a wealthy Philadelphia family. Beyond this, her marriage to Mr. Taylor and her subsequent death, we know very little.
In June of 1888 a brand new iron bridge was officially opened a short distance up the road from the Taylor estate. The Taylors had been wed for just short of eighteen months and the fruit of that union was six weeks in the oven. Unbeknownst to Mr. Taylor at the time. Maidred showed a peculiar interest in this bridge. She confided in her husband that the span made her homesick, a reminder of a place from her Welsh childhood where she had sometimes fished with her father.
On several occasions in the weeks that followed Mr. Taylor happily obliged his young wife with frequent visits to the bridge. He had noted a recent melancholy, not even suspecting the likely cause, and was eager to return some cheer to their life. It was a very dry summer and the waters of the creek beneath the bridge grew quite low. The creek's banks were not especially steep at the site and on sunny afternoons the shallow waters were an invitation to explore. After a number of visits Maidred began to bring a small galvanized pail along and would dash into the tall grasses to the rocky shore. Mr. Taylor was amused by her girlish enthusiasm and happily indulged her as he watched from the bridge railing above.
When the early afternoon sunlight was full upon these waters it was dazzling. The light was filtered through the treetops, preventing it from making a blinding reflection. Multi colored and shining stones glistened from the creek bed, captured and magnified through the clear water. She would leave her shoes and stockings upon the grassy shore, hike up her skirts and wade out with her pail to gather the stones that appealed to her. This happy state of affairs continued through July and well into August, all while Mr. Taylor was blissfully unaware of the pregnancy.
On the night of August 21, 1888 there was a full moon. Two youths from a neighboring village took advantage of the light to go gigging for frogs along the creek banks. About an hour before dawn they came upon the iron bridge and found a woman hanging by the neck under it. The two young men spent the next few hours trying to get to authorities to report what they had found. It was just after 8:30 the morning of the 22nd when local sheriff's deputies arrived at the scene.
Meanwhile there was a bewildered Mr. Taylor wondering where his wife had got to at this early hour on a Wednesday morning. He searched about the house to no avail. He did not note any of her things missing. He went to the stable and found the carriage and horses still present. He then made a pass through the grounds, calling out for her, but still there was no reply and no sign of her anywhere on the property.
At first he was concerned, though not panicked. He had come to learn that his child bride had some quirks about her. He put a kettle on for tea and prepared a modest breakfast, which he then took out on the wide front porch. At about the hour that deputies were cutting Maidred down from the bridge Mr. Taylor was eating muffins with apple butter, fully expecting her to appear across the lawn with a bunny or a clutch of wildflowers. She was still possessed of the childlike innocence that would draw her to the pursuit of such things. This was not the first time that she had wandered away unannounced, though it was peculiar for the early hour. As wonder slowly crept into his mind he began to realize that he was uncertain when she had left their bed.
By the late afternoon Mr. Taylor had spent restless hours anguishing over what might have become of his wife. As the hours of the day progressed his imagination lurched towards ever darker conclusions, until he could bear it no longer. Around 3:45 he took his carriage off to the county sheriff's office, some five miles distant. By 5:00 he was speaking with the duty sergeant at the courthouse, pleading for their assistance in locating his missing wife. Once the officer began to request some specifics in order to file an official report, it became apparent that the woman being described matched the description of an yet unidentified woman in the county morgue. When the two deputies came and requested that Mr. Taylor accompany them he was quite bewildered. He had no suspicion that he was being taken to identify the remains of his missing wife.
Mr.Taylor was a broken man after that. The shock of discovering that he had lost both a wife and child in such a brutal fashion was crippling. And never any understanding as to why. Why had she hung herself? Was it because of the child? She had to know. The coroner said that she was likely at three months. Mr. Taylor was left to wrestle with these questions for the next thirty-eight years, until his passing at the ripe old age of eighty-three in November, 1926.
During those years the estate had slowly deteriorated. For the first twenty years after her passing it seemed that Mr. Taylor was determined to memorialize her in every act. The many plants and trees flourished, and in late summers at their full maturity his gardens were a true splendor. He could carry this on until the age of sixty-five. After 1908 nothing new was planted, no trees were tended and the plants of the wild slowly reclaimed their space. Upon his death there was simply abandonment. There were no heirs, no living relatives, no will left to express any wishes he may have had.
It was nearly another full decade before any question of the property was even raised, after which the estate spent another thirty years in a legal limbo. It remained in a state of neglect for all that time. Locals would venture onto the grounds to gather apples, pears or walnuts, all of which survived in abundance. The country throughout was filled with wild berries and mushrooms when in season and the Taylor estate was no exception. It was inevitable that some would wander onto the property in pursuit of these morsels. One of these cases occurred in May of 1959, another tragedy which may or may not be the cause of events soon to follow.
The early Spring of 1959 had been very wet. Consequently the wooded slopes of the area grew thick with the annual seekers of the prized morrel mushroom. The pickings were quite good this year and word spread. On a Saturday morning, May 16, a young couple from a town twenty-five miles away drove to the area to try their luck. They parked the family sedan in the old entry lane to the Taylor estate, then set off on the grounds in search of the mushrooms; a husband, wife and their nine year old son. As they waded deeper into the woods they frequently became entangled in the growing thicket. It was upon one such occasion that they were atop a slope with a northwest face, above the Woolly Booger pond. The husband had been snared by a blackberry briar and in his effort to free himself he tumbled over the rim and down the slope.
Initially this spurred some celebration as the slide had put him atop an impressive trove of morrels. As the man eagerly gathered up this prize he was also looking about to see where he might best get back up the slope. He eventually spotted the surface of the water below. Quite surprised at this he called out this discovery to his wife and son, announcing that he was going down for a closer look.
No one can say for certain exactly what happened next. We only have the account from the wife and son. They both reported that they had remained at the top of the slope, peering down through the thicket as best they could. They were able to hear, but not see to the bottom. Just a few minutes after he had told them that he was climbing to the bottom there was a sudden flash of blinding light from below, followed by the sound of a loud splash into the water. No body was ever recovered.
In the course of investigating this case divers were brought in from State authorities. They could find no body, nor could they find the bottom. Eventually this information reached some parties with the US Geological Survey. Teams from this agency made a number of visits to the site during 1962 and early 1963. I can not say with certainty that the sequence of events are all related, but the following year the Taylor estate was incorporated into a larger tract of land acquired by the Army Corps of Engineers. This was ostensibly for the purpose of a dam project. A dam which, to this day, remains unbuilt. Though it is now administered under the Park Service, the land remains under control of the feds. Officially the Woolly Booger site is off limits. Officially.
Fifty years ago that is a rule that supposedly applied, though it surely was not enforced in any way. By the early seventies it was more or less accepted that there would be no dam. The original area that had been zoned for the purpose had been divvied up for multi purposes, administered by a combination of state and federal authorities. For the most part the area remained one of those blessed plots of earth that pass unnoticed. This was true, but for a small group of youths who came from farm lands adjacent to "government land", as it came to be known.
In 1975 I became one of those youths. My family moved into a farmhouse that sat upon what had once been a dairy farm, bordered on one side by a zone designated as State property. The Woolly Booger pond was only a little over a mile from our home, as the crow flies, but required some more travel than that to arrive there. I was informed within a very short time of moving there about Woolly Booger and it's mysterious past. I found that most were aware of it's existence, though few could say that they had been there and seen it themselves. This area was heavily steeped in superstitions and legend. In addition to Woolly Booger's creepy history, there was also the legend of Maidred's ghost haunting the old Taylor orchards. The bridge where she had hung herself had come to be known locally as "the hangin' bridge". In the eighty plus years since her tragic end there were ten other deaths by hanging recorded at the span. The year that we arrived was the last year that the bridge was open for vehicle traffic. It stood for another two years after that, before it's final destruction.
It was late summer when we arrived that year, so it was not until the following summer that I had opportunity to fully explore the new neighborhood. By that time I had grown well acquainted with my peers who lived along our ridge. There were a dozen of us all told, ten boys and two girls, all within a three year span of age. The eldest was Alan who was seventeen. We were not always assembled as a full group, but in summer it was not unusual for four or five of us boys to ride together. There was fishing, canoeing, biking, hiking...sometimes just hiding someplace to sneak some cigarettes. Or something better. Sometimes there was beer, which in those years still held that mythical quality. It was the summer I was first introduced to Little King's Cream Ale.
The first weekend after the end of the school year there were six of us who rode over on our bikes to meet at the hangin' bridge. It was already closed for traffic at this point, so we felt quite at ease congregating on the bridge with a cooler of canned beer. Our little party went on for nearly two hours and the beer had run out. We were just getting ready to leave when two army jeeps came up the road toward the bridge. This didn't worry us at all, in fact most of us were keen to get an up close look. For most of us the only jeeps we'd ever seen in our lives were on the TV program MASH.
The first jeep rolled to a stop just before the gate and a lanky corporal with red hair and freckles bounded from the passenger seat. He briefly tipped his helmet to us and then went directly to the other end of the gate. He had the keys to open it and in less than a minute was swinging the gate open towards us.
"Y'all gotta move boys. We got some traffic coming through." He had a slow drawl and a genial manner. We weren't told to clear off, just move out of the way. The corporal remained there at the end of the gate as the second jeep drove on to open the gate at the opposite end of the bridge. Once that gate had been opened the jeep pulled through to park at the opposite end and another soldier took post at the gate. A short time later a caravan of deuce and half rolled across that bridge. There were six of them, all fully loaded, and they had to cross one at a time. Soldiers called and waved from the backs of the trucks as they rolled through. A few of them tossed out some olive drab box kits of field rations. This was long before MREs. I think they were called k-rations in those years.
Once all six of the trucks had crossed our red headed corporal closed and locked the gate, as his counterpart at the other end did the same. He hopped into his jeep and called out to us as they prepared to drive off, "National Guard unit, boys. We gonna be out here a couple weeks on maneuvers. Y'all be careful crawling around these woods, ya hear?"
I think the universal reaction within our little squad was "Well hot damn!" The field rations provided enough additional amusement to remain on the bridge for a while longer. The highlight of this kit had nothing to do with any of it's foodstuffs. Inside of every box there was a mini pack of four cigarettes and a book of humidity resistant matches. This was the beginning of our bi-centennial summer. We all sensed it was going to be something special. If only we had known why.
There is more to this tale, but I will conclude here for now. As I write the Deaf Kids are still at large. The sanctum of Woolly Booger has not yet been breached. We remain relatively safe for now. Remain vigilant!
This is Special Investigator Ford Wenty, SCIU....signing off until next time...
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