LEGEND TRIPPING, THE DEINDUSTRIAL GOTHIC, AND A WORLD FULL OF MONSTERS

“Monsters exist because they are part of the divine plan, and in the horrible features of those same monsters the power of the Creator is revealed.” -Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

In our so-called rationalist and reasonable age, legends have lost none of their currency and have persisted and flourished in new guises well into industrial times. Our modern urban legends show this, and like older legends they are also often associated with very specific places. The activity of legend-tripping to these places has grown up around and alongside these twice-told tales, and seems to have really taken off since the 1950s. The pastime of legend-tripping takes a person on a thrill ride through the spine-tingling borderlands where folklore mingles with historical facts, where rites of passage expose one to ethereal dangers, and into those Gothic places where ghosts and monsters are said to have made their homes. The legend trip leads people past the familiar and on a magical journey into the unknown.

The chances are strong that if you grew up in America, or some other industrialized nation, you’ve already been on a legend trip. If you’ve ever snuck into a cemetery at night to visit a particular grave associated with ghosts, hauntings, or alleged crimes, you’ve legend-tripped. If you’ve ever driven to a particular bridge or to a specific bend in the road, where you then have to turn off the car and flash the headlights three times to see if you can hear the screams of the children who were said to have died in a school bus wreck at that very spot, you’ve legend-tripped. If you have ever snuck into an abandoned building, or a building you thought was abandoned, because a witch was said to have lived there, or a serial killer was said to have taken his victims there, you have dosed yourself up on a legend. If you ever tried to find the place where the Frogman climbed out of the Little Miami River and over the guardrail to amble in front of passing traffic, with the hope that you might see a Frogman as well, then you have legend-tripped.

In all of these examples the story came first, often in the form of an urban legend, but how did these stories start and where did they come from? Although some academic folklorists prefer to call them contemporary legends the name urban legends is still what actual folk prefer to refer to them as. Author and professor Jan Harold Brunvand brought the term urban legend into general use for the public in his 1981 book The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meaning. Though the stories that become urban legends are popular enough on their own, Brunvand’s book and his subsequent follow-ups helped popularize many stories even further, where they continued to take on new life.

Urban legends are born of rumor, misremembered history, unexplained experiences, and can’t-explain experiences. The urban legend is at home when something from beyond is seen, felt or heard, then whispered about and spread on playgrounds and bus rides, told at a party, and passed on from one person to another. When the compulsion of the story mingles with a need for an experience of the freaky and fantastic, people will leave behind their comforts and take a step towards the strange.

At its most basic, a legend trip can be defined as an excursion to a place where something uncanny has happened. These legend trips are undertaken for the most part by adolescents, often under the influence of alcohol, marijuana or other drugs.1 Often the people who go on the trip have the specific intention of having an uncanny experience of their own. In part it may be to test the veracity of the legend. In part it may be to test their fortitude, willpower, and courage. In this latter mode the legend trip also takes on aspects of a rite of passage. Rites of passage and rituals in general are often noted for their liminality. Visiting places associated with threshold experiences acts as a way of accessing the altered space, often in an altered state, and functions as a way of passing through, of passing a test.

Brunvand wrote in his Encyclopedia of Urban Legends that “Legend trips function both as informal tests of the claims made in supernatural legends and as verification of the courage of the teens themselves, who may try to act out the legends they have heard by blinking the car lights a certain number of times, calling out for the ghost, or sitting on a cursed gravestone.”

Much of the time these trips happen at night, as the darkness adds to the spook factor, though it’s hardly a requirement with anything as informal as a legend trip. The places themselves are usually alleged to be the scene of tragedy or salacious crime, or a haunting, monster sighting, or other form of paranormal activity. Bill Ellis wrote in the American Folklore Encyclopedia that “often a baby is said to have died or been murdered, frequently at a bridge, and its ghost is said to cry at certain times. Or a person—man or woman—was decapitated in an accident, and a ghostly light lingers at the site of the tragedy."
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The legend trip is a distinctly North American phenomenon, though it is not necessarily unknown outside this continent. For some the ever-present hunger for stories never dies and they keep up the practicegoing from site to site, and collect story after story long into adulthood. I think the popularity of this activity also has to do with a thirst for magic and mystery in a world dominated by managers and machines. For repeat offenders who go on to visit site after site, it becomes a way of feeding themselves a steady diet of stories, and involving themselves in the mythic side of life. For those who have gone from mere enthusiast to true cult fanatic, the documentation of their own experiences in the form of podcasts, vlogs, articles, and books becomes a part of the game. In time they may go on to become bona fide true-crime, paranormal, and occult investigators.

URBAN EXPLORATION AND THE DEINDUSTRIAL GOTHIC

Going on legend trips routinely crosses over into the activity of urban exploration and the practice of psychogeography. Setting is character, and the often horrific and bloody stories associated with many sites might be seen as a reflection of the wretched state of our collective inner lives in the shared outer landscape. If such a thing as the genius loci, or spirit of a place exists, one of the ways to get to know that spirit is surely through the stories of a place. These can teach us about the spiritual qualities of a location. When the place is visited new experiences one has there get reflected upon and, internalized. When the new experiences are shared with others, they send further refractions of the tale out into the culture.

Though locations vary from region to region certain categories of places remain common: bridges, tunnels, caves, cemeteries, abandoned buildings, a particular grove of trees in the woods, or a certain stretch of lonely road. For the most part they are places that have been left untended and abandoned. An empty house is a common sign and symbol of the experience of urban and rural decay; looking at them, it is easy to imagine how they might be haunted. Our collective psyche provides ample material for stories about haunted houses as most everyone has heard heart-wrenching tales of dysfunctional families, of wife beaters and child abusers. Those who live in this unfortunate reality abide in everyday haunted houses. Sometimes they leave behind ghosts and psychic traumas that echo in our shared memory.

I think it is worth noting that in Gothic literature the action of a story always seem to unfold in places that are decaying and falling apart. The settings are often moldering estates and castles, decrepit houses and abandoned ruins, a similarity shared with some deindustrial tales set in the time of decline and future dark ages. Gloom and desolation hang over everything. The settings are also relatively isolated from outside help. In this respect, Detroit could be one of the most Gothic, and deindustrial, cities in North America. Many other once prosperous towns and cities across the United States and around the world could now be considered paramours of a deindustrial Gothic sensibility. They become subject to photographers and artists making ruin porn, documenting the slow demise of buildings as nature, the elements and humans enact their destruction. Visiting these places is another kind of legend trip.

As Jhonn Balance of the band Coil sang, “Pay your respects to the vultures / for they are your future.”1 The popularity of ruin porn and urban exploration of abandoned sites lies in the fact that it is an exposure to the inevitability of our shuffling off this mortal coil. As our own civilization succumbs to the natural cycle of growth and decline, ruin porn reminds us of the processes to which we will all succumb.

Abandoned amusement parks are particularly popular for those touring the ruins of deindustrial civilization.
Perhaps it is because they can be seen as representing a kind of peak experience in industrial culture: the rides, attractions, sights, sounds, and tastes all reinforce the spectacle of getting what you want when you want it, if you can afford the price of the ticket. Seeing nature take over places where the good times once rolled down coaster tracks is perhaps a reminder that the days of frivolous consumption are not as eternal as many media messages have implied.

In a society that’s obsessed with ideas of limitless progress, the allure of ruin porn and the exploration of industrial ruins is an escape valve offering a look at inevitable endings. The fallacy of perpetual economic growth gets stripped down and laid bare. All things eventually sink into the underworld before they can be reborn.

INTO THE UNDERWORLD

Since ancient times, certain spots were thought of as being entrances to the underworld, and mythic figures such as Aeneas and Odysseus passed through those gates in the course of their adventures. For Aeneas and Odysseus the portal happened to be a cave near Lake Avernus, whose waters were gathered in a volcanic crater. Hercules is said to have pulled up Cerebus from Hades by entering a cave on the peninsula of Taenarum. In our own time countless stories about places named as the “Gates of Hell” or “Pits of Hell” persist within the milieu of urban legends, and a number of these portals to the underworld are rumored to exist within the United States.

The Pits of Hell in Columbus, Ohio, is one such spot. It is a large underground tunnel and drainage culvert in Clintonville Park (at the time of this writing renamed “Portal Park” by users on Google Maps). The Pit can be accessed with convenience from behind the parking lot of a Tim Horton’s coffeeshop. The place is also known as the Gates of Hell and the Blood Bowl. It is a massive industrial presence with huge steel I-beams at the mouth of a basin, at the bottom of which is a large drainage tunnel, all of it covered in tags and graffiti. The name Blood Bowl came to the place, according to the stories, when a local skateboarder died trying to do a stunt in the tunnel. When he failed to land his trick he hit his head hard on the concrete and his blood was spattered everywhere. In the center of the tunnel is a chamber where it is said the more impressive pieces of graffiti art can be found. I can imagine this chamber being a popular place to get high and drink beer or cough syrup for teenagers (if teenagers are still “allowed” to sneak away from their helicopter parents long enough to do these things).

In the town of York, Pennsylvania, is a place where there are not just one, but Seven Gates of Hell. Located on Trout Run Road, formerly named Toad Road, the place is associated with that modern form of barbarism known to many as psychiatry. It is said that a lunatic asylum was once located off this road in the 1800s. When it caught fire, many of the inmates burned to death in the devouring flames, as firefighters couldn’t reach it in time. Hundreds of others used the fire as their chance to escape into the woods. Search parties were sent to collect these poor souls, who only wanted their freedom. The searchers were aggressive when they apprehended the escapees. Their heads had been filled by many stories of the violent and crazed behavior of the people locked away inside. The searchers were said to have beaten many of the escapees into submission, and those who wouldn’t submit they murdered. As if the torture of these “patients” inside the asylum walls by dubious therapeutic techniques hadn’t been enough, their subsequent deaths by fire and violence are said to have left a psychic stain on the land that led to the opening of these Seven Gates of Hell.

The land home to the Seven Gates gives would-be legend-trippers a bit of trouble because they are located on private property. For teenagers the act of trespassing most likely adds to the thrill, but for adults who would prefer to keep their trips on the legal side of the law, this kind of escapade might best be avoided.

Those of drinking age might be better off visiting another Gate to Hell that is said to exist in the basement of Bobby Mackey’s Music World, a country-music night club in Wilder, Kentucky. It sits at 44 Licking Pike, just above the banks of the north-flowing Licking River, one of the tributaries to the Ohio River. The story has it that there was a slaughterhouse on the site in the 19th century. It got torn down and a roadhouse was built on the spot that went under various names until country singer and musician Bobby Mackey bought the joint. While having a portal to Hell in the basement might have been enough to put Mackey’s club on the map, no self-respecting night club owner should let a good haunting go to waste: his venue is also alleged to be the abode of the ghost of Pearl Bryan, an Indiana woman who was brutally murdered and decapitated in 1896 a few miles away in Fort Thomas, Kentucky.

The story of Pearl Bryan is one of many gruesome chapters in Greater Cincinnati’s book of true crime. Bryan was a socialite from Greencastle, Indiana. Her father was a well respected and wealthy dairy farmer, and she was well liked and regarded as beautiful throughout the community. Scott Jackson was an aspiring dentist who happened to pass through her hometown, and the two had a love affair. When Jackson left for dental school in Cincinnati he also left her knocked up with a child. She had just started working as a Sunday school teacher when this happened, and she decided to track Jackson down. Without wanting to cause a scandal, she told her parents she was going to visit a friend in Indianapolis, but instead went to Cincinnati to look for the man who jilted her and tell him she was pregnant, hopeful that they would marry. Instead he and an accomplice Alonzo M. Walling dosed her up with cocaine, took her to a secluded spot just across the river in Kentucky, and decapitated her while she was still alive on January 31, 1896. Her headless body was found shortly thereafter by a farmhand. Jackson and Walling were later apprehended, and sentenced for murder, for which they were hanged the following year behind the Campbell County Courthouse. The first drop of the rope was not enough to snap their wicked necks, and it took them a few minutes to strangle to death on the gallows. These two criminals have the odd distinction of being the last to die by the noose in Campbell County.
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Some friends of mine once went on a trip to visit a few sites in Indiana. Their trip wasn’t so much about chasing legends as it was a form of legend-tripping’s sister or cousin, so called “dark tourism,” or travel to places associated with death and suffering. Their first stops were the blink-and-you-miss-them towns of Linn and Crete, Indiana, two burgs associated with the birth and life of notorious cult leader Jim Jones. Then on the next leg of their jaunt, they visited the town of Greencastle. There they visited the cemetery and unmarked gravestone of Pearl Bryan, who was buried without her head, the location of which was never revealed by her murderers. Bryan’s gravestone has been left unmarked because it kept on getting stolen by people who would make dark pilgrimages to the place.

I WANT TO BELIEVE IN MONSTERS

Monsters such as the murderers Jackson and Walling aren’t the only ones to haunt our memories or cause people to trip out on a legend. Sites associated with monsters such as the Loveland Frog Man, the Pope Lick Monster, the Lake Erie Monster, Bigfoot, and the Mothman have become places of veneration and pilgrimage for those who hope to see one of these beings themselves. While the existence of these beings is denied by official science, it is embraced by those with a sense of the mythic.

One town that has become a major destination spot for monster lovers is Point Pleasant, West Virginia. It holds an annual Mothman festival every third weekend in September to commemorate the original sightings of the red-eyed and winged being in 1966. The festival draws a huge crowd every year and has become an important part of the town’s economic survival. Seekers who are also interested in the nearby mysteries of the Flatwoods monster often attend. I can see a situation arising in our deindustrial futures where local festivals and holidays emerge around other monstrous creatures, with celebrations happening on dates associated with their first sightings or major dates of their monstrous activity. As the festivals transform over time, they might begin to include offerings and rituals as ways of appeasing the wrath of the monsters, and of keeping their community prosperous and protected.

Cryptids are another term people use for these kinds of beings, and in the past I used that word interchangeably for monster without really thinking about nuances of definition. As I reread sections of John Michael Greer’s book Monsters: An Investigator’s Guide to Magical Beings for this article, I noticed he deliberately does not used the word cryptid. Greer gave the explanation that a cryptid can be any kind of unknown creature. It could be an undiscovered kind of sardine or a newfangled rat, or an unknown microfauna deep within the sea. In this sense cryptids are simply classes of creatures that humans haven’t encountered before. Monsters, on the other hand, have been encountered by many people, and they become part of the folklore of their region and have stories and lore surrounding them. They may be real physical creatures and they may exist solely on levels of non-material reality such as the astral plane. Some monsters exist on multiple levels of reality and consciousness. What distinguishes them from the cryptid is the accretion of stories surrounding them and their encounters with humans. All that said, many popular blogs, YouTube channels, and books that delve into these subjects don’t often make this distinction and call these kinds of beings cryptids.

A genuine need for monster seekers might arise as our societies slip from their current stages deeper into the deindustrial Gothic landscapes. Within the ruins of aged estates, crumbling mental asylums, and husks of hospitals, not all the ghosts that linger will be mere abstractions, and intrepid questers with the skills to cope with these beings and ameliorate their influence in communities will be needed. The skills such investigators need are not currently taught in the university—another place where the wrecked shells of buildings may leave behind vicious postmodern imprints on the genius loci.

Becoming a monster investigator in your spare time, however, is certainly feasible, and another activity that doesn’t require much in terms of equipment or expensive gear. Maps of your local area and some books on local folklore are enough to get you started, along with notebooks to write down and sketch observations and findings. A camera and tape recorder could be added to the kit, used to interview witnesses and people knowledgeable of local lore and to document sightings. Greer’s book Monsters is one of the best places to start, with a whole chapter devoted to the art of investigation. The information in Greer’s book, when combined with that in the guidebook for urban exploration by Ninjalicious, Access All Areas, can lay a groundwork of two different skill sets required for navigating the inner and outer landscapes where monsters dwell.

Chances are, no matter where you live, there is a storied place nearby for you to visit. Some of these are perhaps already destination spots for legend-trippers. Others might be trip sites that are waiting to be born. A great resource for North Americans is The Map in Black: A Mysterious Map of North America,created by Jeff Craig.1 The Map in Black shows sites categorized under Aliens, UFOs, Ancient American Sites, Cryptids (that usage of the word again!), Ecology, Hauntings, Military/Government sites, Native Lands, and Sacred Geography. These are all perfect categories to look at when planning a legend trip. At the time of this writing the internet is still intact and there are numerous websites devoted to the hobbies of urban exploration, legend-tripping, and visiting mysterious places. When the internet is gone books on local folklore, ghost stories, and urban legends will be the places to check for ideas. The next legend-tripping site will be born when someone follows up on a rumor another person told them while out skateboarding together, or in the office, and they go to check the place out for themselves, and then tell others about the spot in turn.

Legend trips are all about the stories we tell ourselves. By visiting these places we have the chance of embodying the stories, of touching a place where something mysterious happened. In so doing we can allow their magic and mystery to come into our lives.

RE/SOURCES:
Belanger, Jeff. Picture Yourself Legend Tripping: Your Complete Guide to Finding UFOs, Monsters, Ghosts, and Urban Legends in Your Own Backyard, Boston, Mass.: Cengage Learning PTR. 2010.
Brunvand, Jan Harold. The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meaning. New York, NY.: Norton. 1981.
Brunvand, Jan Harold, ed. American Folklore: An Encyclopedia. New York, N.Y.: Garland Publishing Inc. 1996.
Greer, John Michael. Monsters: An Investigator's Guide to Magical Beings. Lewes, England: Aeon Publishing. 2021.
Hammon, N.G.L, and Scullard, H.H., eds. The Oxford Classical Dictionary. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. 1970.
Hensley, Douglas. Hell’s Gate: Terror at Bobby Mackey’s Music World (America’s Most Documented Haunting). Denver, Colo.: Outskirts Publishing. 2005.
Kownacki, Paul. “Columbus, Ohio—Pit of Hell” <https://www.roadsideamerica.com/tip/20632>
Lyons, Siobhan. “What ‘Ruin Porn’ Tells Us About Ruins—And Porn.” <https://www.cnn.com/style/article/what-ruin-porn-tells-us-about-ruins-and-porn/index.html>
Malvern, Marcus Jr. “The Downingtown Gates of Hell.” <http://www.weirdus.com/states/pennsylvania/local_legends/seven_gates_of_hell/>Wikipedia. “Gates of Hell.” <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gates_of_hell>

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This was another essay for my Cheap Thrills column in an issue of New Maps. I am adding these all to my website now, since they originally appeared first in print.

Find my other Cheap Thrills articles here at the links below:
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A COMPLEXITY OF SPECTACLES

DREAM FORAGING

STREAM FORAGING

THE DOWNWARDLY MOBILE DANDY AND THE TRAILER PARK QUAINTRELLE

THE POWER OF THREE: TERNARY LOGIC, TRIOLECTICS AND THREE SIDED FOOTBALL

RADIOS NEXT GOLDEN AGE

THE ART AND PLEASURE OF LETTER WRITING

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Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. 

1 With the use of hallucinogens it becomes a real head trip. I’m not necessarily recommending this.
​1 Coil, “The Last Amethyst Deceiver,” from The Ape of Naples
1 www.mapinblack.com