Cocoa

The following is hear-say, so should be taken with a pinch of salt. It is, however, freaky.

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This is going to sound really silly, guys, but I promise it is entirely true.

I live in southern Indiana. the town is Evansville.

There’s a small rural area just outside of the city I live in. It’s bordered on three sides by the river, and on the fourth by a bayou, so at times, it’s cut off entirely from the rest of indiana (during flood seasons.) We call this place ‘Dogtown’, owing to the name of a tavern out there, but it’s really called ‘Union Township.’

I was introduced to this place via a friend of mine with a very fast car. Hardly any people live out there anymore, and the main road follows the course of the river (indeed, if you go off the road, you fall into the Ohio river), so we used to race out there.

One day he showed me an old building which, upon sight, scared the piss out of me. All the buildings out there were old, uninhabited, and falling apart, but this one was particularly terrifying. I asked him to turn around.

He told me it was a school, and that some dude murdered a bunch of people there. I took him half seriously, but decided to figure out the story for myself. I was 17 or 18 at the time and had just entered college as a history major, so I figured it’d be good practice.

I spent the next two years or so taking trips out there with friends, to the ‘school’ or to other places in the area, and recording what happened. Long story short – lots of weird shit.

We broke into the ‘school’ a couple times. First time, we didn’t get very far – me and one of the other guys felt a terrible sinking sensation in our chest, and about that time, a truck drove by, whereupon an old man yelled out the window, in proper scooby doo fashion, ‘You kids get outta there, you here me?’ Thankfully we were armed with baseball bats and poles, just in case someone like him stopped and tried to threaten us. He drove on, but we gtfo’d.

Another time we actually went in and stuff. There was a tricycle upstairs when we got up there, and, after we looked around some more, it vanished. When we left it was in front of the door, and when we returned to our car, ‘MARY’ was clearly written in the water/condensation (whatever the crap you call that stuff) on the trunk.

Other weird things happened around that area. Twice, friends and I saw a black cloud, similar to fog, that we couldn’t penetrate with light. One time it was in a field right before the ‘school’, and our flashlights wouldn’t touch it at all. The next time was when the place was flooded, we tried to go out there, only to turn around when we realized, about halfway through the drive, that the ‘black fog’ covered the road just ahead.

Other strange things happen. Twice friends and I heard motorcycle noises speeding by our car as we turned on one of the really dangerous S-curves near the river. Both times it happened in the same spot.

We were also driving around out there during the day once and noticed a huge fire in the distance. We got over to it and pinpointed exactly where it was (which wasn’t hard to do, seeing as it was at the intersection of two roads.) We also noticed that at this point our compass was spinning in circles. More on this happening later

There’s also an old iron train bridge out there the main road goes under. I’ve had lots of nightmares about this place, and area folk legend is that the KKK used to hang people from the bridge. Before knowing of said folk legend, I noticed that I and other friends experienced choking sensations when going under the bridge. This was documented separately by a few of us without confronting the others about it.

A wiccan friend of mine says that she ‘knows’ the entire area is something of a ‘portal between dimensions’, that the black fog has something to do with that, and that there’s something really evil living around and under the iron bridge. I don’t buy that for a moment, but I do think something strange is going on. (And I have seen a big lumbering thing walking on top of the bridge, as has one of my friends who was with me, but… that could have just been some random dude. at three am. on an old bridge that you can’t get to without climbing. I don’t know.)
I ended up doing my history major senior thesis on the place. 40+ pages, usage of the 1850 census, whooboy. In the process, though, I was totally looking for folktales and things which would have caused whatever is out there. I didn’t find much. The KKK did have a strong presence out there, but no hangings that I could find.

The “school” is actually the old powerhouse for a huge lock and dam complex that used to be out there, until they dynamited it in the 1970s.

There were some boys that got killed there by Native Americans a long, long time ago. And flooding frequently wiped out entire farmsteads.

Strangely enough – the place where we saw the fire used to be Rahm Station, an old train station/general store/etc. It and the few houses around it caught fire a long, long time ago. But beyond that, I have no idea what the hell is going on out there.

My dad grew up around here and said that his friends and family always thought the place was ‘evil.’ I’ve heard similar things from other people and their families. The entire place seems to be avoided and ignored.

I may never know what the fuck is up with that place.

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A seagull has turned shoplifter by wandering into a shop and helping itself to crisps in Scotland and has struck multiple times – it invariably favours cheesy Doritos.

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HAD I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with the golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams beneath your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

~ W.B. Yeats

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A woman of Wuppertal, Germany, called armed police in when she thought he saw a masked criminal. Further inspection confirmed that the criminal in question was in fact a stuffed toy.

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An Oregon man, Kent Couch, was unfortunate enough to gain a significant altitude sitting in a chair with 105 large helium balloons attached to it. All in all he travelled 193 miles to Idaho after a 9 hour flight.

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It appears that a 4 year old girl in America rang the emergency services (911) nearly 300 times asking for a McDonalds. They were not forthcoming.

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MONARCHY: You have two cows. The king takes both and hangs you. He then nurtures the cows until they’re fat and eats them while the poor peasants starve.

ANARCHY: You have two cows. Your neighbour claims you stole them from him. You then agree without government interaction that you each keep one cow.

ARISTOCRACY: You have two cows. The wealthy nobles take them from you and sell them on the market to a poor peasant.

AUTHORITARIANISM: You have two cows. The government kills them and eats the meat without your consent.

DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. Your neighbour steals them, and the town holds an election debating whether he should keep them or not.

SOCIALISM: You have two cows. The government takes one and gives it to someone else.

COMMUNISM: You have two cows. The government takes both of them and evenly distributes the milk.

CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull.

AUTOCRACY: You have two cows. The dictator confiscates both and gives you a life sentence.

UTILITARIANISM: You have two cows. A neighbour has none. The government makes you give your neighbour a cow, but the neighbour has to share some of his chickens with you.

BUREAUCRACY: You have two cows. The government takes them both, shoots one, milks the other, pays you for the milk, then pours the milk down the drain.

AN AMERICAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows. You are surprised when the cow drops dead.

A FRENCH CORPORATION: You have two cows. You go on strike because you want three cows.

A JAPANESE CORPORATION: You have two cows. You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. You then create clever cow cartoon images called Cowkimon and market them World-Wide.

A GERMAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You reengineer them so they live for 100 years, eat once a month, and milk themselves.

A BRITISH CORPORATION: You have two cows. They are mad. They die. Pass the shepherd’s pie, please.

AN ITALIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows, but you don’t know where they are. You break for lunch.

A RUSSIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You count them and learn you have five cows. You count them again and learn you have 42 cows. You count them again and learn you have 12 cows. You stop counting cows and open another bottle of vodka.

A SWISS CORPORATION: You have 5000 cows, none of which belong to you. You charge others for storing them.

A BRAZILIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You enter into a partnership with an American corporation. Soon you have 1000 cows and the American corporation declares bankruptcy.

AN INDIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You worship both of them.

A CHINESE CORPORATION: You have two cows. You have 300 people milking them. You claim full employment, high bovine productivity, and arrest the newsman who reported on them.

AN ISRAELI CORPORATION: There are these two Jewish cows, right? They open a milk factory, an ice cream store, and then sell the movie rights. They send their calves to Harvard to become doctors. So, who needs people?

AN ARKANSAS CORPORATION: You have two cows. That one on the left is kinda cute.

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