October Special: Part 1

I love October. It brings with it a change of weather and color as the year begins to die, it breathes in dead leaves and cool breezes, and as it ends, the boundary between Earth and Elsewhere weakens, ushering in a time of skeletons, jack-0-lanterns and grim reapers. And I guess beer bottle and sexy nurse costumes, but I try to ignore that.

But in honor of this month of horror, we're going to do some Deep-Time Fishing. It's like Deep-Sea Fishing, in that sometimes you dredge up a creature which looks more at home in a Lovecraftian myth than on planet earth. Every now and then, I encounter these creatures.

Here's one for this week.

Highways in Maine are much less dreary than anywhere else in the nation (because many of them have yet to be transformed into freeways or interstates). While we were driving towards Bar Harbor, Jenna and I had a conversation that went something like this:

Me: "Wow, nice flea market. Should we--WHOA!"

Jenna: "What? What?"

Me: "Did you see that house!?"

Jenna: "No, I didn't!" She turned to see it. "Wooooww!"

This is what I had seen on the side of the road:



There may exist, somewhere, a more grotesque house than this one, but I don't know if I want to find it. Just the quickest glance of this house gave me a little sour nudge in the pit of my stomach. We didn't stop for pictures that same day, but we did on the way back.



The architectural style seems to be something like a Queen Anne or a Victorian Revival, but those values have been usurped completely by putrefactive horror. The forces of time and rot are dragging the house's structure quickly towards the earth. A man in the flea market across the street offered us no hints about the house's identity except to warn us that it's very near its catastrophic end. The "DO NOT ENTER" road sign mounted on the right seems out of place, and adds to its eerie quality.

Take a closer look at the sinking outbuilding:



The parabolic shape of this building's roof line reminds me of something out of Tim Burton's nightmares. If we didn't believe the house had become the residence of demon spawn, perhaps we would have ventured inside. But, like Lovecraft's doomed explorer of The Picture in the House, I think what we might have found in that building would be worth a special degree of madness.

Something about the unnatural bending and undulations of the woodwork literally sent shivers through my spine. If I had seen this house in the dead of midnight, I don't think I would be writing this blog post.

Here is a parting glance of this, the House on a Highway in Maine.



See you here again in a few days. In the meantime, you may wish to enjoy Cinemassacre's all-month-long Monster Madness, or indulge in X-E's Halloween Countdown. Until then, ciao!

-Jonesy

More Snapshots

My first post for August of 2009! I have a lot of pictures, but right now I'm a little bit at a loss for what to post (I haven't been exploring in a while), so here are some snapshots.



Old Ford dealership, Conway



Abandoned gas station, Beebe



The Gray Mansion, Grayville, IL



The Arlington Hotel, a former hideout of Al Capone, Hot Springs



Drive-in movie theater, Mountain View (still in business!)



Train wrecker, Railroad museum, Pine Bluff



The Old Port, Portland, ME



Abandoned storefronts, Grayville, IL



Highly unusual bridge, somewhere in Maine



25 Fullerton Street, Boothbay Harbor, ME (my childhood home; beige when I lived there; historically a mid-1800s carriage house)

-Jonesy

A quarter of Maine

Here's something I learned today.



The lighthouse on the Maine quarter is a real place. Not only is it a real place, but we inadvertently visited it on an exploratory drive.



The lighthouse is at Pemaquid Point, a remote coastal location about 45 minutes from our bed & breakfast in Boothbay Harbor. Of course, it's on the Historical Register (I think probably the entire state of Maine is on the register). The perilous point was the site of a couple of late 1600s shipwrecks, whose passengers went on to settle in places like New York and Massachusetts.

Once you get into the lighthouse, which we didn't expect to be able to, since the brochure said it was closed on rainy days, you see this:



Most of the complex is a museum these days, but the 1856 fourth-order Fresnel light is still used to ward ships from impaling themselves. Members of the coast guard arrive every now and then to replace the bulbs. Once at the top of the tower, the viewer sees this:



The view would be grander on a clearer day, but the ocean never changes. Outside the lighthouse tower is another unusual building:



This mid-1800s building once held the lighthouse's bell. These bell towers are now a rarity, and Pemaquid's is one of the last remaining. Hurricane Bob knocked it over in the 90s, but it was repaired.

Whew. I tell you what, Maine is far too easy. Everywhere I turn there's beautiful stuff, weird stuff, ancient stuff. Some of them I can't believe I missed when I was little. Expect to see more.

-Jonesy