The strange bike ride
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Southern Lines
Lloyd “Cape” Caperton
Since Halloween is the thirty-first of October (The ancient Celtic day was November 2.) I thought I would use this story for my column.
My parents had moved to Tarrant City from Weogufka several months before I was born, where my father and mother had a photography and art studio. My father was also the assistant manager of a dry cleaning business. I went to grammar and high school in Tarrant.
The nearby Keytona and Pinson Valley area were still semi-rural, and often as a kid, after I got out of school in the evenings, I would ride my bicycle to Keytona, which was about 3 miles from my home, where I would go swimming in Five Mile Creek, which was about the size of Weogufka Creek, but I am sure much more polluted. A man in the area also rented out horses to ride, and I sometimes would rent one and go riding. There were plenty of nearby trails where one could ride a bike or a horse, which rented for $5 an hour, which was a good bit of money back in the 70s. It would be about like paying $30 or more an hour now, so I mostly rode my bicycle or would sometimes walk to Keytona Lake, an old rock quarry that had filled up with water. I would slip in illegally under a chain link fence and fish.
The world record brim fish was caught there and was mounted on a wall at Richardson Hardware in Tarrant City. There was a spring in Keytona, called Rushing Springs, where water came out of the ground from a pipe, and across the road from this, several acres of land had been recently cleared for where I heard some sort of mental institution was to be built. There were mounds of dirt there that had been piled up by the bulldozers that made good ramps for kids to jump on their bikes. Me and several others often went there and did this.
One evening after the other kids had already left and went home, I decided to explore around the new clearing of land. About half way around it, I discovered a gravel road that went through a cane break that was on both sides of the road. This looked like a good road to ride a bicycle down, so I rode down the road through the thick cane break for about a quarter of a mile or so.
A strange sort of feeling came over me that I can’t really describe. The cane break ended, and I came upon a pasture with a barbed wire fence on both sides of the road. I rode for about another quarter of a mile and came upon some farmhouses and barns and a man in overalls standing just inside the fence, who was looking at a cow laying down in the pasture that appeared to be dying. As I rode by on my bicycle, the man who was only a few feet away never looked at me or appeared to notice me, though he was facing me and the road.
A few feet farther down the road, I also rode right past several dogs in the middle of the road that acted like they didn’t see or hear me riding by. I thought this was a little odd, but didn’t think too much about it. I also, for some reason, could no longer hear the noise from nearby Highway 79.
As I rode past the farm houses, I noticed some vehicles in their yards that appeared to be from around the 1920s but looked new, along with some wooden wagons. It was starting to get late, so I turned my bicycle around and headed back. I went back down the road and through the cane break into the new clearing and rode back home.
I was 13 years old then, and a couple of weeks later I turned 14 and got my motorcycle license and told several of my friends who also had enduro motorcycles about the road I had found at the backside of the new clearing while recently riding my bicycle and suggested that we go riding there on our motorcycles. I took them to Keytona, to the new clearing where I had found the gravel road that went through the cane break… except the road I had ridden down wasn’t there! There were woods and some canes there and what appeared to have been at one time a road bed, except the road was all overgrown with big trees and bushes and now impassable. The road I remembered was in good condition.
We rode all around the clearing numerous times, but there was no road in the back of it anywhere. I spent the whole rest of that summer riding around that area looking for that place. I came in on a road from the other way and found what looked like the farmhouses and barns, except they were dilapidated and in ruin. When I saw them the first time, they were in good shape. I have seen television shows like the Twilight Zone where stuff like that happened, but this was real life.
Several months later the mental facility was built at the former clearing. According to some of the local urban legends I later heard while attending high school, some of the nurses and workers there quit their jobs because of some of the very weird things that they had experienced while working there; I never heard exactly what kind of weird things had happened to them, but they attributed the strange events to the fact that the place was a mental institution. What I experienced was before the mental facility was ever even built.
Did I somehow travel back several decades in time? Or were the man and dogs I had seen ghosts? Or something else? I heard someone say once that the supernatural world is just a part of the natural world that we don’t understand.
It has been almost 50 years since this event happened to me when I was 13; it remains the strangest thing that has ever happened to me in my life. This is my Alabama ghost story! Until next time, Dixie forever!