If you enjoy Fred's newsletter, you might want to subscribe. So many newsletters are quitting these days, maybe he would like some encouragement. :-) HUGS, kath ============================================================ Get a FREE ($9.99 value) self-inking Handy Stamp from iPrint! You won't need to write your return address on mail anymore. Pay a minimal shipping charge. Design your Handy Stamp now! http://click.topica.com/caaaelLa84t9fa9dLNYa/iPrint ============================================================ ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? Welcome to ... The S T R A N G E T R A V E L E R The Best Vacation Ideas This Side of The Other Side! http://www.strangetraveler.com ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? Monday, Nov. 19, 2001 Fellow Travelers, Welcome, to the only travel newsletter on the Internet that dares you to toilet paper and egg your motel next Halloween. Today's visitations include: * STRANGE TRAVEL AND THE NEW NORMAL * HALLOWEEN: AFTER THE CANDY * GO TO HELL IN STULL, KANSAS * SUSPICIOUS SPIRITS * LAWRENCE AND LOGISTICS ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? STRANGE TRAVEL AND THE NEW NORMAL I was ready to press the “send” button for this newsletter early last Tuesday morning, but accidentally deleted a portion of it instead. I bit my tongue, counted to 50 and went to bed. I woke up a few hours later to CNN reports that an airplane had fallen from the sky and hit New York City again. Deja vu. Evil-looking black smoke. People running, screaming, crying. Rudy Giuliani wearing his somber face. Once again, I felt like a pawn in a chess game I never agreed to play. Suddenly, delivering an Internet newsletter about visiting the gateway to Hell seemed redundant. Mailing out stories about restless spirits felt wrong. It felt cruel. It felt ... pointless. Who wants to read about scary places to travel to when the basic act of traveling itself is terrifying? That’s one of many philosophical questions I’ve begun asking myself since Sept. 11. The world has changed over the last two months. People everywhere view travel differently than they did on Sept. 10. Goals, values and lifestyles are being privately evaluated and altered as folks cancel vacation plans in light of the War on Terror. Boredom is no longer a concern. People’s desire for the different, the offbeat and the disturbing are suddenly being filled by the unbelievable events warping our reality daily. During good times, people yearn for the excitement of the dark corners of their lives. In times like these, folks yearn for the light. What does that mean for The Strange Traveler? I am seriously thinking about temporarily suspending the newsletter. With all that’s going on in the world, I sometimes feel guilty tossing this newsletter into cyberspace. It feels like I’m throwing confetti at a funeral. What do you think? Has the time for The Strange Traveler come and gone? Or are there ways I can make it more relevant to the “new normal” our leaders have described? Should I offer guides to Strange destinations that offer hope and spiritual enlightenment? Or do these times call for dark, yet campy, escapism? You know, Alice Cooper, Elvira, the Addams Family; making fun of Miss Cleo. Or does this new normal mean I stay the course? Are haunted houses, monster-infested lakes and alien landing sites immune to the threat of global terrorism? I don’t know. I’m at a crossroads. You can help. Let me know your thoughts about this newsletter in light of recent events. Let me know what kind of stuff you want to read. Let me know how I’m relevant. My email address, as always, is <a href=" mailto:[email protected] "</a> I look forward to hearing from you, and I promise anyone who writes will get an answer. Hey, it’s cheaper than therapy. In the meantime, here’s the newsletter I was going to send you before American Airlines Flight 587 nose-dived into Rockaway. With Thanksgiving on the horizon, the Halloween references are a bit out of date, but, then again, in this newsletter, Halloween is always relevant. ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? HALLOWEEN: AFTER THE CANDY Last year, I spent Halloween with my oldest son, checking out the local legend of the Ghost of 13 Curves near Syracuse, NY. We found a handful of people who’d seen the apparition, a scouting crew from Fox Family’s “Scariest Places on Earth” and lots of teenagers jumping out of bushes and giggling. I wrote about it last year in my “Strange Destinations” newsletter. If you missed it, drop me an e-mail and I’ll send you a copy - revised just enough to avoid copyright problems. My address, as always, is <a href=" mailto: [email protected] "</a> Bobby is away at college now, so I decided this year’s Halloween adventure would involve my youngest son, Joey. Problem is, he’s 5. My wife and I dressed him like the kid in that “Little Vampire” movie and I took him out begging for candy. Then, after tucking him in, it was a couple of glasses of cabernet, about 40 leftover Twix bars, and an hour or so scrolling the internet newswires for indications that the Great Pumpkin had indeed found that sincere plot of farmland. That, you might recall, had been my idea for a terrorism-free Halloween: A tailgate party in a supposedly haunted pumpkin patch. A stakeout for the legendary apparition that ruined so many Halloweens for Linus Van Pelt. An excuse for staying up all night washing down all those perfectly good candies my kids thought were “yucky” with some kind of holiday-themed spirits. (I suggest Black Magic Stout, Hobgoblin ale or Old Nick barley wine. See the Beer Hunter website for more suggestions: http://www.beerhunter.com/documents/19133-001404.html) The concept was good. All I needed was a location. After hours of Internet searching, e-mails to my normally helpful paranormal sources and deafening silence from my Strange Traveler readers, I can reach only one conclusion: There are no more sincere pumpkin patches left in North America. Apparently, every pumpkin patch now includes an array of gourds painted and propped to resemble the cast of “The Wizard of Oz”. Every patch now offers “haunted” hayrides and pawns off bundles of dead corn stalks to suburbanites as Halloween decorations. It doesn’t matter. I’ve changed my mind about the whole thing. Why waste an evening waiting for a spirit whose roots go no deeper than the panels of a comic strip? Why wait for a supernatural vegetable, when you can use the same magic night to stalk something much, much bigger and darker? Why not stake out the Prince of Darkness? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? GO TO HELL IN STULL, KANSAS There are more players starting for the Kansas City Royals than there are houses in Stull, Kansas, a forgotten town off Route 70 between Lawrence and Topeka. Nevertheless, next Halloween, Stull could be a great vacation destination. Think about it: No one is going to plant a bomb there. No suicidal hijacker is going to smash a 747 into a barely inhabited Midwestern hamlet. And no one within miles of the place is going to worry about opening an envelope full of mysterious powder: Stull’s post office closed about a century ago. But I won’t guarantee your safety next Halloween if you spend it in the old cemetery that anchors this nearly extinct Kansas town. Satan is expected to drop by. A combination of local lore, urban legend, gothic imagination and cool web sites maintains that Stull Cemetery is one of the legendary seven gates of hell. It’s one of two places the devil is said to appear simultaneously on earth after midnight on Halloween night, according to a 1980 article in the Kansas City Times. The other place is somewhere in rural India. Why Stull? Rumor has it Satan’s son is buried in the cemetery. According to local legend, the Devil consorted with a Stull woman who practiced witchcraft and gave birth to a son who was so deformed he couldn’t survive. Both he and the witch are allegedly buried in the cemetery. Some say the ghost of the demon boy still haunts the cemetery. A few years ago, some photos surfaced of a werewolf-like boy peering out from behind a tree, according to Troy Taylor, one of the most reliable ghost experts in the business. A gravestone marked “Wiitch” is said to be the resting-place of the wolf boy’s mother; Beelzebub's consort. The cemetery acquired a cult following in the early 1990s when the alternative rock band Urge Overkill released a CD titled “Stull”. The cover featured a photo of the cemetery and the church and one of the songs included references to the town, hell and evil. (http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Station/9092/) There’s a lot of information about Stull’s supernatural connections, and some photographs that really give you a feel for what it’s like to visit available at http://www.geocities.com/Baja/Outback/2960/. Ghost Source also has some decent information and photos at http://www.ghostsource.com/location_spotlight.html. In 1998, the caretakers of the cemetery cut down a pine tree that was said to have been used to hang a suspected witch. In modern times, Wiccans are said to have congregated around the tree during the spring equinox. When the tree came down, folks interested in the supernatural began to smell a cover-up. You can read about that legend at the Haunted Kansas website: http://www.hauntedkansas.com/stullks.htm. Among the legends swirling about Stull: - Neither rain nor sleet nor nuclear fallout will enter the ruins of the church, even though it no longer has a roof. The ghostly parish, in other words, is precipitation proof. - In 1993, when the Pope was flying to Colorado, he asked that the pilot fly around Kansas, into Nebraska, because the area around eastern Kansas, where Stull is located, was unholy. The source of this legend is supposed to have been Time magazine, but nobody has yet been able to come up with an issue that carries that reference. - A secret set of stairs in or near the church leads to the bowels of Hell itself. The doorway is hidden, and once you find it, a mysterious force is said to beckon you downward. People have supposedly ventured down those stairs for just a few minutes and returned to find a couple of weeks have passed. If that’s true, no one ever filed a missing person’s report. ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? SUSPICIOUS SPIRITS Troy Taylor, editor of Prairieghosts.com (http://www.prairieghosts.com), is skeptical of the alleged supernatural activity in Stull. He notes that, although strange occurrences are said to have happened here for more than a century, the first published account of weirdness appeared in the University of Kansas student newspaper in 1974. The article featured interviews with students who said they’d learned of the legend from their grandparents. One student claimed to have been grabbed by the arm by an invisible assailant. Others talked about unexplained memory loss while visiting the place. I don’t know about you, but when I was in college, memory loss was part of every weekend. And the residents of Stull, the supposed grandparents of the students who started the story, say they’ve never heard of anything like that. Well then. Dismiss it. Unless of course, you think they’re lying. Remember “The Stepford Wives?” How about “The Wicker Man”? In both movies, the whole town was in on the dirty secret. Stull is a tiny place, easily organized, easily intimidated. How do you know they’re not covering something up? I covered a lot of small towns and villages when I worked for a newspaper in northern New York. They routinely hid instances of substance abuse, domestic violence, nepotism and politically creative snow plowing. Once, during a meeting of the village of Evans Mills, the mayor cut a fart and tried to blame it on the village clerk. So yeah, Stull seems suspicious. Every year, on Halloween night, they post sheriff’s deputies around the cemetery. (OK, there’s been quite a bit of in year’s past) And every year, on Halloween, right before midnight, just when the unholy one is scheduled to arrive, they kick all the media out. (The official line is, they didn’t want to encourage trespassers; and they do get a lot of trespassers.) One story tells of two young men who visited Stull and got scared when wind began blowing out of nowhere. They ran back to their car, only to find it on the other side of the road from where they’d parked it, facing the opposite direction. (OK, this is familiar too. Hey, it was the 70s.) ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? LAWRENCE AND LOGISTICS Daytime visits to Stull aren’t a problem. Nighttime visits could cost you as much as $100. That’s the fine for trespassing. Build it into your vacation budget. But don’t plan to stay overnight in Stull. You’ll end up sleeping in your car. Your best bet is probably Lawrence, Ka. Stull is about 15 miles west on Route 44. Directions and a map are posted at a Stull web site created by a former Kansas State University student who made a few uneventful visits there in his cranky yellow car, “the Flying Dog Turd.” The site’s also got some photos. Check it out at http://jove.prohosting.com/~chads/stull/index.html. Lawrence has a thriving arts community and a well-established blues scene. You can check it out at http://www.visitlawrence.com/index.shtml. It also has the Eldridge Hotel. (http://www.eldridgehotel.com) This historic building, once known as the Free State Hotel in the slave state of Kansas, has had its share of legendary hauntings. In the latter part of the 19th century, this building burned several times. In 1863, it was the focus of Quantrill’s raiders, a rampaging unit of 300 to 400 pro-slavery thugs whose orders were to “kill every man and burn every house” in Lawrence. (http://www.ci.lawrence.ks.us/local_history/quantril/quanraid.html) The Elbridge Hotel that stands today contains an original cornerstone used in its rebuilding after Quantrill’s raid. During Quantrill’s sacking of Lawrence, many hotel guests died in the smoke and flames. Their tortured spirits are said to remain. There are numerous cold-spots throughout the home, doors open and close inexplicably, and lights flash on and off without explanation, according to The Shadowlands web page: http://theshadowlands.net/places/kansas.htm. If you stay there, ask for Room 506 and you may not have to trek all the way out to Stull. The room, while not a rumored gateway to Hell, has a reputation as a “portal to the spirit world,” according to The Shadowlands. Lights flicker there for no apparent reason and breath marks have appeared on recently cleaned mirrors. ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? So, what do you think? Is there a place for The Strange Traveler in this not-so-brave new world? As always, you can contact me at <a href=" mailto:[email protected]"</a> Well, the sun is rising ... Fred P.S. - Chances are, you are NOT the strangest person you know. Do you have any friends, co-workers, relatives, cellmates or members of your coven who might enjoy this weekly walk on the weird side? If so, just forward this e-mail to them. They can sign up by using the links below. ************************************************************ TO SUBSCRIBE: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Send an email to: <a href=" mailto:[email protected] "</a> OR: Go through the Topica website at <a href=" http://www.topica.com/lists/Strangetraveler "</a> The travel destinations and events that appear in this newsletter have been selected by me, largely on whims determined by the phase of the moon and what I ate for lunch. Apart from those offers clearly set apart from the text, none of the links presented here are paid promotions for any company or organization. Feel free to forward this, in its entirety, to others. If you just use pieces of it, please give me writer's credits and list The Strange Traveler URL. Or pay me. That would be good too. (c)2001 The Strange Traveler. 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