Above is an old Polaroid taken of what the “Valley Avenue Believers” – a group of pre-teens who fancied themselves junior Mulders and Scullys (well before THE X-FILES were a twinkle in Cris Carter’s eye) – found painted on a door inside an old powerhouse in upstate Walden, New York, 56 years ago.
I know because I was one of the Believers and I took the picture with the Swinger camera I’d gotten for Christmas 1967. I brought the camera in case we ran across something.
“Yeah, yeah, Larry, like what? A ghost?”
“Yeah,” I’d say as seriously as an undertaker. “A ghost.” (It would be 16 years before I’d learn the terms “focused non-terminal repeating phantasm” and “Class 5 full roaming vapor.”) Did I expect to actually see a ghost? To this day, I don’t know. I know if we heard any noises inside that place, we’d all pretty much look like we’d seen one.
Propelled by sheer nerve and a sense of invincibility granted by that heady but dangerous blend of youth and ignorance with a dash of stupidity, the Believers first broke into the place in October 1968 on a Halloween dare.
The door in the picture, as I recall, led to another set of stairs that led down to what appeared to be a flooded basement. We were content to just shine a flashlight onto the surface of the dark water that seemed to swallow the stairs up just a few steps down. How deep it probably was and how deep we imagined it to be were two different things. We were were brave paranormal investigators, but not that brave.
And, for the record, we did think we heard that “hum” a few times. Or, dare I say, humming.
I discovered the photo mixed in with postcards, baseball cards, and more mundane photographs inside a shoebox in the attic of my parents’ house a few years ago. I pocketed it, put it inside a book, and promptly forgot about it.
Several months went by before I flipped through the book and saw the photo again. This time, as I turned the words on the door over in my mind, and then audibly, I realized a horror story was lurking in the picture, off its left edge, somewhere in the darkness beyond the door itself, cued by what had been written by … well, who might that have been, and what was their purpose? To me, that was a question that needed no answering. Not right away, anyway. It only deepened the creepy. If we see it as a warning, the Believers in my novel THE DYNAMO – the prequel to THE CLIFFSIDE CHRONICLES – do an about face and there’s no story. But if we take it as an invitation, well, here we are, dipping a toe into that deep, dark water so to speak, taking it on a form of faith that we’ll get that toe, foot, leg, and the rest of us back.
Whatever deep, dark story was forming “felt” like the kind of tale told by an older kid to a circle of wide-eyed squirts around a backwoods campfire. What is called an urban legend today and used to be called ghost stories. The kind that seemed to feature that old decrepit and verboten place every American town seemed to have. At least they did when I was growing up. I can personally think of three or four old houses, a train station, a school and a few hotels and factories in just three towns I lived in between 1966 and 1975 that fit the bill. For those of a certain age and mindset, “Keep Out” and “No Trespassing” signs might as well have read “Come In” and “Feel Free to Trespass.” Parental admonitions guaranteed it.
The yarn one could spin from the words on that door didn’t seem to be a standard “This Old House”-type tale in which supernatural entities “haunted” some hulking edifice that had been unoccupied for decades. When I was 4, those entities were those ubiquitous comic book ghosts that – despite their cartoon appearance in the minds’ eye – still made me whistle past those edifices after sunset when I was 10. Rather, it was far more disturbing and – to allow a term from a most un-child-like vernacular to vector in – existential … in which the very house or building itself at the center of the tale was evil. Down to each evil nail in each evil board and each evil stone making up the evil foundation on which the monument to evil sat evilly brooding. Of course, it had to look the evil part. A post-modern split-level or office building can be scary for other reasons, but the older and more un-contemporary a place looked outwardly and inwardly, the scarier and more foreboding to the child-observer. As young children, we feared almost as a group mind what lurked under our beds and inside our closets.
There was another thing about that fabled powerhouse. Namely a story of unknown origin circulating that for some reason the building’s chimney went deeper into the ground than it went into the sky. Sounds like another thing a bigger kid would invent that to scare those littler kids around that campfire. Or what a horror writer might concoct. Not for nuthin’, but that sounds like something straight out of STRANGER THINGS. I don’t know if we thought much about it at the time, considering the unevolved state of our imaginations, but upon pondering the idea when I recalled it, I immediately thought of “The Upside Down” from that Netflix series. How far down did the chimney go and what was at the bottom? Of course, the answer can be found in THE DYNAMO, which introduces the main character, Sam Bennett, featured in the six coming-of-age horror stories comprising THE CLIFFSIDE CHRONICLES. (Think of it as the both the prequel to that saga and Sam’s origin story.) Full transparency, all of my books owe as much to STRANGER THINGS as any of its myriad earlier inspirations, and strives to do for my Seventies what the Duffer Brothers’ series do for their Eighties.
A man-made structure that is as much a character as any living person is nothing new in the horror genre. One need look no further in the canon than Hill House in Shirley Jackson’s THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE and the Overlook Hotel in Stephen King’s THE SHINING.
Jackson’s opening paragraph of her aforementioned novel – in addition to serving as an exemplar of how masterful use of the semicolon (and several amazingly placed commas) makes for living, breathing prose – describes a house that is itself living, breathing, and (gulp) thinking. And it modeled the way I intended to describe the powerhouse (or dynamo) as it was in the heyday of the Believers, though I make no claim to be able to generate spooky text approximating its rarefied greatness. My readership will tell about that, but in the meantime here is that opening paragraph from THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE:
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
Still elicits a “wow” every time I read it. Even the house is “not sane.” Nor is the powerhouse at the center of THE DYNAMO.
The first mature drafts of the first two CHRONICLES books and outlines for the other four were completed before it occurred to me that the series actually had an “origin story.” A real one. And that the semi-fictional “Cliffsiders” of the very real village of Cornwall-on-Hudson, NY, were preceded by the actual “Valley Avenue Believers,” a clique formed by a group of 6th Graders at Valley Central Middle School who all lived in one neighborhood in nearby Walden, NY. Just like their fictional counterparts, the Believers were obsessed with scary movies, spooky books, and exploring the town’s allegedly haunted houses and abandoned places, especially what remained of a sprawling knife factory and hydroelectric powerhouse. Like the aforementioned Fox Mulder, they wanted to believe.
The two decrepit, made-for-horror-story structures at the heart of the Believers’ adventures were quite a sight, standing like giant monuments to a foreboding past on opposite banks of the Wallkill River when I arrived in town over the Summer ahead of the 1968-69 school year. It was my third new school in as many years, with a fourth yet to come. Now, a prospect like that was scary all by itself, even though as a military brat I should’ve been used to it.
Today, only the powerhouse remains, and I wonder if that door in the Polaroid still stands open, simultaneously warning and inviting trespassers, which is kinda what most good horror stories do if you really think about it. And the best horror stories are about trespassing in a way. They compel readers to break and enter into a world that both repels and attracts with equal intensity as we venture deeper – if we dare – into a “zone of the interior” that is at once an escape out of one dimension and into another.
