Okay, here is my true-to-life and verifiable Halloween story. Well, verifiable if I could find Alberto, Megan, or John, that is.
Back when I was in high school in Roswell, Georgia, there was an unused and untenanted tract of land between my town and its northern neighbor, Alpharetta. Located across GA Highway 400 from my neighborhood, over on the Norcross side, one approached this little wilderness by following a two-lane road and then crossing a bridge over the highway. The moment you crossed the bridge, the road ended in nothing but some brambles and the merest semblance of a dirt track. Up on the hilltop stood the remains of a house, burned out some years ago.
Every high school in the area had its name for this place. The kids at Crestwood High called it Joseph's. The kids at Milton called it Devil Farm or some such. We called it Devil Worship Road.
Of course, there was a tall tale to accompany the name, and the tale was the same from school to school. Some thirty years before, there had been an eccentric recluse named Joseph Something who lived on that land and in that house. Joseph was evidently the Roswell equivalent of Boo Radley. Joseph, the story goes, was said to be the coven master for a bunch of devil-worshippers, who held their satanic orgies out in the country - at Joseph's, at his house. According to the tale, some area kids went missing, and after a fruitless investigation the townspeople were ready to boil over and kill Joseph like some Transylvanian peasant mob. There was damn near a lynching out at Devil Worship Road, and Joseph was dragged away and accused of killing those kids in Satanic Rites. The house went abandoned for some years before it burned; the story was that the police had had a hand in burning it, because devil-worshippers were showing up out there all the time, sleeping in and around the house, holding the old rituals out there. That was the tale, anyway.
When I was seventeen, my friend Megan and I went on a double-date with these guys Alberto and John, more a friendly thing than any type of hot high-school romance. We'd seen a movie and had a slice of pizza, but none of us were quite ready to go home yet - curfew wasn't for another hour. The guys asked Megan and I if we'd ever heard of Devil Worship Road. Of course we had - although neither of us had ever been there. Our escorts proposed that we go, and we readily agreed.
Creaking over the old 400 bridge was creepy in itself, but the place where the road ran out was downright forbidding. We made our way - in John's old seventies-model Jeep - up the hill, only stopping when the ground became too uneven for the car. We climbed the hill to the wreck of the house on foot, none of us talking much, save for the occasional nervous laugh. We walked around the ruins of the place, me getting the heebie-jeebies every second minute about the dangers of falling into the debris-filled basement. Around behind the house, we spotted some strangely shaped objects hanging from the six trees that formed a small grove in what had been the back yard.
We went to investigate. From the lowest limb of each tree hung a small-kitchen garbage bag, tied with its own neck. Of course, back in those days, every boy had a pocketknife on him, and many girls, too. Alberto cut down one of the bags...and out rolled the severed head of a German Shepherd. Fresh.
Each tree had its own dog's head. And on the ground on which we stood, painted in blood - we later found out it was the dog's blood - was a giant pentagram, some six feet across.
Needless to say, we levitated our little white (and Puerto Rican) asses back to that Jeep. We drove to the nearby McDonalds, where Alberto and John called the police and Megan and I sat shivering in the car, doors locked.
Being the fool I am, I went back to Devil Worship Road twice more before I graduated from high school, both times with disastrous consequences. But those stories are for another blog entry...I've had enough tonight.
Nowadays, the site of Joseph's old house, the Devil Farm, Devil Worship Road, is that of Atlanta's Northpoint Mall. That old bridge across 400 brings you into the mall area through an office park. A Zany-Brainy store is located almost exactly where the house once stood. My kid and I, we don't go to that store.
Posted by kelley at October 31, 2003 01:18 AM