Memories and Moments by GrannyJo

Copyright
2005

Every year since they were about 16, my grown sons have a doozer of a Halloween Party. The other day I saw Phil intent at his computer, working out the invitations for the 2006 hauntings. He's usually the one who does the art work and selects the music for the band they've had for over 20 years.

When I saw him hard at work on this year's bash, I thought it was probably time to put up some Halloween/October shivers here on my blog, so I decided to start with CLARK COUNTY HORROR. Phil wrote the initial story for the website dedicated to inviting guests, a job well done, IMO. Further down you will find the EPILOGUES to the story, which I wrote, together with some pictures pertinent to the occasion. I hope you will enjoy all of Halloween 2005, and who knows what 2006 will bring?

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THE CLARK COUNTY HORROR
A Halloween Serial
By PDB

I
A Bad Place

The Horror didn’t start in Las Vegas. It followed us back. Back from places and things we shouldn’t have ventured. An old house. A rickety staircase that carried us up into the menacing gloom of the attic. The letters we read there. The secrets we learned. The charred heap of ...something... in the corner.

We called it the McGill Mansion. My brother, Rick, the purveyor of real estate investments. The property speculator. He brought me to this moldy reliquary from the days when copper was Queen in the early years of Nevada. The house stood on a hill as an overlord surveying the ruins of smelters, offices, rail spurs and company buildings for the defunct McGill Copper Consortium.

We got out of the car and approached the house. Pushed open the gate on the iron fence that surrounded the property. We climbed the mortar-starved steps up a rather severe incline to the front porch. Apparently a renovation had been attempted because the screen frames for the porch were stacked neatly to the side. We looked in the front window, which was still intact and saw the walls had been stripped of plaster all the way back to the wood lath. New lumber was stacked on the floor. Fast food bags and soda cans were strewn about. A coat of dust covered everything. The front door was locked.

“Let’s check around back, there might be a way in back there,” said Rick.

“I’m not sure about this. We came up here for a fishing trip, remember?” I asked.

“Right. And we were going to look into some real estate properties as well, if I recall.”

“This wreck? You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. “I didn’t think breaking and entering was part of the deal when I agreed to check out some houses with you.”

“Oh Christ, give me a break! It’s pretty obvious the place is abandoned. The owner probably ran out of money during the renovation and the contractor split. Look, I’ll call the number on the For Sale sign and let ‘em know we’re up here,” Rick pulled out his cell phone and walked over to the sign which hung askew from some rusty wire wrapped around one of the porch posts. “Then we can sit out here in the hot sun and wait for the owner to finish taking a crap so he can walk us through a house we probably aren’t gonna buy anyway. OR we can save some time and have a little fun sneaking into this old mansion and poking around.”

“If you just want to walk the grounds and not break in, I’m cool with that,” I said.

I had a peculiar feeling about this whole McGill side trip. When the copper mines closed, the town died a slow, wheezing death. Some folks held on, mostly the old with nowhere else to go. When we first pulled off the main highway and onto the gravel road that leads into McGill, we saw a crazy-eyed man sitting on his wrecked porch with a shotgun in his lap. Rick had laughed nervously and hummed a few notes from “Deliverance”. I wasn’t so sure. He looked like a man making a sober decision to place the barrel of that gun into his mouth and pulling the trigger.

Every town has a haunted house. Most of them aren’t haunted. Just old and deserted. A couple of windows busted out by teens on a midnight dare. Overgrown, needs paint, plumbing – the works. Something ready for a visit from Bob Villa. Other houses are the real deal. You can feel it. Smell it like an undercurrent of sewer gas on an otherwise pristine summer day. Things are just not quite right. Not right at all.

Investigators into the paranormal visit haunted houses and can document many manifestations of wacky electromagnetic fields, unusual temperature fluctuations, electronic voice phenomena, and photographic anomalies. Most have reasonable explanations. A small percentage do not.

The McGill Mansion is one of those unreasonable places. But here is the kicker. The whole town is one of those places. Something went seriously wrong here. A Bad Place.
(Continued...)