In September of 2021, in honor of my birthday, my best friend, Terry, and I embarked on a trip... a trip of weirdness. The culmination of our little journey, the cherry on top, was to be our attendance at the Mothman Festival in Point Pleasant, WV but, because of the virus, the festival was cancelled. We went anyway!
Here's us...
I'm chronicling this mostly to remember the trip personally, but there's some tidbits that one person or another might find interesting. The trip was a little over a week, and I planned stops at some legendary Cryptid hot-spots. Also, every hotel we booked was allegedly haunted. Fun times! I have to say that, although we did try to scare up some spirits (the liquid ones being the only ones we were successful with), we did not think we would see monsters and we certainly did not go to hunt monsters and... SPOILER ALERT: we witnessed not one morsel of paranormal activity the whole trip, even at the notorious Bobby Mackey's nightclub. (well, Terry thinks he just may have heard something in the basement of that particular cowboy joint but who's to say)
So here's the trip in a nutshell...
Day 1: I drove from my home in New Orleans to Terry's in Athens, Alabama. As I was turning into his subdivision, a car across the street from me caught my eye. I thought maybe the "666 Redrum" license plate was an omen, a promise of horrifying adventures to come. I was wrong.
We ate a favorite Mexican restaurant of ours called Charritos and drank a few of their top shelf margaritas with a shared excitement of leaving our respective lives for a little while. Back at Terry's we watched one of our new favorite movies, "Return to Salem's Lot" (a favorite because it is absolute rubbish) and got some rest in preparation of our exodus. Into the unknown...
Day 2: Our first stop was Nashville, TN. All we had planned here was one of the nightly ghost tours (which is ironic since I live in a city where we are constantly trying to swerve around the tourists who are anxious to learn about the Nola specters, all huddled around the LaLaurie mansion, appalled by her horrific crimes). I digress.
We stayed at the Union Station Hotel, which is rumored to be haunted by Abigail, a 20 year old woman who said goodbye to her beau who was to be stationed in France during World War II. She saw him off at the station and they promised to meet there again when the fighting was over. When Abigail found out he had been killed, she threw herself in front of a train. Apparently she repeats this action over and over again, stuck in loop. We didn't see her. There's other ghost there too I'm told. Maybe? We didn't see them either. At any rate, it's a swanky, beautiful hotel.
The Union Station Hotel (Swanky, right?)
We ate dinner, hung at a bar called Fleet Street, then went on our ghost tour. It was interesting. But... the most exciting thing... once again I thought our trip was destined for success when the tour guide showed us a pic that had been captured just before our visit of... a SPOOK! I begged her to send it to me and she did, only after I promised to not send her crazy things or stalk her via text. Here's the pic...
Here's the pic lightened up a bit...
See anything?
So we walked a completely unnecessarily long way back to our hotel, confounded by all the construction going on, sat at the hotel bar and retired for the haunt-free night. Next up we were heading for Kentucky to walk where the little green men had and to spend the night in the lair of a werewolf...
Here's a few more pics for posterity...