Wednesday, February 14, 2007

If you were a ghost where would you haunt?

After giving it much thought I have decided that if I ever was forced to do a little post-life haunting I would select as my place of residence, without a doubt, Alpenrose dairy.
The high school I went to used the theatre there for most of our plays. And my opinion of the place has remained the same from the time I first laid eyes on it till now. By all means anyone who is familiar with the place, feel free to throw your thoughts but to those who have never seen it let me try to set the scene a little.

The complex consists of the main dairy, housed in a large concrete box of a building on one side and a velodrome, baseball fields, and racetrack of some sort on the another end. In between those is a miniature town. I say miniature not because it is particularly small but that it was originally designed for children and as such the buildings are built more closely to a child’s scale than adults. On the far side of the town there is a large man-made “pond”. It was never landscaped and looks like a concrete bowl. This body of water is surrounded by a 6-7’ chain link fence covered in signs saying that the water is too be avoided at all costs. The water has over time become an unhealthy looking lake that is black in color and smells unpleasantly of something that is not readily identifiable.

The story goes that when they first built the dairy they built the “town” as well and had puppets and handmade dioramas and other amusements designed so people could take there children to the dairy and let the kids walk through the buildings looking at motorized dolls acting out fairy tales. Well the idea crashed and though the diary still functions the town has been abandoned to a fate of slow decay.

The town has no lighting and at night is left in the dark. There are only two buildings left functioning in it. The rest are filled with cobwebs and weird archaic farm equipment and random items (I know this because you can still look through the windows into the buildings.) The theatre which was what my school used was a good example of why I would choose that place as my place of haunting. In the theatre the only well lit places consist of the main entry, the seating area, and the stage. Everything else, all the side rooms, passageways, and corners were always dark and filled with cobwebs. The unsettling thing was if you walked out of the light and into the shadows you would start to find things; a broken child’s doll here, a single shoe there, an old work shirt, newspaper clippings, things like that.
At night when we held the plays the rest of the town shrouded in darkness would crowd up against the few lights in the theatre. It was like the slow decay had seeped into the corners of the building and eventually it would overwhelm the faint light in the center,

The place just looks like a physical manifestation of someone’s dying dream.
It is the perfect place for a modern ghost.

2 comments:

Bud said...

I might haunt the music building at Biola; lots of unexplored nooks in there, and there's always a lone student in there pulling an all-nighter, ripe for the frightening.

Rybear said...

I'd haunt the Playboy Mansion.