The War Child Rides - Pt 4
Saturday, September 30, 2006
The purpose of the business trip was to get some additional illustrations for a Halloween-related story concerning Civil War locales that were said to be haunted.
John and I got on the road around 3 p.m. on Wednesday, September 10, 1986. We took I-70 east, across Ohio, then West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and finally into Maryland. By the time we reached our first destination, Crampton’s Gap, a mountain pass not far from Burkittsville (where years later The Blair Witch Project would be filmed), it was well after midnight.
Crampton’s Gap [I wrote in late October 1986] is supposedly haunted by Union soldiers from the Sixth Corps who spent the evening of September 14, 1862, lugging cannon up the eastern slope of the gap. If you pause in your car at the foot of the mountain, switch off the ignition and put the car in neutral, you will sometimes find the car rolling inexplicably uphill. Ghosts.
The real explanation is more prosaic. Apparently the uphill roll, which seldom occurs, is a natural phenomenon owing to the area’s topography and its effect on the wind. Crampton’s Gap becomes, in effect, a sort of wind tunnel.
As we approached the gap, I could see in my mind’s eye a subject for a suitably spooky photograph. Six years previously I had spent several days backpacking on the mountain near Crampton’s Gap and remembered a monument to war correspondents erected at its summit. I also knew that near the monument were some street lamps that might provide some suitably spooky illumination. In the event, John and I found that the lighting at the monument was not quite good enough, but halfway down the eastern slope we found a barn and silo, shrouded in mist, that was lit perfectly. We took several photographs, then feverishly tried to get those ghosts to push us up the ridge. It didn’t happen.
Most of the locales we needed were in Washington, D.C. We reached the city’s outskirts around 4:30 a.m. Instead of getting a motel room — John and Paula’s little company operated on a shoestring — we just pulled the van over to the berm of a residential side street. We retrieved a couple of beers from a cooler, cracked them open, and talked amiably for a couple of hours. Then, as an edge of pink appeared on the eastern horizon, we subsided into beery slumber.
