Haunting

I got an email this week from a new Rust reader asking me if I knew anything about the Astoria Elks Ballroom and if I had heard anything about it being haunted.

Funny thing about haunting; either you believe it or you don't. When I was much younger I worked in a Jacobean mansion for ten years. There were all sorts of stories about this place, however having worked there at all different hours as a librarian and as night watchman I never saw anything out of the ordinary except for the behavior of the priests that lived there.

The closest thing I've ever experienced which some may call a haunting was a creepy feeling I once felt on top of Mt Washington in New Hampshire. There were no ghostly images, it just felt creepy being there. It was cold and grey moonscape. There was a story in Yankee Magazine once about how creepy that mountain is.

The only other time I got totally creeped out was once when I was hiking in New York State in an area called Sterling Forest. I found myself in a laurel swamp where I had to bend over to walk through the laurels and I also had to step high over the low branches. This place was littered with thousands of deer antlers as though it were a bone yard. It was cool and I collected a half dozen interesting racks, but it seemed the more racks I collected the more lost I became and the thicker and more difficult the brush was to navigate through. Even looking back to where I had just come from it seemed like the trail closed into a wall behind me. I got the feeling that I shouldn’t be removing any of the antlers and as soon as I put them down the sun shined on a path for my exit. I left and never returned and I never shared the location with anyone.