My Haunted Hometown

In the dark of night, we were just a bunch of meddlin’ kids

I often write about my adventures growing up in a broken-down little town in the armpit of the Adirondacks. Those New York foothills bordered Canada up near Montreal way. In fact, Montreal was our closest city — our television, radio, cultural quirks, and dialects came from the other side of the tracks. We even rooted for Canadian sports teams…this was the culture we knew and felt most a part of.

Malone was one of those places with a ghost town of a Main Street serving as the heart with its arteries and veins reaching out into rickety old streets hailing a mix of Victorian homes, farmhouses, and some poverty-ridden houses along the river. There were a couple of burnt-down blocks in our downtown area from wintertime fires that ravaged old buildings. Grand churches and historic stone buildings lined Main Street, some with newer signage slapped above the entrances in hopes of luring residents into their mom-and-pop shops rather than the Kmart uptown.

We lived in the poorest county of New York state and Malone in the 1980s was known for being a dump of a town. We didn’t have much except for floundering farms, those magnificent old churches, and a shit ton of elementary schools. The unemployment and teen pregnancy rates were rampant.

That’s not to say our town didn’t have spirit. For as much as I described above that sounds unappealing there was plenty that made it a great place to grow up. It was the kind of town where you didn’t have to lock your doors. Everyone knew each other and people were kind. Back in the day, we had celebrations that everyone looked forward to and participated in, such as the Winter Carnival and the county fair.

Malone also boasted some historical significance. We housed an underground railroad underneath one of our churches. Students would often go on tour to see the extremely small tunnel. Malone was the home of William A. Wheeler — the Vice President to the 19th President, Rutherford B. Hayes. Even better than that, if you’re into music, Malone is the hometown of musician Bob Mould. Even still better than that, remember Little House on the Prairie? We were the hometown of Manly. Almanzo Wilder. The book Farmer Boy centered around his life in our town and even features an illustration of our downtown Main Street and lovely Memorial Park.

That’s all a long-winded way of saying, there wasn’t much for teenagers to do other than sneak alcohol from their parents, drive around town in circles, park, hang out at the Rec Park at night, go to the Pizza Box, or go see the one movie that had been in town for six weeks straight. Probably Popeye still.

Stop here.

Isn’t it funny how it seems like it’s almost kind of human nature that in the silence of the dark, we can convince ourselves there is something unnatural afoot?

Is it entertainment? A learned response to visuals we’ve seen and stories we’ve heard?

When we hear bumps in the night, why is it that for many of us, instead of ignoring them with rational non-thought, our hearts immediately race, throats close, foreheads sweat, and we begin to look for shadow demons in the corners of the room?

And isn’t it interesting how watching a scary movie can elicit the same response? With the hair on your arms standing on end, chills running down your spine.

Yet we can’t help but watch paranormal videos on YouTube or TikTok on our phones in bed at night and scare ourselves to death before we fall asleep.

Funny, right?

The thing about Malone at night is that it would get spooky.

At 10:00 pm, the traffic lights along Main Street would all switch to flashing yellow. Being a farm town in the country, it was dark at night. Very dark. Street and traffic lights were the only source of light, but just barely as even those were relics of the past.

As teenagers jammed into someone’s beat-up hand-me-down clunker, we’d drive through the middle of downtown laughing and listening to our Canadian Top 40 music. The nights would be misty and slightly foggy creating a Gaussian blur through the flashing lights.

Kids, of course, exaggerate things even more. But everyone knew that we didn’t just have a couple of houses in town that were haunted. Our entire town was haunted. And to us, at least my crowd back then in the 1980s, we entertained ourselves for years riding around like the Kmart version of the Scooby Doo gang in our Mystery Sedan.

Were we looking for hauntings or running from them? We were bored as bored could be, so both I suppose. One night, as we drove through the creepy Gaussian kaleidoscope of nighttime Main Street, Bill told us the story of when he saw the ghost of his grandmother in the corner of his room. He told it with all seriousness, breathless…almost unable to tell it. It was an event that shook him to his core. We were just about to pass the old Gorman building when the flashing yellow light slammed red before us, causing us to scream.

We were the only car on the street, fog rising up around us — a line of yellow flashes behind and ahead. We sat at this red light not saying a word, scaring each other more with our silence and knowing what each other was thinking — there were some dark ghostly paranormal forces at play here. Why else would a flashing yellow light on a timer just randomly pick that moment in the story to stop us with a red?

We continued on to park at the Rec Park to obsess over this strange occurrence. We sat and talked, agreeing that it was likely a stupid coincidence until we all freaked out at the same time — well, freaked each other out at the same time — by insisting that there was an “odd chill in the air” and something felt off. We felt like we were being watched…get the hell out of here!

There were a couple of places we just knew never to go to at night. Our town cemeteries of course were just not worth the risk. And then there was the old Ballard Mill — as dark and menacing as it was in the shadows of the moonlight. It was even creepy during the day. Even creepier was Flanders Elementary School. This was where I went to grade school, but everyone knew the tale of it being built on an old cemetery. Some would say an old Indian burial ground, and it was twice as frightening once Poltergeist was released. Either way, there were always stories of seeing shadowy figures in the windows when the school was closed, playground equipment moving by itself, and the general feeling of dread. There was also the little girl in town who lived behind the school who would stand behind the chain link fence looking exactly like one of the long-lost twins from The Shining.

The last haunted expedition I went on in Malone was probably about twelve years ago.

We lived across from “the haunted college.” It had several iterations throughout its life prior to becoming a community college, including serving as an elementary school and as a school for the deaf. It was a gorgeous and dignified historic brick building with elegant architecture. Unfortunately, when the college left for a new location at haunted Ballard Mill, the old building sat with nothing new to make a home out of it. Over the years, it succumbed to the sad state of an abandoned landmark far too dilapidated (and filled with asbestos) to be saved.

One Easter, with liquid courage, we thought it would be interesting to break in and see what was inside. The doors and windows were boarded up, but because it was common for kids to get in there and drink or do whatever young whippersnappers do, getting in was not difficult. We went in with flashlights and cameras, walking very carefully. The dust was obscene. There were still the remnants of a school from days past — chairs and papers on the floor as if time stood still. And what you’d swear were orbs flying around. Probably the aforementioned asbestos. Like those nights as a teenager, it was easy to spook yourself out. Convince yourself that chills were running down your back, that you were being watched, the hair on your arms was standing on end. At one point, I couldn’t handle it anymore and ran out in a panic.

Is Malone haunted? Oh, I don’t know. I doubt it. I suppose it depends on what you want to believe. I think when I was young, we were creating a bit of adventure and folklore for ourselves. Malone was no different really than any other small town in northern New York at the time. And we were no different than other teenagers. As for the event at the college, true — I was an adult. But, drinking will do that to you. And one can tend to get a bit nostalgic when they visit home. The college was more of an unfortunate event — as my mom likes to put it, it was the demise of a landmark.

There’s one thing I believe to be true. In the dark of the night, it’s completely normal for our minds to go places they ordinarily wouldn’t visit during the day.

Is it entertainment? A learned response to visuals we’ve seen and stories we’ve heard?

When we hear bumps in the night, why is it that for many of us, instead of ignoring them with rational non-thought, our hearts immediately race, throats close, foreheads sweat, and we begin to look for shadow demons in the corners of the room?

I think it’s all of the above.

Funny, right?

This story was written in response to Sally Prag’s theme for October on The Narrative Collective!

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