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| [The spookiest house in St. Paul.] |
It's that time of the year, spooky season. It got me thinking... what are the sppokiest parts of St. Paul? Where on my St. Paul wanders do I feel like actual ghosts exist?
# 5. The area around Newell Park
This neighborhood doesn't have a proper name, part of Hamline-Midway, but the area around Newell Park seems spooky to me. It's something about the twisted oak trees, and odd undulations of the savannah, the only remnant of what the land actually looked like before white settlement. The nearby railyard adds an eerie ambience, the Black Stack smoke stack looms, and the streets are just confusing enough to throw you a curve.
# 4. Crosby Lake / Watergate / Old Rumtown
I was once in a dark cavern in the bluffs, deep underneath Davern Street, and came across an abandoned boat resting on the pitch-black sand. Walking past it, a hand-scrawled sign saying DANGER KEEP OUT appeared in the massive cavern, a abandoned entombed remnant of a Junior Chamber of Commerce haunted house, now sealed for eternity in its post-industrial tomb. The ghosts of the first refugee still haunt old Rumtown, evicted by Plympton at gunpoint.
# 3. West Side
Something about the West Side is spooky, probably the caves (again) lurking below, but also the hills and ravines and limestone retaining walls that slowly disintegrating in the moonlight. In late October, the cottonwood trees loom overhed, and you cannot erase the wildness of the bluffs from the margins of your memory, no matter how hard you try. Paths leading into the dark woods are there for those with eyes to see, leading down into the dark brambles and, eventually, over a cliff.
# 2. Area by the Half Time Rec
Front Avenue is home to more than cemetery, dating back to the era when this was the edge of town, and the tiny neighborhood tucked between the railroad tracks bumps elbows with the graves of nuns. To live in this odd nameless nook is to make peace with the dead, and it's apparent each Halloween that these cautious accommodations are not always smooth ones. The basement bocce court is haunted by the ghosts of grumpy old men, who bend the bounce of the balls ever so slightly with their lifetimes of frustration.
# 1. Swede Hollow / Dayton's Bluff / Railroad Island
When they burned the hollow homes the city leaders might have eradicatred the walls of the denizens of the city's timeless ravine, but it did nothing to their souls, who remain in the hollow to this day. The sun sets earlier down in along Phalen Creek, and the darkness wafts up to the bluffs overhead, haunting the dusty Victorian homes and nightly causing their radiators to creak and clank. A hairdresser once swore to me she had seen the ghost of Theodore Hamm stalking the top floor of the old abandoned brewery, and I believe her.
