This story, The Haunting Of Kite Park, is the 200th entry since I started this word game in September of last year. These stories allow me to have conversations with friends and complete strangers without having to talk to anyone, which is a testimony to my lack of interpersonal skills. If anyone of these or the next 200 stories resonate on even the smallest cellular level then maybe you could share them with someone else and I could be discovered.  

“Excuse me, do you come here often?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Can you please tell us what’s at the top of that incline, we don’t want to traipse all that way if it’s a dead end.”
“There’s a picnic shelter and a bathroom and a horseshoe pit and the road then connects to the road that surrounds the lake … but if you don’t mind, people don’t typically go up there.”
“Too tough of a climb, huh?”
“Well, no ma’am, it’s haunted up there.”

The woman laughed that laugh that older people laugh at younger folks they think they’re smarter than. “What would make you say such a thing young man?”

“There are stories ma’am. The people that go up there and come down from there aren’t … well … normal. Witches and warlocks people say.”
“You’ve seen these people I suppose?”
“Yes ma’am … hollowed-out faces, strange clothes and hats. They look right through you. They even scare the dogs out for a walk.”

The older woman and her companion scoffed in silence but uttered not another word. The boy took this as a sign and tipped his Newsboy cap and briskly went on his way.

♦

The park that has subsequently been confiscated by the spirits first appeared at the turn of the twentieth century. It was one of the first suburban parks of its kind and was expanded in phases over the next thirty years. There’s a lake – technically called Sulpher Creek Reservoir – and in the early years, it was a favorite spot for young dandies who could rent crude rowboats, which they did in large numbers. On warmer weekends they would show up in their seersucker suits and straw hats, pack a picnic and row their sweetheart out to the middle of the lake where they hoped their seamanship would win them a kiss. Alas, most of the young girls lured out on the man-made lake were too frightened about what might be in the water and about getting their Sunday dresses wet to consider anything remotely romantic. Rather they would sit board-straight tightly clutching their parasols, forced smiles on their faces, hoping for dry land.

By the late 1930s the park had expanded to almost 250 acres and the rowboats were long gone, replaced by stocked grouper, whitefish and the occasional trout and a bunch of rough boys and men who played hooky from school or the unemployment line. They’d fish from the mucky shoreline, smoking, drinking out of a paper sack and telling lies, that started as fish stories but ultimately turned to the park’s darker side and the events of that autumn day a decade or so before.

♦

Prohibition had changed everything except a man’s thirst for alcohol. Enterprising young men, and every man was enterprising when it came to booze, started assembling what became known as the co-op still.

Making your own hooch was a bit complicated, there were a dozen moving parts, so men formed alliances according to neighborhood. One man might be in charge of the fire, that is, the constant gathering of wood and keeping the flame alive, another might be tasked with security or grain acquisition, there’d be bottle guy and someone or maybe a couple of guys would need to know the mechanical sleight of hand required to rig a still from shanghaied parts and odds and ends. If a guy played his part and was a boozer in good standing, he would get his share of the co-op’s output, namely, a weekly bottle or two of brownish water that would leave a second-degree burn on the skin and a sour/hot sensation in the stomach.

The boys started calling their concoction ‘Ol Parkland because their still lived deeply hidden in the suburban park that the civic leaders has so conveniently built for them.

That every man, woman and child were drinking in Prohibition America was an open secret, but the whereabouts of thousands of illicit moonshine and rockgut and white lightning stills was for sure a closed, tightly-guarded secret.

The park had some main access roads that roughly resembled an oval around the basic perimeter. Little paved connections sprang up as more people used the park and started to identify some of the more popular spots. There were a handful of picnic shelters and some play equipment and areas that turned into default ball fields and sunning lawns, but the shelter at the top of the steep incline remained almost always desolate, like a forgotten corner that was somehow off limits. Adjacent to that shelter were thick stands of eucalyptus and sycamore and black pine and stately old oak trees. It was a kind of untrodden forest that stretched back miles on park property. It was the perfect out-of-the-way set-up to manufacture and drink ‘Ol Parkland.

♦

Cleveland Kite couldn’t have been much past seventeen. He was never much of drinker, though he loved to see a challenging plan well executed. His nature wasn’t criminal but he felt that life was fraught with too many rules and he was not fond of being told what to do.

Cleve quit school last year to help his dad run his small gear shop that supplied sprockets and axels and small steel mechanical parts for local manufacturers, a concern that was fairly booming on account of the sudden infatuation with bicycles. He had a mind for science, bright enough for university most said, and it wasn’t long before he was drafted into the homemade hooch fraternity by some neighborhood types whose primary focus in life would turn out to be the bottle. They recognized that Cleve was not like the rest of them, that he was smarter, more analytical, quieter … it wasn’t his company that they sought, rather it was his mechanical mind and how it could help them get a drink.

Cleve and the town’s bootleggers was an odd pairing, not anything like a friendship. For the others in the group, their main friendship was with the booze, as for Cleve, he simply liked to figure out how stuff worked and he got a certain stimulation from the intrigue that surrounded the entire enterprise. Still, Cleve was always the piece that didn’t fit, the young man that, people would say, had a bright, illuminating future that fairly stood out within a group and town that tended to be dull and hopeless.

The ‘Ol Parkland co-op, at its zenith, was yielding a half a dozen barrels of corn whiskey per week – barely drinkable but highly profitable for a bunch of uneducated park-dwellers in the lead up to the Great Depression. Cleve was acting as a sort mechanical maintenance man, literally keeping the still operational with string and baling wire and a series of mismatched parts that resembled a patchwork quilt. For his troubles, he received maybe five bottles per week which he typically sold back to one of the other members. The way he saw it, he was satisfying his natural urge to tinker, nobody was getting hurt and he always had a few bucks in his pocket.

Members of the co-op started gathering at the park, in the forgotten space at the top of the incline, multiple times per week. The picnic shelter there become a sort of default clubhouse and the men would maybe have a little drink, play horseshoes and discuss the business side of prohibition. Friday evenings would find most members in the park, as it was typically the day that bottles and money changed hands in anticipation of the demand for booze brought on by Saturdays and Sundays. The mood would be guarded yet festive and the influence of ‘Ol Parkland traveled on the breeze and on the breath of these strangers thrown together by the bootlegging economy.

On this Friday, Cleveland Kite came into the park and climbed the path to the whiskey rendezvous. It was near dusk and he arrived almost without notice. Men were throwing horseshoes, but it escaped his observation, preoccupied with what appeared to be a piece of copper coil. As he approached the group, aimlessly and distracted, he passed in front of the horseshoe pit and before a word could be spoken in almost complete silence, a horseshoe from the other end, maybe fifteen paces away struck Cleve in the head. Or at least it appeared to hit him but after impact, Cleve stood straight, in a way suspended … then he put his hand to his right temple and crumpled to the ground, like a fainting woman overcome by the heat.

Getting hit in the temple in just the right (wrong?) way, especially with something big and heavy like a fist or a horseshoe can kill a guy. The temple is only protected by a thin bit of skull and underneath this fragile shield is the middle meningeal artery. A precise blow to the temple can rupture this artery and the resulting blood flow has nowhere to go, so unless the victim gets prompt medical attention, the brain fills with blood and that can be a killer. When Cleve’s co-op partners ran to his side he was still breathing, albeit he had a nasty black-and-blue lump where horseshoe met temple. They thought he was just knocked-out, that he would come to. Instead, blood was pouring into his brain and in less than fifteen minutes he stopped breathing and was dead.

Nearly a century ago no average citizen would have known a thing about the medical reality that had just played out and even if they had, there would have been no efficient way to get help to Cleve or to get Cleve to help. It was all a terrible accident. Nobody’s fault really, which is what makes what happened next a haunting tragedy.

♦

The young man who threw the deadly shoe was named Horace, he cried out, “Cleve, Cleve! Why did you do that? By the time I saw you the horseshoe was already in mid-flight! Why on earth were you not paying attention? …” He ran to his side and was soon joined by six or seven others who had been drinking and carrying on around the horseshoe pit.

“He’ll be alright won’t he?”
“I think he’s dead … I can’t find a pulse.”
“We do we do?”
“We should go for help, maybe it’s not too late.”
“If we go for help the police will swarm this entire area … they’ll ask what we were all doing up here … what if they find our still? … this will ruin everything!”
“We should hide the body.”
“Hide the body! It was an accident! It could have been Horace or any of us, Cleve appeared out of nowhere …”
“Ya but our still and all the money we’ve made over the year is no accident. Who wants to throw all that away?”

It was dark now and there was confusion and sadness and disbelief. Some of the men had to fight the urge to just run, to get away as far and fast as they could. It was at that point that a wiry, dark-haired lad named Henry stood up. He was the nearest thing to a ringleader the group had. He wasn’t especially well liked but he had a short fuse and inspired a certain sense of fear so he often got his way and now he sounded so sure of himself that he seemed to be the voice of authority.

“Listen, for all we know there isn’t anybody who knows that Cleve was up here. Cleve was a good Joe, I wish we could change things, turn back the clock, but the fact is that he’s dead. One unfortunate accident shouldn’t have to leave a mark on the rest of forever. We have a lot invested in that still, for most of us, it means survival. Nothing can bring Cleve back.

“I say we take him into the trees where no one ever goes, bury him so deep that no one will ever find him. Then we dummy up, keep our mouths shut and take what we know to our graves.”

♦

At some point in the twenty-first century, the Spanish Bark Beetle became quite a nuisance to the local tree population and it wasn’t long before their attack became an epidemic in the big suburban park. Hundreds of trees had to be cut down and removed and power equipment and bulldozers were brought in to dig up the stumps and remove the soil that surrounded the infected trees. On the third day, a dozer operator told his supervisor that he thought he dug up some bones, maybe a coyote or something. Closer inspection revealed an intact human body and if someone looked even closer, a skull with blunt-force trauma around the right temple. Nearly 100 years after the end of Prohibition, it was liberation day for Cleveland Kite.

♦

The kid that wore the Newsboy cap walked through the park nearly every day, it was a shortcut home from school and while it is was trapped in a suburban neighborhood, it felt like a wilderness. He liked the lake and the trees, he could name the dozens of bird species that took flight there on sight … of course, he knew a lot of other things about the park too and he tried to never be there after dark. Still, it seemed someone was always poking at the haunted side of the park.

One day, two older gents stopped him asking, “Hey son are there horseshoe pits in this park, me and my friend here would sure like to play someday?” Before the boy could answer, they all heard the sound of horseshoes, that unmistakable ring of steel horseshoe hitting the steel stake. The old man said, “Someone must be tossin’ horsehoes, it sounds like it’s coming from up there at the top of the incline.”

“No sir. I mean, no one is playing horseshoes up there,” replied the boy nervously. “Of course they is,” said the old guy “I can hear them clear as day, let’s go have a look.”

“That’s the part of the park that’s haunted sir, people don’t go up there … nothin’ real bad ever seems to happen, just spooky.”

“Balderdash,” said the old man. “Just a couple of guys throwin’ horseshoes, come on, I’ll show you.”

The boy muttered to himself, “Nobody playin’ horseshoes up there sir…” but he followed the two old timers just the same. When they got to the top of the incline the two old men were pretty much tuckered out, and the place was deserted. There was a bathroom, a picnic shelter, trees and squirrels and lush patches of lawn and an old horseshoe pit, but not a soul in sight.

“I could have sworn I heard the sound of horseshoes,” said the old timer once he finally caught his breath. “No sir,” the boy said. As they stood there the dirt and sand moved in the horseshoe pit right in front of them the way it would if a horseshoe had just landed, and then they heard the loud clang of a shoe hitting the steel horseshoe stake at the other end. The two older men turned pale saying, “What’s going on here, what kind of a game is this?”

“Well, horseshoes sir, haunted horseshoes,” said the boy. “The park’s haunted sir. The sounds of horseshoes go on all day long but no real person’s ever playing. Legend has it that something bad happened up here, had something to do with the horseshoes … Now the ghosts, the spirits play their own games, like they don’t ever want to let go of something they lost … kinda sad … no one comes up here sir …”

The sign at the entrance to the park has always read Sulphur Creek Suburban Park, but all of the local kids, for as long as anyone can remember, have only known it as Kite Park.

Photo credit: Nick Kenrick.. on Best Running / CC BY-NC-SA