About twelve years ago, Ed and I took an October camping trip to the Savage River, in Maryland. We left after work on a Friday and drove to the state park there in the rain, arriving after dark. The rain stopped as we arrived, but the lingering fog and off season lack of inhabitants made the campground seem eerie. There were no other campers, so we had our choice of spots, but it was difficult to choose in the dark. We resorted to pulling into promising sites and using the car headlights to examine them. As the headlights illuminated one of the first sites we tried, we were spooked by the sudden vision of an old-fashioned highchair facing us. Nothing else, just an old, empty highchair, surrounded by fog. We couldn’t have known this at the time, but at that very moment, the movie “The Blair Witch Project” was being filmed. At a state park in Maryland. When we saw the movie two years later, it reminded us of that camping trip. Spooky.

Last weekend we took another October camping trip, this time to Queen Wilhelmina State Park in Arkansas. The park is in the Ouachita Mountains, a national forest area that spans into Oklahoma as well. The terrain is beautiful, and reminded us of the Appalachians. We drove there in the rain, and arrived in conditions that were less dark, but more foggy and windy than those twelve years ago.

Pitching the tent, we reminisced about the Savage River trip, when suddenly we heard “Tubular Bells” playing very loudly through the fog! That’s right, the theme from “The Exorcist”. We couldn’t see anything other than some vague flashing lights, but were able to nervously laugh it off because it wasn’t quite dark yet, and this time we knew there were other people at the campground, even if we couldn’t see them. Still, spooky.

The next day we noticed scarecrows and small train tracks around the mountain top where we were, and realized there was a “haunted railroad” ride in the park. What is normally a scenic miniature train ride for  visitors is turned into a train of horror in Halloween. The music came from the train.