There was a time when there was no internet. No cell phone. No Netflix. No iAnything. There were pay phones and party lines. Fifty cents got you a movie ticket or a burger at the luncheonette. We entertained ourselves with our mind's imagination. At least my friends and I did.
Like all crazy boomers, my circle of friends and I held Halloween as sacred. We didn't get dressed up or go trick or treating along with the little kids. All we wanted was a good scare. So, as we approach Halloween 2014, I give you a glimpse back into time when things that went bump in the night would not actually kill you.
"The Heartbeat”
Urban legends and teenagers go together like a drunk and his wine. That fact is as true today as it was forty-five years ago, when my senior class cohorts and I decided that it was not a consummate Halloween without a trek to “The Heartbeat”.
The Heartbeat, as it was commonly referred to, was in actuality an old, rundown, abandoned seminary called St. Michael’s Grove. It was located high in the hills of Jersey. It was called The Heartbeat because legend had it that on Halloween night, a maniac with a machete-like arm, roamed the grove in search of victims and when he found one and killed one, all that remained was the sound of the dead person’s heart beating out there in the darkened woods. Mind you, when someone is dead, it is for certain that his or her heart would no longer beat and if we were interested in reality, we would know this. We, as foolish adolescents, believed this preposterous story without benefit of reason. In retrospect, maybe we just wanted to believe in the mystery and lore of such a legend because it was the best of times in our small town lives.
I was doing a last minute check of my backpack, making sure we had all necessary equipment for the journey, when I heard the old Rambler with its mournful bellow of a horn and screeching tires, roaring towards my house. One last check of my survival kit- flashlight, matches, a new pack of Marlboro, and last but not least, the joint my cousin Gabe gave me that I had saved for this very occasion.
I was barely out of the front door when Tim started yelling in my face, “Get in already! Where’s the joint?” “Shut up”, I said. “My parents will hear you.”
It wasn’t as easy to get a hold of pot in those days as it seems to be today. Medical marijuana…who’d a thunk it. Procuring marijuana made you quite popular back then. A joint was as rare as a gold doubloon on the Jersey Shore and just as valuable to us lamebrains.
The Rambler belonged to Dowdiness’s mother, Ruth. We always included Dodie because she was the only one who had access to a car. It was indeed the strangest vehicle we’d ever seen. It was pink and silver and it had no shifting column. It went from P (ark) to D (rive) by pushing a button. Tim, Gina, Bill, Marilyn, Dodie, and I, all managed to stuff ourselves into this squeaky pink tin can on wheels. Dodie drove it like a crazy person with the radio’s volume turned up as high as it would go until the speaker sounded like crumpling papers at 1000 decibels. The ride was frenzied with loud confusion. You knew everyone was stoned when we began to talk, laugh, and debate in all directions and all at the same time. In spite of the chaos, we reached our destination just as the full moon was rising over the dense trees that covered the grove.
It was a crisp indigo night punctuated by a bright yellow moon. This night, the moon was all the light that the grove offered to its visitors. I was the only one sensible enough to have brought a flashlight. Everyone piled behind the single beam of light I carried as we made our way up the broken paths littered with brittle branches and leaves. I felt like a Sherpa leading an expedition. No one talked as we walked. Six sets of footsteps crunched and snapped the debris, sometimes in unison like a drum line of marching morons. Occasionally, there was a burst of nervous laughter when someone’s misstep on loose gravel sent them flying forward into the next person. When I stopped, everyone ground to a halt. We listened to the night and strained to hear the restlessness of the trees in the wind. You could hear the wind blowing through their branches, making sounds like a circus calliope. “It was the music of the dead”, I thought to myself, not daring to speak out loud. We walked for what seemed like miles. In reality, it was probably less than the equivalent of a football field. Finally, someone spoke. “I’m sitting down for a smoke,” said Bill. We all decided to join him and sat semi-circle on a small ridge. A stone block was our conference table and it was immediately strewn with an assortment of cigarettes, matchbooks, and gum wrappers. One by one, matches sizzled and burned. Everyone exhaled at once, creating a whooshing sound, producing a thick cloud of smoke. Then the coughing concert started. We were too young to be hacking like this but we were all too stupid to give it up.
“Hey…do you hear that?” Tim said.
“Hear what?” I said, pretending to be nonchalant.
“That! Listen!” We all shook our heads to the negative, but we desperately listened for whatever was making Tim nervous. All of a sudden, Marilyn gasped. “I hear it”. “It sounds like…”
“A heartbeat”, Tim said finishing her sentence. “Come on, it’s coming from over there”. That's right dummies, run towards it. We all jumped up and huddled uncomfortably close to one another. We didn’t use the flashlight for fear that “it” would spot us. We were all so scared by now that whatever it was could probably smell our fear. As silently as we could, we made our way through the thicket, until we came upon a small wooden shack surrounded by unkempt brush. It was so quiet that we could hear each other breathing. There, within its silhouette, we could see a speck of luminescence through a tiny windowpane.
“Somebody’s in there” I whispered.
“Who would be all the way out here?” Bill asked. (One unfortunate by-product of smoking pot is that smart people become pretty dumb.. a duh- we were). Suddenly we all looked at each other, terrified with the same thought… “It’s the Heartbeat killer!” Hitchcock couldn’t have devised it any better. As if on cue, the woods resonated with a creeping, methodical… thump thump, thump thump, thump thump. I don’t remember who screamed first or if everyone screamed at the same time, but the grove was alive with the sound of panic. Like Keystone Cops, we couldn’t get out of each other’s way fast enough. No one could figure out which way was the path to safety. When the door to the shack swung open, we saw a shadowy figure emerge, appearing as a ten-foot giant with a long, claw-like hand. It made grunting sounds as it came toward us. With that, we took off like scud missiles and luckily found our way to the Rambler. We never looked back. Little did we know that the grunting monster was actually yelling at us- “Damn kids! Get outta here
Weeks later, after we all had our fill of reliving this terrifying event over diner food laden midnights, I found out that the monster turned out to be “Turk”, a five foot, overweight drunken vagrant that walked with a cane. Sometimes he used the old groundskeeper’s shed as a home when it got too cold to sleep out on the streets. The thumping noise came from an old pump that supplied the shed with running water. Lord knows how many times on Halloween good old Turk would have his buzz interrupted by a bunch of silly, stoned kids. I never shared the truth about the heartbeat with the others. If any of them knew , they never spoke about it...the fact that the terror we faced that night was no more than a grouchy old wino and a rusty pump. We all must have taken a silent oath to preserve the secret so that the goofy high schoolers next in line would visit the Grove, after we were gone. And that they would experience that same juvenile, sacred rite of passage that we did- to scare the crap out of oneself.
I hope that this legend is still alive and well. I hope every October 31st, the woods are filled with the shrill of teenage screams while their fertile imaginations run wild with visions of unworldly monsters. There’s time enough for them to deal with the real monsters in this world and to learn the scariest reality of it all- that becoming an adult would never be as much fun as being a dumb ass kid.
Like all crazy boomers, my circle of friends and I held Halloween as sacred. We didn't get dressed up or go trick or treating along with the little kids. All we wanted was a good scare. So, as we approach Halloween 2014, I give you a glimpse back into time when things that went bump in the night would not actually kill you.
"The Heartbeat”
Urban legends and teenagers go together like a drunk and his wine. That fact is as true today as it was forty-five years ago, when my senior class cohorts and I decided that it was not a consummate Halloween without a trek to “The Heartbeat”.
The Heartbeat, as it was commonly referred to, was in actuality an old, rundown, abandoned seminary called St. Michael’s Grove. It was located high in the hills of Jersey. It was called The Heartbeat because legend had it that on Halloween night, a maniac with a machete-like arm, roamed the grove in search of victims and when he found one and killed one, all that remained was the sound of the dead person’s heart beating out there in the darkened woods. Mind you, when someone is dead, it is for certain that his or her heart would no longer beat and if we were interested in reality, we would know this. We, as foolish adolescents, believed this preposterous story without benefit of reason. In retrospect, maybe we just wanted to believe in the mystery and lore of such a legend because it was the best of times in our small town lives.
I was doing a last minute check of my backpack, making sure we had all necessary equipment for the journey, when I heard the old Rambler with its mournful bellow of a horn and screeching tires, roaring towards my house. One last check of my survival kit- flashlight, matches, a new pack of Marlboro, and last but not least, the joint my cousin Gabe gave me that I had saved for this very occasion.
I was barely out of the front door when Tim started yelling in my face, “Get in already! Where’s the joint?” “Shut up”, I said. “My parents will hear you.”
It wasn’t as easy to get a hold of pot in those days as it seems to be today. Medical marijuana…who’d a thunk it. Procuring marijuana made you quite popular back then. A joint was as rare as a gold doubloon on the Jersey Shore and just as valuable to us lamebrains.
The Rambler belonged to Dowdiness’s mother, Ruth. We always included Dodie because she was the only one who had access to a car. It was indeed the strangest vehicle we’d ever seen. It was pink and silver and it had no shifting column. It went from P (ark) to D (rive) by pushing a button. Tim, Gina, Bill, Marilyn, Dodie, and I, all managed to stuff ourselves into this squeaky pink tin can on wheels. Dodie drove it like a crazy person with the radio’s volume turned up as high as it would go until the speaker sounded like crumpling papers at 1000 decibels. The ride was frenzied with loud confusion. You knew everyone was stoned when we began to talk, laugh, and debate in all directions and all at the same time. In spite of the chaos, we reached our destination just as the full moon was rising over the dense trees that covered the grove.
It was a crisp indigo night punctuated by a bright yellow moon. This night, the moon was all the light that the grove offered to its visitors. I was the only one sensible enough to have brought a flashlight. Everyone piled behind the single beam of light I carried as we made our way up the broken paths littered with brittle branches and leaves. I felt like a Sherpa leading an expedition. No one talked as we walked. Six sets of footsteps crunched and snapped the debris, sometimes in unison like a drum line of marching morons. Occasionally, there was a burst of nervous laughter when someone’s misstep on loose gravel sent them flying forward into the next person. When I stopped, everyone ground to a halt. We listened to the night and strained to hear the restlessness of the trees in the wind. You could hear the wind blowing through their branches, making sounds like a circus calliope. “It was the music of the dead”, I thought to myself, not daring to speak out loud. We walked for what seemed like miles. In reality, it was probably less than the equivalent of a football field. Finally, someone spoke. “I’m sitting down for a smoke,” said Bill. We all decided to join him and sat semi-circle on a small ridge. A stone block was our conference table and it was immediately strewn with an assortment of cigarettes, matchbooks, and gum wrappers. One by one, matches sizzled and burned. Everyone exhaled at once, creating a whooshing sound, producing a thick cloud of smoke. Then the coughing concert started. We were too young to be hacking like this but we were all too stupid to give it up.
“Hey…do you hear that?” Tim said.
“Hear what?” I said, pretending to be nonchalant.
“That! Listen!” We all shook our heads to the negative, but we desperately listened for whatever was making Tim nervous. All of a sudden, Marilyn gasped. “I hear it”. “It sounds like…”
“A heartbeat”, Tim said finishing her sentence. “Come on, it’s coming from over there”. That's right dummies, run towards it. We all jumped up and huddled uncomfortably close to one another. We didn’t use the flashlight for fear that “it” would spot us. We were all so scared by now that whatever it was could probably smell our fear. As silently as we could, we made our way through the thicket, until we came upon a small wooden shack surrounded by unkempt brush. It was so quiet that we could hear each other breathing. There, within its silhouette, we could see a speck of luminescence through a tiny windowpane.
“Somebody’s in there” I whispered.
“Who would be all the way out here?” Bill asked. (One unfortunate by-product of smoking pot is that smart people become pretty dumb.. a duh- we were). Suddenly we all looked at each other, terrified with the same thought… “It’s the Heartbeat killer!” Hitchcock couldn’t have devised it any better. As if on cue, the woods resonated with a creeping, methodical… thump thump, thump thump, thump thump. I don’t remember who screamed first or if everyone screamed at the same time, but the grove was alive with the sound of panic. Like Keystone Cops, we couldn’t get out of each other’s way fast enough. No one could figure out which way was the path to safety. When the door to the shack swung open, we saw a shadowy figure emerge, appearing as a ten-foot giant with a long, claw-like hand. It made grunting sounds as it came toward us. With that, we took off like scud missiles and luckily found our way to the Rambler. We never looked back. Little did we know that the grunting monster was actually yelling at us- “Damn kids! Get outta here
Weeks later, after we all had our fill of reliving this terrifying event over diner food laden midnights, I found out that the monster turned out to be “Turk”, a five foot, overweight drunken vagrant that walked with a cane. Sometimes he used the old groundskeeper’s shed as a home when it got too cold to sleep out on the streets. The thumping noise came from an old pump that supplied the shed with running water. Lord knows how many times on Halloween good old Turk would have his buzz interrupted by a bunch of silly, stoned kids. I never shared the truth about the heartbeat with the others. If any of them knew , they never spoke about it...the fact that the terror we faced that night was no more than a grouchy old wino and a rusty pump. We all must have taken a silent oath to preserve the secret so that the goofy high schoolers next in line would visit the Grove, after we were gone. And that they would experience that same juvenile, sacred rite of passage that we did- to scare the crap out of oneself.
I hope that this legend is still alive and well. I hope every October 31st, the woods are filled with the shrill of teenage screams while their fertile imaginations run wild with visions of unworldly monsters. There’s time enough for them to deal with the real monsters in this world and to learn the scariest reality of it all- that becoming an adult would never be as much fun as being a dumb ass kid.