Gold Dust to Dust: The Ghost Town of Rhyolite

April 27, 2016 — The road in front of us was dusty, the hills surrounding us shades of beige and brown. The desert, man. But it wasn’t too bad. January’s a good time to be in the desert. And I was excited. We were pulling into my first Old West ghost town. I mean, to this point I’ve seen more ghost towns than a guy who makes a living sitting in front of a computer should have, but they’ve been mostly clumps of stone cellars or ramshackle wooden buildings in forests. You know, East Coast ghost towns. This ghost town was out in the desert of Nevada, dry and cracked, like a carcass left out for vultures and exactly the experience I was looking for. Except for the sheet ghosts and giant naked Lego woman, of course.

Rhyolite is an igneous, volcanic rock, of felsic (silica-rich) composition (typically > 69% SiO2—see the TAS classification)…wait. Ripping off the wrong Wikipedia article. The town of Rhyolite, Nevada, which was named after the rock, was settled in 1902. So not the oldest of wests—really the tail end of that period—but, still, it was a Gold Rush town.

Rhyolite’s in the Bullfrog Hills, a couple of hours northwest of Las Vegas, and right on the edge of Death Valley. Five miles west, and this place would be a California ghost town.

As we drove in, the road sloped upward. We passed about half a dozen buildings, some no more than facades, others as crumbled as ancient Roman ruins, until we reached the top and parked. Nobody was around. It was a literal and figurative ghost town. So we ran down the road darting in and out of buildings in wild abandon because, you know, ghost town.

Rhyolite started as a mining camp after gold was found in the Bullfrog Hills, which were named for the mottled green color of the rock that they were excavating. Mining soon started in earnest, and a few towns cropped up in the vicinity. Rhyolite was by far the biggest because it was near the largest and most promising rock tunnel, the Montgomery Shoshone Mine. After the initial rush, the town quickly became legit. At its peak, as many as 5,000 lived here. It had banks and saloons and brothels and everything you want out of an Old West town minus Don Knots in a black cowboy hat with a silver-spangled brim.

Then the mine dusted. It wasn’t as rich a source for gold as had been hoped. The big mine finally winked closed in 1911, but by then the population had already dwindled to about 500. By 1916, the town was only such by the slimmest definition of one, and by 1920, it only had one resident, a 92-year-old codger whom I assume had some serious stories.

In the following decades, many of the buildings decayed into oblivion or were torn down for materials. One wooden shop made it to 2014 before it was hit by lightning and burned own. Movies were filmed here as well, the 1987 Chery 2000 and 1998 Six-Gun Samurai, being the two I’ve seen from the list because I minored in late-century post-apocalyptic science fiction.

Various signs were staked into the side of the road, mostly informational placards, but one or two Beware of Rattlers signs, too. The desert, man. The informational placards explained what each building used to be and included photos of them before they ghosted. At the top of the rise, where we parked, was one of the best-preserved buildings. It was originally a train station, but after the trains stopped coming, it was converted to a casino. It was boarded up and fenced off. Looked like an abandoned Mexican-themed chain eatery.

Further down the road were the remains of a jewelry shop, a school, a general store, a jail, a couple of banks. Some were protected by fences, and others we could walk right through the doorways, pushing invisible swinging saloon doors as we went. Some of the graffiti had been around almost long enough to rank as historical.

The last building on that stretch of road was an odd one, even for a ghost town. Its walls were polka-dotted with the butts of glass bottles, some 50,000 of them. The house made of glass bottles was built by a miner named Tom Kelly in 1906, and was restored sometime here in the 21st century. In front of the house was a model of the town made of mortar and broken glass of various colors. The house looked like an art installation, but that was probably more because it was almost in the middle of one.

At the base of hill there is the Goldwell Open Air Museum. That’s where the sheet ghosts and naked Lego woman enter the story. Some of the installations dated to the 1980s, Like Albert Szukalski’s The Last Supper, a line of the aforementioned ghost-like plaster forms, as well as Ghost Rider, another ghost-like plaster form, this time about to hop on a rusty bicycle. The giant Lego woman (Lady Desert: The Venus of Nevada) was actually a giant cinder block woman. She was erected in the 1990s by Hugo Heyrman. There was also an indoor museum/gift shop showcasing photos of Rhyolite from back when the town bustled with more than rattlesnakes, but it was closed on our visit. You can see some of those types of photos here, including this great before and after shot of the town.

Hangin’ out with strange art is about where we lost that spooky ghost town vibe, so we tried to get it back by searching for Rhyolite’s cemetery.

It’s called Bullfrog-Rhyolite Cemetery, since it was shared by two towns, and it’s about half a mile east of Rhyolite. We drove down an old dirt road that cut through some sage brush, and even then didn’t see the cemetery until we were on top of it. It only had a few stone grave markers, one of which commemorated the final resting place of a woman named Bessie L. Moffat, who was born in 1881 and died in 1986. She missed the debut of Cherry 2000 by just a year. The rest of the graves were humps of human-sized dirt or circles of rocks. A couple had wooden markers.

Standing in that graveyard was a real moment, of the type I don’t always get and usually just pretend to have so I can end articles better. I mean, here I was, a suburban, East Coast, colonial-history-steeped guy standing in a century-old graveyard full of sage brush and Gold Rush miners, looking out at desert hills that nestled a fading ghost town.

I walked bow-legged out of that cemetery and yelled “Giddyup!” when I turned the key in the ignition to drive off into an imagined sunset.

OTIS Miscellany VI: New Orleans Edition

Watching this thing walk down Bourbon Street will stick with me forever.

April 20, 2016 — It’s been more than a decade since I’d been to New Orleans. That’s pre-Katrina. Pre-social media. Pre-OTIS. Pre-tty shameful. I mean, here I am, a guy who searches out oddity, and I hadn’t been to one of the oddest cities in the country since I started the site. My only memento of that previous trip was a small ceramic skeleton playing the accordion, the homemade price tag on which labeled it a Peruvian Day of the Dead offering. He has leered at me from his shelf ever since that day.

Well, not anymore. Finally, about two months ago, I returned to New Orleans for a few days. I had a semi-full itinerary for Lindsey and I—a couple of museums, Madame Laveau sites, some cemeteries, and we hit ’em all, which I’ll get to writing about soon. Until then, here’s the random stuff in between that we incidentally passed or couldn’t do much more with other than just pass.

1. Banksy’s Umbrella Girl — We Airbnb’d a place in Treme, which meant a half mile walk to downtown. Every time we took that walk, we passed the graffiti of a girl under an umbrella on the side of an abandoned building at the intersection of Kerlerec Street and N. Rampart Street. I’m definitely that guy that calls every stencil graffiti a Banksy just because, but in this case it was a Banksy. The big tip-off was the protective Plexiglas sheet that was bolted over the paint. That thing that probably took 10 minutes to put up is worth six figures if it can ever be separated from the building. Turns out, it’s the only Banksy left from when the mysterious guerilla artist toured the city after Katrina. The rest were removed to cash in on or painted over by a local anti-graffitist called the Gray Ghost. You live by the spray can, you die by the spray can.

2. Lalaurie Mansion — This three-story mansion in the French Quarter once held remorseless evil. Her name was Madame Delphine Lalaurie. In this house at 1140 Royal Street that today does whatever the architectural equivalent of humming innocently is, the wealthy 19th century socialite tortured and murdered slaves. Nobody knew what went on in her attic until a fire, set by a slave cook chained to a stove in an attempt to kill herself, opened the depravity to light. Lalaurie escaped the mob and took off to France, never to be heard from again. Until American Horror Story: Coven when Kathy Bates played her. This mansion certainly deserves its own entry, but because it’s a private house, all you can do is stare at the exterior and imagine all the horrors that went down inside. Bonus: Between 2007 and 2009, it was owned by actor Nicholas Cage.

3. Nicholas Cage Tomb — Oh look, Nic Cage again. I visited St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 for a few reasons, and for sure one of them was that it contains the future tomb of Nicholas Cage. He’s reserved a nice big, white pyramid for his dust. Which, you know, could be chalked up to an outsized actor ego, but I like to think Cage just has style. Because the guy who did Leaving Las Vegas and Vampire’s Kiss could only have that.

4. Upstairs Lounge Arson Site — We’d been doing some cemetery explorations with a friend of OTIS we’d just met named Diane. We were walking her back to her car, when she pointed down at the sidewalk to a bronze plaque at 141 Chartres Street. “You might be interested in this,” she said. The story it hinted at was a terrible one. So, yeah, I was. On June 24, 1973, 32 people died in a fire in a gay club called the Upstairs Lounge. It was located on the second floor of the building looming above us as we bent over the plaque. Officially unsolved, most experts believe the fire was set by Rodger Dale Nunez, a gay man who had been kicked out of the party earlier that day. Still, the reactions by the churches that refused funerals and the families too ashamed to claim remains and the general apathy of the city and media toward the mass murder galvanized the local LGBT movement in New Orleans. Nunez committed suicide a year later.

5. Bourbon Street — We visited the week after Mardi Gras, so if there’s ever a time Bourbon Street should be sick of being Bourbon Street, it’s then. But, nope, it was still Bourbon Street. a wretched hive of scum and villainy...that's way too much fun. We saw brazen nudity and extravagant costumes, performers and musicians, people passed out on the sidewalks. But, despite all that, and a little because of it, I have to say that I think more cities should allow walking drinks.

6. Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop — The ancient-looking building at 941 Bourbon Street was once a 18th century blacksmith shop run as a front for a smuggling operation by the pirate name Jean Lafitte. Today, it’s a bar that serves voodoo daiquiris. There’s nothing like getting drunk on purple Slurpees at a National Historic Landmark.

Wyld Stallyns: The Rocking Horse Graveyard

April 13, 2016 — I visited the Rocking Horse Graveyard at the wrong time. It was a crisp, sunny April morning. The grass was well-maintained. Joggers trotted by on the road. Farmland stretched around us idyllically. A single llama clipped grass in a paddock full of sheep across the way. And my kids ran through the herd of wild rocking horses with utter joy.

It should have been creepier. But that’s my fault.

I should have gone on an autumn midnight, when each rocking horse cut black silhouettes into the blue night sky and brown leaves scrabbled by on the road. When it was windy, so that each equine jumped threateningly on its rusty, broken springs like slavering carnivores on weakening chains. When it was overgrown, so that the horses seem less placed and more trapped. My kids should have been afraid to get out of the car.

It’s astounding that something so simple as three dozen cast-off rocking horses could give off such Jekyll and Hyde sides with just a slight shift of context.

The Rocking Horse Graveyard is a recent phenomenon that started five years ago or so. Still, nobody in the town of Lincoln knows how it began here in the patch of grass on Old Sudbury Road. Or, if they do, they’re keeping their mouths shut, like the town bylaws were written by Shirley Jackson.

But there are theories.

Like the one that says the horses mark the site of a previous lemonade stand, which the kids decorated with a couple of their rocking horses. When the economy crashed, the kids went back to earning in-game currency in Minecraft, but the horses stayed. And multiplied.

Or the one that claims that a single rocking horse had been set there as part of a Halloween display, ridden by a headless rider. Eventfully the rider disappeared, but the horse stayed. And multiplied.

Or that they just started appearing. Somebody dropped a horse on the side of the road because he didn’t want to bother with the town dump. It caught on, and the horses multiplied.

Whatever the reason, the people of Lincoln are used to them now. As the joggers went by, I touched my cap to them, and one replied, “Looks like there are more here. Must have been a good winter for them. You should really think about taking up jogging.”

Actually, that last was sentence came from my own conscience, as I poked a single finger into my paunch to test its softness like I was testing the wind.

All the horses were facing outward from a central point on our visit, but every once in a while somebody comes along and rearranges them. Sometimes they circle the horses up, which is how the Rocking Horse Graveyard got its other name, Ponyhenge. Sometimes they’re lined up like race horses. Sometimes they’re decorated for the holidays.

But they’re always there, like the ghost of a yard sale, cracked plastic and splintered wood and rusty metal, and each one giving visitors and passersby the side eye. So if you live nearby and have a rocking horse that your kids have outgrown, you know where to go. But be sure to drop it off at night. And don’t tell anybody. Ever.

Mausoleum Mountain: Montjuic Cemetery

April 11, 2016 — I’ve already told you the two spooky, beautiful reasons why Lindsey and I visited Montjuic Cemetery in Barcelona, Spain. I also described this 57-acre hill of a graveyard where people can be buried six feed down and still be above your head. But then I only gave you photos of shrouded skeletons (Ha—"only"). Here is a better view of the cemetery and its sculptures and crypts and mausoleums. Barcelona really knows how to bury its dead.

 

Death Above and Below: The Framis and Juncosa Tombs

April 9, 2016 — “Where ya headed?” asked the driver as Lindsey and I dove into the back seat of the cab, except that he said it in Spanish—or possibly Catalan—because we were in Barcelona.

“La Cemeteria de Montjuic.” I said proudly. I’d been practicing.

“Cementiri,” he corrected. He switched to English for obvious reasons. “Do you have family there?”

“No. We’re tourists.” I didn’t know how culturally acceptable it was to admit that I wanted to ogle the dead people of his city. It’s barely culturally acceptable in the States.

“Ah, it’s a beautiful cemetery. Very much worth seeing.”

“Awesome,” I said.

“My family is all buried there.”

“Oh, that’s great.” I said.

“Eh, not really,” He then dragged his thumb across his neck and made that extended K sound with his mouth that for some reason universally means dead.

“Right.”

He offered to drive us around the cemetery, but we declined. Five minutes after he dropped us at its south entrance, we regretted it. The entire cemetery clings to the sides of a tall hill, its Montjuic namesake, and our legs and feet had already been beaten pulpy from miles of wandering the city for the past week.

Montjuic opened in 1883 and since that time has amassed the remains of more than a million Barcelonans sorted into 150,000 plots planted in a hill with a great view of the city and harbor—minus six feet of dirt or a stone mausoleum door.

At least, I think it’s a great view. We didn’t make it to the top, but we didn’t really need to. We were there for two specific graves, both of which, it turned out, were located at the base of the hill. Neither one has a story behind it, but, man, does each have something fantastic atop it.

The first was a few plots down the road from the south entrance. There, reposing on the 1888 tomb of one Dr. Farreras Framis, was a full-sized shrouded skeleton, as if projected there by the human remains beneath it.

[Now I want to do a funeral art installation where the grave statue gets swapped out every so often to one that matches the chronologically decaying condition of the interred. Eventually it would be a sculpture of just dust and bone-bits. I hope I die rich enough to afford 25 grave statues. This was a giant aside. I’m putting it in brackets.]

Everything I know about this grave I pulled from the grave itself. The name of the deceased, his title, the sculptor (Rossend Nobas), and below it all, the phrase, “Catedratico de Anatomia”—professor of anatomy. That means the sculpture is both a memento mori and a memento vitae for Framis. The real impressive thing about this grave, though, is that the doctor resisted the temptation to epitaph it with, “My grave is way cooler than yours.”

And maybe that’s solely because of one of his neighbors up the hill, even though that neighbor moved in about a quarter of a century later. To find that one, we went to the cemetery chapel at the north entrance. On its exterior was a map that illustrated the cemetery’s three self-guided tours that you can follow using the color-coded signs staked throughout the paths: an art tour, a history tour, and a combo of both. This next grave was on both the art and combo tour, and was just a few sections away.

So we headed off, rounded a bend, and there he was. Or, rather, there they were.

An upright skeletal shrouded form loomed behind a seated Grover Cleveland. It rested its bony hand on his shoulder, and the ends of its shroud had started to envelope the former U.S. President like the shroud itself was alive...and hungry.

All right. Not Grover Cleveland. Nicolau Juncosa. You wear a big mustache, throw on a few pounds, you start looking like a lot of people. There’s really not much to say about this one except, “Wow.” Then you say it again, but backwards. The sculptor is Antoni Pujol, and had he lived a century later would have been doing special effects for monster movies. Probably would have done wonders for the Poltergeist remake.

After that we kind of wended around. I mean, it’s hard not to. Once our tunnel vision for the two graves widened to the cemetery overall, we just kept seeing cool statues and mausoleums piled atop cool statues and mausoleums. I’ll follow this post up soon with another one on the cemetery itself [UPDATE: Here it is], but basically we'd see an amazing sculpture or edifice in the near-distance, go to it, then see another in the near-distance, and go to that one, then see another one, and so on. Had we not been too tired to ascend the hill, we would probably have gotten sucked deeper into the cemetery until we were lost forever, eternally meandering from cool thing to cool thing until we were completely given up for dead.

In which case I would hope to get funerary art atop my corpse as cool as Dr. Framis or Mr. Juncosa.