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Needless to say, we really wanted to see this place. But I was a little concerned about finding it. The only semi-good direction we had to the place had said that it was “off to the right” in relation to the park entrance. But even though we tried to search all around that side we didn't see anything. In fact, we spent a good couple of hours driving up and down every road we could find, looking for anything that remotely resembled a castle... but we were getting pretty damned discouraged. We were actually going to give it up for the day and head to the next site on our list when we pulled over to the side of the road near the entrance to look over the maps for the next location. I got out of the car and wandered across the road to get a few more general shots of the park before we left. I had gone up onto a small hill to get some quick shots; it was then that I first noticed the trail. It was a very faint trail that seemed to lead right into a patch of dense brush. I couldn't imagine what it led to back there, and of course that piqued my curiosity even more. I signaled to Mark that I had spotted something to check out and headed for the trail, following it until it rounded a corner and lead into a narrow little valley between two wooded hills that had not been visible to us before. It was at that point that I did a little spastic insane jerky FREAK-OUT dance because I unknowingly walked full-on into a humongous spider web that had been stretched across the path and was instantly draped in the sticky awful mess from head to foot, a pretty horrid experience lemme tell you. |
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The source of the bad smell became apparent as soon as we neared the upper pool, which quite stagnant and, oddly enough, had a bunch of Cheerios floating in it. On the other side of the pool I happened to find a roach (and not the insect kind) left behind on a leaf, and a girl's pink headband lying on the ground just next to the upper pool. We also found a sign saying that the name of this place was Proctor Springs and giving some background info on it. The mouth of the spring comes right out of the ground and almost looks like a real mouth complete with moss-covered Rolling Stones-style tongue. This was a really exciting find, it was great to finally unearth this strange and unusual place, and finding that sinister paper on the “altar” added such a memorably creepy note to the experience. I almost expected to hear a witches cackle from the dark and shadowy woods at any second. And I guess it might be noteworthy to mention that some people sitting at a picnic table further out in the park looked at us as if we were crazy people when they saw us emerge from the place after checking it out for a bit. |