Deinstitutionalized

It's almost impossible to believe that summer is already over. Well, it's not over in Arizona. Fall is our favorite season so naturally it's been hard adjusting to the never ending desert heat.
My remedy for a heart homesick for crisp, autumn mornings and a kaleidoscope of forest colors is the usual horror flick marathon.
I'm transported instantly to the leaf lined street of Haddonfield, Illinois or the fresh, fall air of the Hudson River valley as I approach Sleepy Hollow.
Recently we discovered a movie filmed at the abandoned Danvers State Insane Asylum in Massachusetts. Naturally this piqued my interest, so I did a little research of my own and found I'm not the only lunatic who enjoys the thrill of trespassing in the spookiest of spots. The Ohio Trespassers club catalogs each of their expeditions with galleries and historic information on their website. This brought to mind my first few dates with the old man.
Besides tracking a dog through the woods past midnight in search of one evasive raccoon, we also found ourselves exploring the dark and forgotten areas around Enoree. I think this may be why our relationship survived, we were weird...together. And it was okay to be weird, as long as we were together. Our "journeys" led us to the Enoree schoolhouse (which was a usual hot spot for most youngsters in the area), the Lanford schoolhouse among the kudzu and muscadines...where we found remnants of the last Halloween spook trail held by the church youth group back in the eighties. The family cemetery behind great grandfather Maxcy's homeplace...the barns, the houses, the slaves' shacks, the sharecropper's shanties. The old Fleming house with the moldy cot and empty peanut butter jars, the witch's hut out near Piney Grove school...the one Daddy still won't talk about. We stumbled across countless vermiculite mines, gully caves, fall out shelters, and hanging trees.
I knew when I heard Heith's old Bronco turn onto the Parsonage road he was almost two minutes from my house. Every Friday night we'd create a new adventure. Some adventures were lessons in operating four wheel drive at high speeds while leading local county deputies on a frenzied chase through some muddy field.
I've always been curious and romanticized by anything scary and I surrounded myself with friends who felt the same way. Playing in the cemetery at church with the kids, we would usually always find our way down to the abandoned house in the woods where each of us would take a dare to go inside. Ross always went inside.
We scared ourselves all the time, until we felt the tingling sensation crawl up our back and tears well up in our eyes. Campfire tales, ghost stories in the basement, trips to the woods and the road side hut with Rachel, the soybean house up near the old peach orchard, the Riverdale mill after demolition began, the cement plant with the sacrificial paintings, and the one place I never got to see...the tuberculosis hospital. Tall tales will have to suffice for that missed trip.
We still enjoy the thrill of walking past the no trespassing sign...keeping our fingers crossed behind us.