Creepy Classics & Monster Bash News

When I was between the ages of five and eight we lived across from a baseball field that was used by Grove City College for games. I could sit on the front porch in the summer evenings and watch "the big kids" play baseball or softball. But, just off to the left of my view was a small brook, a small bridge, and a path that led into the woods on a hillside.

I often would play on that little bridge, sometimes I would pretend I was fishing like my dad. I'd use a stick, a string, and an oversized chain-link hook (that could never catch a fish). I could look up that path that wound up the hill, shaded heavily by trees. To me it was a vast hillside forest.

It was a big day when my mom said I could deliver something to my grandparents on foot. The most direct way to get to their house was, indeed, up that dark-treed pathway. The path was a steady upgrade through those trees, along a larger creek (Wolf Creek), up near a stone and wrought iron courtyard by the college chapel. When you broke out of the woods, you were in that small chapel courtyard. From there it was through a concrete alcove with stone benches and a low wall that I loved to walk along. Down an uneven sidewalk to my grandparents' orange brick house. Their house was actually on the campus itself (my grandfather worked at the college).

That trip through the woods, to get to the campus and the house, was perhaps a quarter mile. It felt like a ten-mile trek for this little boy. On top of that, it was heavily treed, a dark, enchanted forest. There could be that wolf that walked like a man behind a tree. Flying bats the size of German Shepherds. Owls hooting from trees with their eyes lighting-up like in the movies. Then, on one side of the dark path there was a steep descent that led down to the dark waters of Wolf Creek. There were the nightmare thoughts of rolling down that hill and splashing into those deep, dark waters. It became a regular thing for me to deliver food, messages, and borrowed items, to my grandparent's house. It was scary, but it was always an adventure in my mind.

All this imagery had been developed from me seeing those crazy foreign fairy tale movies that screened on children's matinees at the local theater. I also had studied the gnarled woods in the background of the paintings on Aurora monster model boxes. There were creepy things I saw in comic books...and, those mean trees that threw apples in THE WIZARD OF OZ. Heck, I also envisioned Oz's flying monkeys swooping out of trees on that journey to my grandparent's house.

I never told my mom, or grandparents, how scared I was. I wanted to keep being able to be that delivery boy. Besides being scary, it was exciting, and I was proud to be able to do something like that on my own. In this day and age I doubt my mom would have sent me on these missions. But this was the 1960s, in a small American town.

Frequently, my mom would instruct me to tell my grandmother to call when I got there. Maybe Mom thought there were flying monkeys in those woods too.

Ron Adams 
Ligonier, PA 
February 2025