I had to get out of the city.
I was just getting too intense too much noise too many people the whole post COVID thing. So I packed up everything I had, which wasn’t much to begin with, took my dog, and I moved up here. Luckily my friend had a place to rent out here upstate, but things have just gotten crazy. I guess if I have to start this journaling thing, I should probably start at the beginning.
So here goes.
I drove up on Friday at the end of the day, which was probably the worst decision I could’ve made. I got caught in all of the leaving New York City traffic. It probably ended up taking me an extra three hours for me to get up here. But I do have to say the further I got away from the city the more light I felt.
I just couldn’t handle it anymore the pressure the intensity.
All the reasons I moved to the city in the first place had become the reason I had to leave. I used to love the hustle and the bustle. But the cost of living and just gotten too high and I wasn’t doing anything but working. And on a cartoonist’s salary, there wasn’t even that much work to do to get paid.
So my friend Rob said why don’t you move to our place upstate? You can settle down, maybe take a few months, write that book you’ve always wanted to write. Do those paintings you always wanted to do. It doesn’t cost even half as much to live up here.
Rob had just recently come into an inheritance of an old house from his great uncle or something. He told me I could stay there cheap if I wanted to do a few repairs around the place.
I figured Rob doesn’t have to know that I’m not that handy. So I took the offer.
Driving up here was ridiculous and I stopped at a place to get dinner that gave me a stomach ache, so Saturday morning was more exciting than I wanted it to be.
That said, I found a little coffee shop that I think I like on my first try.
It’s a nice little spot downtown. Living about 3 miles out I still have to drive in. All the shops are right in the middle of town, lots of people come in and out even on a Saturday morning at 9 o’clock, so I get to people watch at this coffee shop.
The girl who runs the place is named Sam and she’s pretty cute. She’s one of those Proto punk girls with multicolored hair and I think I even noticed the outline of a nipple ring through her tight white T-shirt while she was pouring the coffee.
She gave me a nice big smile which is probably the same smile she gives everyone in town.
Being a college town, this place is in the middle of nowhere, but still has enough new people that come in and out on a weekly basis that people are fairly used to having strangers around. Sitting in the shop, I overheard some guy discussing physics and a bunch of people working on their laptops.
While I sat there with my sketchbook, trying not to get noticed drawing the physic skies, some rough-looking old guy almost fell as he came in and made quite a racket. Sam jumped over the counter, which was quite impressive, and helped him up before he knocked over the garbage can. Apparently his name is Karl. He must be a regular. She sat him down at a table across from me so I could get a good look and do some fun sketches of him without anyone noticing. He was a crackly old guy with hair coming out of places that no one should have hair, a nose like a hawk and eyes that were sunken deep inside his bony skull. He was wearing way too many clothes for a fall day in the 60s, which made me certain he was one of the local homeless guys.
Sam brought him water and slipped in a coffee. I overheard her whisper “no charge” to him. She even slipped me one of those smiles as she walked past my table on her way back around the counter.
Yeah I definitely think I’m gonna like this place.
Karl on the other hand was clearly upset. Sam was talking to him over the counter, trying to keep him calm as she juggled customers, pouring lattes and other drinks in between conversations. I caught just enough to hear what Karl was talking about. He said his friends were missing.
He said a couple of nights ago he saw the grinning man in the mist. The grinning man, I thought, that’s a new one. He said he hid from the grinning man behind a dumpster, but his two friends were still hanging outside on the porch in front of some Mexican joint. A mist surrounded them and the grinning man (who apparently was some kind of a tall skinny guy in a top hat and tails) walked up to them through the mist and began to speak to them.
Karl said he knew that every time the grinning man came, his friends had disappeared. I sat and sketched in my book for a little while longer trying to hear more, but Karl just seem to ramble about other things after that, and the store got too busy for me to even see Karl.
When things started to slow down again, I walked up to the counter and asked for a refill.
Sam smiled at me again – the third time – wow. So I figured I would ask what was going on with Karl. She started off with something like “Oh well Karl’s just…”
“Who is this grinning man?” I asked. “What was Karl talking about?”
Samantha smiled.
She had a great smile.
She looked up at me as she was steaming a latte, the machine belting, and burping shots of steam into the milk.
“Well, there’s a legend. Somewhere around 100 years ago, as far as I know it started, some guy… He was a doctor, a professor at the university. He killed his family, and then killed a few other people, but he blamed it on ‘the grinning man.’ He said the mist comes along… And out steps the grinning man, killed his family and took them away. Since there were no bodies, and there was no actual evidence of them being murdered, except hearsay, the man was jailed rather than put to death. In jail, apparently he slowly went insane.
“Over the years since, people have gone missing, I guess just like anywhere else, people leave. People don’t tell their families, whatever, but the story goes, and the excuse often is that they disappeared into the mist, or the grinning man got them.”
“Wow, creepy,” I said. “That’s a cool local legend.”
“Yeah I guess,” Sam agreed. “It certainly gives the local historical society something to do on Halloween.”
“Is there a lot of mist?” I asked.
“Well something about the lake and the way the hills in either side cradle the valley, causes a lot of mist,” Sam explained. “Some of the weather guys up at the university have talked about it as a strange anomaly that only exists here and a few other places around the world. But yeah, we seem to get a lot of mist off the lake, it’s usually gone by mid morning, but it’ll creep in overnight. Some days the whole place will be Impossible to see through. But it’s easily explained.”
“Wow,” I said. “I’ve only been here a day and I’m already getting the local legends.”
“Oh, that’s not all,” Sam offered. “There’s a lot of weird stories around here. Some wild Native American stories, and some stories about the original settlers up here. Someone should write a book someday.”
I laughed, because deep inside I was excited. Up until now, I thought of this place a retreat, a getaway, but also kind of a defeat. The city had defeated me. What did Frank Sinatra say? If you can make it there you can make it anywhere. Well, I couldn’t make it there. The entire drive up, I was bashing myself in the head with thoughts of defeat. The last few months have just been so absolutely miserable.
But now here was something interesting.
Something I could make something out of, maybe.
I’ve always loved a good story, especially when it has legend and mystery. This might be a great project to distract myself with until I can figure out everything else. I was determined to ask Karl about his grinning man. But I also thought it might be good to go to the library to look up some of these stories. Who was this college professor who killed his family? Why was it such a mystery? Who else disappeared in this area? And where?
These were all great questions. All stuff I can sink my teeth into.
My days as a role playing game artist and writer came back to me. Maybe there’s a game in this? I mean a creepy little town with weird mist and people going missing… monsters in the fog? What could be better? I guess I’d have to learn more. I’ll probably just have to fill in a bunch of stuff because it’s probably nothing real, but certainly it was fodder for some cool stories.
Sam got busy back working with some new customers, and our conversation just kind of broke off. I sat back in my seat and did a few doodles of creepy, grinning men and top hats, and then decided to look up on my phone.
Let’s see… murders about 100 years ago in this town.
This wasn’t exactly Metropolis so murders weren’t really a regular thing. It wasn’t that hard to find some stories about the old murders.
Sam was wrong. It wasn’t 100 years ago. In 1850 a prominent doctor/professor at the university had been found covered in blood. His family was missing… His wife, his children, even his mother-in-law who had been living with them. There was a gun and there was a bloody knife. The house was in a shambles, but there was no evidence of the rest of his family. The bodies were never found.
Very cool, I thought to myself.
Well, not really cool. I felt a little ashamed about that emotion, but really it was an interesting mystery. Why would a guy kill his family? Why would a prominent professor whose life seem to be going just fine one day just up and kill his family? And why would he come up with the story about the mist? He talked about men or creatures coming out of the mist but the description in the article wasn’t very clear. But they said that he was arrested and quickly tried, and eventually ended up in a nearby town in a penitentiary.
There was a link at the end of the page that seemed to be significant, so I clicked which took me to another article. Supposedly it was related, because the headline on the article was two more people who “disappear into the mist.“
This was another article from the 1800s: in 1875 a local girl and her boyfriend disappeared. Many people said they just ran away to be together.
The article implied that people “disappearing into the mist” had become a local metaphor for running away.
That was really strange. It happened often enough that people had a nickname for it.
I wondered if there was a connection. Logic told me there couldn’t be, there’s 15 years difference, but it would make for an interesting story. I always contended that the best stories, whether they’re novels, comics, movies, or even role-playing game scenarios, were ones that had a kernel of truth in them… a kernel of actual history or a very real emotion at the heart.
After all the stuff that I’ve seen taken place in New York, this little story seemed like a great way to get my mind off things.
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