M.E.S.S.A.G.E.S.
Dudleytown:
The Day of Mixed Memories
The Day of Mixed Emotions
The Day That Insanity May Have Creeped In
by Vincent E. Martinelli, Jr.
This is a story about a group of people, who were all born in Waterbury, who ventured to the infamous Dudleytown.
Way back, maybe around 1984, a dozen of us decided to go to the world-famous spooky location known as Dudleytown.
When we got there, John was in the lead car position, with his girlfriend as his front seat passenger. He was driving a brown 2-door Mercury Cougar.
I was next in line, with my girlfriend in my front passenger seat, and J.R. and his girlfriend in the back of my “boat” (a Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham d’elegance). It had midnight blue interior and dark blue metallic exterior, leather all around, a built-in C.B. radio and P.A. system, a moon/sun roof, and dark tints all around; I added a trunk-mounted car phone, curb-feelers in all the corners, and exterior spotlights. It was fully loaded by all measures.
Jose was in the third car with his girlfriend in the front seat of his Lincoln Continental.
The order of how we parked has significance. We all parked in a straight line, partially on the barely-paved narrow roadway and partially in the hay/grass/weed medley.
John and I were the only 2 people who were willing to walk into the field - which both tempted and repelled us. Everyone else not only stayed in their cars, with their windows up and the doors locked, but also cowarded as low in their seats as possible.
We had all been to “The Green Lady”, several “haunted” cemeteries, an that spooky house on Elm Street in Southington – with uncanny resemblance to the one in the nightmare-ish movie.
This was an ordinary day in late spring. The skies were mostly sunny, the temperatures were seasonably temperate, the air was light and breezy. Trees were in full bloom, wildlife was abundant with food-a’plenty as the creatures’ instincts defaulted to reproduction over common sense - running around as if immortal, albeit horny.
John and I have been best friends since we were kids; practically brothers. We had heard ghoulish hallowed stories of this place for years, and, although we were both very apprehensive, he was actually a bit more scared than I was, and I was a bit more open than he was.
Being in the lead car, he got out of his car first and waited for me to get to him. We walked up, side by side, toward the open field – of mostly grazing grass with various pollen-rich wildflowers, and a few scattered trees. We were both soft-spoken as we were paying close attention to our surroundings (and way too manly to admit that the quiver in our throats was of profound worry). Our conversation was shallow, and light. I noticed that it was getting harder to breath, and harder to hear him, which I chalked off to some combination of the elevation and the fact that I had been playing tennis and had gone swimming earlier in the day. We had only walked about twenty-five feet at that point. Now, don’t get me wrong, it felt like we walked a hundred feet, but, when I glanced back at the cars it was pretty clear that we had only accomplish a little bit over a car length of travel.
Unexpectedly, he briskly turned to me and stopped cold.
He said, “Do you hear that?”
I said “No. Actually I don’t hear anything.”
He said, “Yeah, that’s what I mean. All the birds just stopped. Look around … nothing is moving.”
I reluctantly looked around, expecting that his assessment was fully exaggerated; the, I admited “Yeah, you’re right. There are no sounds at all - and the wind completely stopped.”
The air felt a smidgeon electrified - and not in a friendly way, more of a suffocating “you should panic and run” kinda way.
He turned to his right, toward me, and then slightly backwards. He noticed that I took a step forward and he said disbelievingly, “You want to keep going?” I said “Yeah, you don’t want to go back, do you?” – expending much effort not to let him hear the gulp of fright in my esophagus. We were both standing idle and contemplating what to do next – suck it up and leave, like sane people, or forge on with our proverbial feathers plumbed. He said, “I’m ready to go if you’re ready to go.” I said “Yeah, whatever you want, but we’re here, so we might as well keep going” proving that I lacked his wisdom. He said, “You’re not scared?” I was a bit alarmed by that question as I’ve never, ever, at any point in my life experienced any fear from him. I said, “Yeah, but I’m more interested in busting everyone else’s ass for being chicken-shit.
And besides, we’re not going to buy into all the hype, are we?”
We agreed to continue. Our chit-chat diminished, but we both kept talking, most likely to bolster our self-confidence (and to ensure that we were both still actually alive). Our pace was as quick as molasses in the ‘fridge. Not ten feet later, standing closer than three feet from him, I thought he was whispering to himself. Just then, he hit my arm. I saw him moving his mouth, but I thought he was just busting my ass - I could only hear faint echoes of what he was saying, and his words were belated and coming from other directions. I tried responding, but even my yells were like soft whispers.
We took another two caterpillar-sized steps forward, and we noticed that not only were there no sounds, and that we were having trouble seeing each other, but also that all of our senses seemed to have been muted. We both stopped walking. Our shoulders collided - everything was so … nothing; it wasn’t dark, it was just … nothing. I took a pretend step forward, maybe all of three inches.
At that moment, he and I turned directly face-to-face and he yelled, “I had enough. I’m going back. You do what you want.” A yell, yes, but it sounded like an indiscernible whisper from a mile away. I agreed, “Yeah, I’m good, I’m leaving too”, although I’m not sure that he heard me – I wasn’t even sure if I said it out loud or solely in my own head.
I think that we were both so scared that we couldn’t even pee our pants. Understand: it was as though the entirety of existence was fading to nothingness. The ground felt gooey, like it was sucking our innards out of us. Each step seemed to be in slow motion and exhausting.
Sure there could be some psychology here - instincts of fear telling us to vacate, but it wasn’t that, it was something else, something different … an ungodliness.
As we labored back to our cars - as fast as we could and yet our steps seemed ineffective. Thankfully, the closer we got, the more our senses became sensical … existent … normal. Ah, the greatness of firm ground afoot! A seemingly godlike feeling, our sense of touch had also returned - one that I hadn’t, to that point, realized was gone.
At the cars, I said “You do a k-turn, and I’ll follow you, and, with any sense, everyone else will follow suit.”
Although we agreed, he pulled forward … which I assumed was a sign that he changed his mind and wanted me to k-turn first and lead us out of there (we both knew that there was only one way in (and, hopefully, at least one way out) - so I did.
We fished our way down the forsaken excuse for a road, going as fast as we could on the rough surface - all of our cars were pretty new, so we didn’t want to do any damage. I was going pretty slowly to make sure that nobody would be left behind, and John would pick up the rear. That was our typical tact - we each had a CB club with thirty-five to fifty members, so we developed a protocol.
Oddly, although all of our cars were equipped with some of the best citizens’ band radio systems, none of us were able to reach anyone else. That wasn’t too surprising as the famed Litchfield Hills and area surface water (lakes, ponds, rivers) had a funny way of disrupting radio communications. Still, it was dead air; not just no static, but an uncanny feeling of dead air. I, for sure, weighed the value of escaping the tentacles of whatever-the-hell just happened over the more sensical car count - to assure ourselves that nobody was left behind with a dead battery or something like that.
Finally, we approached the actual town road, and I noticed … What? … WTF? That’s John’s Cougar right in front of me - not a look-a-like - I recognized the plate. Weird. Impossible.
We made our way out of town and onto the highway. When John and I took our exit, everyone else continued on, as they live a few miles further away. John took a turn to go back to his house, and I decided to go directly to our local Great Brook Lanes.
I walked in and several voices called out to me. Everyone knew that we were making the trip to Dudleytown today, and they all wanted to know what happened.
I told them everything that happened, and in great detail. Some non-believers were challenging me a bit, so I gave even greater detail. Finally, they – the chickens who were too scared to join us - said “Prove it”. (Hmm. How the hell could I do that?). So, I said “John should be here any minute now, you can ask him as soon as he gets here.”
They chattered back, “Yeah, we will, he’s standing directly behind you.”
I turned around and sure enough he was right behind me. I explained that I told everyone what happened and now “they want you to tell them what happened.” I was a bit concerned because he never gets pale and he recovers quickly, so I wondered why he looked ill – like faint ill.
He said, in a firm, authoritative, understated voice “Yeah, I know. I was standing behind you the entire time." Shifting his eyes to our ad-hoc eager audience, he continued “Yes. Everything he told you is exactly correct - every word of it happened exactly like that. Except one thing.”
I said “What?”
He said, in the same unconfident way, “It all happened exactly like that … except … you weren’t there.”
I thought he was just being an obnoxious ass as he tended to be. No, he was serious, and he wanted to know who told me what happened. I looked at him like “Dude, don’t bust my ass and make me look like a fool. You were right behind me the entire time, until about 10 minutes ago - so how could anyone have gotten in my car to tell me anything. There’s no way that I could know in such accurate detail what happened - even if someone else told me what happened, there’s no way that the phone game could ever be that accurate. I know what I saw. I know what happened. I was there!”
I was pretty steamed that he would make it seem like I wasn’t there. So, I started telling him even more details - like when he parked on a large hump, and then started the car up again and moved it a foot forward. Then I reminded him that when he got out of the car he looked down at the ground, then looked up (at me), then closed the door, and smirk-snickered “Well we can leave now.”
Stunned, like genuinely stunned, he seriously couldn’t believe it. I said, “John, did that place really do something to your brain? If it happened exactly like that, and I wasn’t there, then who was walking beside you? Who were you talking to?” He said “that was J.R.” I said, “No, he stayed in his car. But, we’ll have to ask him when he gets here.”
A few minutes later, J.R. came in, looking disappointed and mad. Before any of us could say anything, the perpetually late J.R. said “I told you guys I wanted to go with you. Yeah, I was a little bit late, but you could have waited for me. I really wanted to go.”
John and I were confused and stunned; we we just looked at him, jaws dropped.
Then JR said, “How was it, anyway? Did you see anything? Any ghosts? What happened? I just wish you guys waited for me.”
To boot, Jose later recalled all that happened. He agreed to just about everything - although he couldn’t account for what happened outside of the cars since he stayed in the car - and that it was only he and his girlfriend that were in the car. His other two passengers, who John and I both attest had been with him, went out of state a couple of days ago and couldn’t make it!
Later, John pulled me aside saying, “There’s something else about what you said that was inaccurate.” I asked, “What?” He said, “I didn’t just pull forward, I decided to go straight ahead.” I was puzzled, “That doesn’t make sense. By the time I got to the road, you were in front of me. You couldn’t go straight – the road ended.” He said, “Yeah. I know. I can't explain that either. And, there’s something else.” I was more confused than ever, “What?” He said that “All the way home I kept hearing your voice, like you were in the back seat. But like it was a dream, not like you were really there.” I laughed and said, “What was I talking about?” He said, “You were just mumbling. You kept saying “What the hell just happened? This can’t be real. What the hell just happened?”
My throat closed up, my eyes immediately teared, every hair on my body stood at attention. Those words were exactly what I was saying to myself all the way to the lanes. That was more freaky than anything else that happened that day.
In retrospect, I wonder if what we experienced was a true manifestation of complete insanity - on par with the Dudleytown repute.
When we got there, John was in the lead car position, with his girlfriend as his front seat passenger. He was driving a brown 2-door Mercury Cougar.
I was next in line, with my girlfriend in my front passenger seat, and J.R. and his girlfriend in the back of my “boat” (a Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham d’elegance). It had midnight blue interior and dark blue metallic exterior, leather all around, a built-in C.B. radio and P.A. system, a moon/sun roof, and dark tints all around; I added a trunk-mounted car phone, curb-feelers in all the corners, and exterior spotlights. It was fully loaded by all measures.
Jose was in the third car with his girlfriend in the front seat of his Lincoln Continental.
The order of how we parked has significance. We all parked in a straight line, partially on the barely-paved narrow roadway and partially in the hay/grass/weed medley.
John and I were the only 2 people who were willing to walk into the field - which both tempted and repelled us. Everyone else not only stayed in their cars, with their windows up and the doors locked, but also cowarded as low in their seats as possible.
We had all been to “The Green Lady”, several “haunted” cemeteries, an that spooky house on Elm Street in Southington – with uncanny resemblance to the one in the nightmare-ish movie.
This was an ordinary day in late spring. The skies were mostly sunny, the temperatures were seasonably temperate, the air was light and breezy. Trees were in full bloom, wildlife was abundant with food-a’plenty as the creatures’ instincts defaulted to reproduction over common sense - running around as if immortal, albeit horny.
John and I have been best friends since we were kids; practically brothers. We had heard ghoulish hallowed stories of this place for years, and, although we were both very apprehensive, he was actually a bit more scared than I was, and I was a bit more open than he was.
Being in the lead car, he got out of his car first and waited for me to get to him. We walked up, side by side, toward the open field – of mostly grazing grass with various pollen-rich wildflowers, and a few scattered trees. We were both soft-spoken as we were paying close attention to our surroundings (and way too manly to admit that the quiver in our throats was of profound worry). Our conversation was shallow, and light. I noticed that it was getting harder to breath, and harder to hear him, which I chalked off to some combination of the elevation and the fact that I had been playing tennis and had gone swimming earlier in the day. We had only walked about twenty-five feet at that point. Now, don’t get me wrong, it felt like we walked a hundred feet, but, when I glanced back at the cars it was pretty clear that we had only accomplish a little bit over a car length of travel.
Unexpectedly, he briskly turned to me and stopped cold.
He said, “Do you hear that?”
I said “No. Actually I don’t hear anything.”
He said, “Yeah, that’s what I mean. All the birds just stopped. Look around … nothing is moving.”
I reluctantly looked around, expecting that his assessment was fully exaggerated; the, I admited “Yeah, you’re right. There are no sounds at all - and the wind completely stopped.”
The air felt a smidgeon electrified - and not in a friendly way, more of a suffocating “you should panic and run” kinda way.
He turned to his right, toward me, and then slightly backwards. He noticed that I took a step forward and he said disbelievingly, “You want to keep going?” I said “Yeah, you don’t want to go back, do you?” – expending much effort not to let him hear the gulp of fright in my esophagus. We were both standing idle and contemplating what to do next – suck it up and leave, like sane people, or forge on with our proverbial feathers plumbed. He said, “I’m ready to go if you’re ready to go.” I said “Yeah, whatever you want, but we’re here, so we might as well keep going” proving that I lacked his wisdom. He said, “You’re not scared?” I was a bit alarmed by that question as I’ve never, ever, at any point in my life experienced any fear from him. I said, “Yeah, but I’m more interested in busting everyone else’s ass for being chicken-shit.
And besides, we’re not going to buy into all the hype, are we?”
We agreed to continue. Our chit-chat diminished, but we both kept talking, most likely to bolster our self-confidence (and to ensure that we were both still actually alive). Our pace was as quick as molasses in the ‘fridge. Not ten feet later, standing closer than three feet from him, I thought he was whispering to himself. Just then, he hit my arm. I saw him moving his mouth, but I thought he was just busting my ass - I could only hear faint echoes of what he was saying, and his words were belated and coming from other directions. I tried responding, but even my yells were like soft whispers.
We took another two caterpillar-sized steps forward, and we noticed that not only were there no sounds, and that we were having trouble seeing each other, but also that all of our senses seemed to have been muted. We both stopped walking. Our shoulders collided - everything was so … nothing; it wasn’t dark, it was just … nothing. I took a pretend step forward, maybe all of three inches.
At that moment, he and I turned directly face-to-face and he yelled, “I had enough. I’m going back. You do what you want.” A yell, yes, but it sounded like an indiscernible whisper from a mile away. I agreed, “Yeah, I’m good, I’m leaving too”, although I’m not sure that he heard me – I wasn’t even sure if I said it out loud or solely in my own head.
I think that we were both so scared that we couldn’t even pee our pants. Understand: it was as though the entirety of existence was fading to nothingness. The ground felt gooey, like it was sucking our innards out of us. Each step seemed to be in slow motion and exhausting.
Sure there could be some psychology here - instincts of fear telling us to vacate, but it wasn’t that, it was something else, something different … an ungodliness.
As we labored back to our cars - as fast as we could and yet our steps seemed ineffective. Thankfully, the closer we got, the more our senses became sensical … existent … normal. Ah, the greatness of firm ground afoot! A seemingly godlike feeling, our sense of touch had also returned - one that I hadn’t, to that point, realized was gone.
At the cars, I said “You do a k-turn, and I’ll follow you, and, with any sense, everyone else will follow suit.”
Although we agreed, he pulled forward … which I assumed was a sign that he changed his mind and wanted me to k-turn first and lead us out of there (we both knew that there was only one way in (and, hopefully, at least one way out) - so I did.
We fished our way down the forsaken excuse for a road, going as fast as we could on the rough surface - all of our cars were pretty new, so we didn’t want to do any damage. I was going pretty slowly to make sure that nobody would be left behind, and John would pick up the rear. That was our typical tact - we each had a CB club with thirty-five to fifty members, so we developed a protocol.
Oddly, although all of our cars were equipped with some of the best citizens’ band radio systems, none of us were able to reach anyone else. That wasn’t too surprising as the famed Litchfield Hills and area surface water (lakes, ponds, rivers) had a funny way of disrupting radio communications. Still, it was dead air; not just no static, but an uncanny feeling of dead air. I, for sure, weighed the value of escaping the tentacles of whatever-the-hell just happened over the more sensical car count - to assure ourselves that nobody was left behind with a dead battery or something like that.
Finally, we approached the actual town road, and I noticed … What? … WTF? That’s John’s Cougar right in front of me - not a look-a-like - I recognized the plate. Weird. Impossible.
We made our way out of town and onto the highway. When John and I took our exit, everyone else continued on, as they live a few miles further away. John took a turn to go back to his house, and I decided to go directly to our local Great Brook Lanes.
I walked in and several voices called out to me. Everyone knew that we were making the trip to Dudleytown today, and they all wanted to know what happened.
I told them everything that happened, and in great detail. Some non-believers were challenging me a bit, so I gave even greater detail. Finally, they – the chickens who were too scared to join us - said “Prove it”. (Hmm. How the hell could I do that?). So, I said “John should be here any minute now, you can ask him as soon as he gets here.”
They chattered back, “Yeah, we will, he’s standing directly behind you.”
I turned around and sure enough he was right behind me. I explained that I told everyone what happened and now “they want you to tell them what happened.” I was a bit concerned because he never gets pale and he recovers quickly, so I wondered why he looked ill – like faint ill.
He said, in a firm, authoritative, understated voice “Yeah, I know. I was standing behind you the entire time." Shifting his eyes to our ad-hoc eager audience, he continued “Yes. Everything he told you is exactly correct - every word of it happened exactly like that. Except one thing.”
I said “What?”
He said, in the same unconfident way, “It all happened exactly like that … except … you weren’t there.”
I thought he was just being an obnoxious ass as he tended to be. No, he was serious, and he wanted to know who told me what happened. I looked at him like “Dude, don’t bust my ass and make me look like a fool. You were right behind me the entire time, until about 10 minutes ago - so how could anyone have gotten in my car to tell me anything. There’s no way that I could know in such accurate detail what happened - even if someone else told me what happened, there’s no way that the phone game could ever be that accurate. I know what I saw. I know what happened. I was there!”
I was pretty steamed that he would make it seem like I wasn’t there. So, I started telling him even more details - like when he parked on a large hump, and then started the car up again and moved it a foot forward. Then I reminded him that when he got out of the car he looked down at the ground, then looked up (at me), then closed the door, and smirk-snickered “Well we can leave now.”
Stunned, like genuinely stunned, he seriously couldn’t believe it. I said, “John, did that place really do something to your brain? If it happened exactly like that, and I wasn’t there, then who was walking beside you? Who were you talking to?” He said “that was J.R.” I said, “No, he stayed in his car. But, we’ll have to ask him when he gets here.”
A few minutes later, J.R. came in, looking disappointed and mad. Before any of us could say anything, the perpetually late J.R. said “I told you guys I wanted to go with you. Yeah, I was a little bit late, but you could have waited for me. I really wanted to go.”
John and I were confused and stunned; we we just looked at him, jaws dropped.
Then JR said, “How was it, anyway? Did you see anything? Any ghosts? What happened? I just wish you guys waited for me.”
To boot, Jose later recalled all that happened. He agreed to just about everything - although he couldn’t account for what happened outside of the cars since he stayed in the car - and that it was only he and his girlfriend that were in the car. His other two passengers, who John and I both attest had been with him, went out of state a couple of days ago and couldn’t make it!
Later, John pulled me aside saying, “There’s something else about what you said that was inaccurate.” I asked, “What?” He said, “I didn’t just pull forward, I decided to go straight ahead.” I was puzzled, “That doesn’t make sense. By the time I got to the road, you were in front of me. You couldn’t go straight – the road ended.” He said, “Yeah. I know. I can't explain that either. And, there’s something else.” I was more confused than ever, “What?” He said that “All the way home I kept hearing your voice, like you were in the back seat. But like it was a dream, not like you were really there.” I laughed and said, “What was I talking about?” He said, “You were just mumbling. You kept saying “What the hell just happened? This can’t be real. What the hell just happened?”
My throat closed up, my eyes immediately teared, every hair on my body stood at attention. Those words were exactly what I was saying to myself all the way to the lanes. That was more freaky than anything else that happened that day.
- We were never able to reconcile our individual recounts of the day.
- We’ve never gone back.
- We’ll never go back.
In retrospect, I wonder if what we experienced was a true manifestation of complete insanity - on par with the Dudleytown repute.