I finally got some of the better shots up. For your amusement or mine, I did a couple of perspective shots on this trek, just to give you an idea how big some of the features on the North Bend Rail Trail are. I stand six feet tall, so as you can see from the pic to your right there, I'm a very small, freaky looking litte haunt for Tunnel #12. I figure that the tunnel is around 22-24 feet tall at the center of the arch, given my size in the shot there, and considering I'm about two feet in from the very entrnce to the tunnel. The other pictures for your viewing pleasure are at the end of this post. In IE you'll get the tool tip alt tags if you hover the mouse over each shot, I'm told Firefox doesn't do that(never tested it myself) so you won't get to see my witty image remarks. I got a couple shots of the fall leaves which were really nice, and I shot some other things that are entertaining and amusing. Anything that's confusing, just ask I'll tell you as much as I can about it. I'm amazed that the shots came out as well as they did considering both mine and my Mom's fingers were so cold from the wind chilled air and all (the shots with me in them were taken by my Mom, she's learning to use the camera so I'm not the only one who'll be taking pictures on trips like that). Every time I go out there, I enjoy the quiet and solitude, it's a wonderful place to sit, relax and lose yourself for a time. I think my meditation efforts were helped out by going on the trip and taking the pictures I did.
I do want to clarify something from my rant the other day. I didn't like Sci-Fi Investigates, I recommend people turn that show off, the investigators don't know what they're doing. But the Ghost Hunters did all right with Moundsville Pen, I'm just losing my patience with the show's suddenly intense "debunk everything" attitude that picked up in last season. When they started, at least the early episodes I watched, the attitude was more "gather information and make an educated determination based on what we get" than it is now. While I'm all for a scientific approach to paranormal investigating, no investigator in the world can do an adequate job if his bias closes his mind. I'll keep my eye on the show, but if the trend of "this isn't real" for potential evidence continues, then that'll be another program on my "good shows gone bad" list. The guys running TAPS admit to having paranormal experiences, you'd think they'd be more open to the possibility that other people experience things like that too.
Comments:
sikaurai
Well, I'm kicking myself for watching it. No you didn't miss much except a couple nice pictures of the mothman statue they have down there, the Lowes Hotel, the rivers (Ohio and Kanawha), and the town itself. They at least got some nice visuals of their setting.
Having been to Moundsville Pen before, I know first hand what it's like to come up the road and see that building. It's like a castle sitting there across from the mound. I should try to get up there and get some pictures of the prison, probably would have to wait till spring, Route 2 can be a real pain in the winter with ice and snow and all. an interesating point of fact though, to get to either Moundsville or Point Pleasant, which are nowhere near each other, you have to take State Route 2. I do try to describe things as I see them, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
Breakfast Squid
It sounds to me like your time was much better spent. I recommend the book The Mothman Prophesies by John Keel if you want a better snapshot into the phenomenon that went on down there. The book which was written in the 70s, not long after that stuff went down in Point Pleasant. I'll point out that John Keel was investigating the stuff real-time. He was there in Point Pleasant when it was happening in 1966-67 he had some experiences himself which he covers in the book. It sounded interesting to me too, that's why I was so mad that it turned out so poorly made. Any real investigative journalist knows you don't cite a movie as a source of fact which is what those clowns were doing. Every time they'd get the real facts from a resident down there you'd always hear in the voiceover narration "but the movie showed it this way" or words to that effect. Hell, give me a camera, a couple thousand dollars, and a couple days and I'll make you an hour long special that's better that what Sci-Fi showed. Sci-Fi Investigates should be taken off the air if they don't want to do the investigations right.
KyuubiKhaos
I don't think the "investgators" knew what they were doing in this case, that whole phenomenon requires a special type of investigative style. I've seen better coverage of the Mothman on TV before, but the John Keel book remains my suggestion for best evidence of everything that went down in that little West Virginia town 40 years ago.
Aside from that bad Mothman show, things are okay for me.
alphonse13:
They kept laboring the lights in the sky which were unrelated to Mothman. That TNT area is a lot different now than it used to be too. They never once mentioned that neither the north nor south power plants are still standing, both buildings fell down long ago (I think the North Power plant, where the Mothman was seen in the sixties went down in the late 1990s). Nor did them mention that there are tunnels under that whole area going back to the days that was a weapons facility. You find a lot of that stuff out by reading the book. They also didn't mention that some of those igloos are pribvately owned, which means it's considered tresspassing to go out to those ones. Those so called investigators also did one thing which damaged their credibility early on and the worst possible thing for an investigator to do, they used the movie The Mothman Prophesies as their primary source of information. You can't say a person who was actually there and saw the Mothman has questionable credibility because their accounts don't match up with the Hollywood fantasy facts from a piece of garbage movie.
Tunnel #19 has a story about a woman in white, and Tunnel #13, though there are no stories, does have the history of a train crash off the Bond's Creek Bridge (see picture below) so there's bound to be some activity there too. I've not taken my DVR through Tunnel #13 yet, but the next time I get out there I'll do that instead of taking pictures (It's hard to do both). I may not get out there again till spring since the road out to North Bend State Park, where I get to the tunnel from an access trail, is very much a country road and would be disasterous to get caught out on in the winter, there's no Cell signal out there at all.
Pictures!
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| Images in this table hosted by Photobucket |
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