Black Mountain

For a small town Allegheny Heights, Pennsylvania has more depression, alcoholism and suicide that any other place in the United States. It is also the one place in the eastern United States where both positive and negative electromagnetic forces fight and combine to cause severe storms within the human mind. Some have suggested that Allegheny Heights was like an inland Bermuda Triangle where the souls of the tortured are taken by a gateway into another dimension. No one has proved anything yet but there is a lot of talk.

There is one place in particular, about five miles from town called Black Mountain. It was called Black Mountain because, despite it being in an area that got a lot of sun the mountain itself was always in shadow. It was, rather is, a place where there have been more than five hundred suicides and attempted suicides in the last twenty years. However, the sides of the mountain weren’t the only shadows. The canopy of the trees at the base of the mountain are well over grown to the extent of walking on the ground around Black Mountain is like walking through an open field at midnight during a new moon. No light at all, except for the flashlight most people carried when they traversed into the area. The thing was…the darkness was made the area the perfect place to commit suicide.

The strange thing was, some of the bodies of the suicides were found lying on the ground…a strange place for a body to be found when there were so many trees to hang themselves from. God knows there are still plenty of ropes hanging from the branches from the bodies which were cut down and those who changed their minds once the rope tightened. Hell, I don’t know how they did but they did it. The bodies on the ground looked as if they had been mummified or as one guy guessed dehydrated by radiation but we always asked radiation from what? The thing was some of the dehydrated bodies were dead less than a week.

Some have claimed that they have see lights floating around Black Mountain but no one, not even the biggest advocate, has ever taken a picture of any light, orb or even a flying saucer. Another thing, not one of the “grown up” citizens of Allegheny Heights neither saw any lights nor claimed to have seen any lights. But there are those who will argue till the cows come home that they have seen them and no amount of proof to the contrary will even convince them different.

Well anyway, let’s get back to the story. One morning back a couple years ago a group of kids and I were walking close to the Black Mountain forest but not in it. There was not a kid’s parent with a hundred miles would ever give their permission for their child to go anywhere near the actual mountain. Anyway, while we were walking one of the girls looked on a tree and saw a parchment note nailed to the bark. It read, “I am here for the end. Do not try to find me because I will not be found.” It also gave a time of 12:35 PM. There was no date or other information…just the note and the time. But the parchment wasn’t weather beaten as you would suspect from an older note but then again…who uses parchment in the 21^st Century?

We didn’t waste any time. I grabbed the note…you know come to think of it we could have considered that note a grave marker but I wasn’t thinking with a clear mind at the time. I wanted to get those kids back to town so like I said, I grabbed the note, rushed back to the car and I got those kids home before rushing into town and to the police station.

Now, I was well known at the police station. I did a lot of exploring around the town and found a lot of stuff I turned in to the cop until the rightful owners could be found. I remember that I found a chest with fifty 1967 Canadian $20 gold coins under an abandoned barn north of town. The owners of the property didn’t know how they got there or who owned. I turned them into the police and a month later they gave them back to me as found treasure. It took a year but I found the owners. A family was visiting when their coins disappeared. Anyhow, I returned them and got a $1,000 reward but that was the honest thing to do.

I took the note to the police once the read it they were as confused about it as I was. I told them that there was nothing else anywhere in eye’s sight except that note. They called the hotel and they weren’t missing anyone and the state had no missing person reports from anywhere in this end of the state so obviously it was someone who didn’t want to be found so he left everything behind him and no one knew anything.

The desk officer got on the phone and activated a phone tree that had been set up more than a dozen years before. They had found maybe 300 bodies over the years and a couple hundred of those who were wandering around the mountain after a failed attempt. Within twenty minutes more than twenty five of the biggest, strongest men in the county, as well as a handful of nurse’s arrived at the station and I was told to lead them to where we had found the note. We drove in a caravan out to the point where the tree was and as soon as we stopped the men started their search and the nurses set up their first aid station.

The trees in the area were dried and looked nearly dead. Their leaves, the ones that were still hanging, were brown with tinges of black on their edges. The grass was charred and felled to point away from the mountain. I was surprised that I had not noticed those things earlier but even after I had none of the “rescuers” seemed to have noticed them either.

I pointed out the exact tree where the note was found and the men were all over within seconds. They checked the nail holes where the sign had been hung. There was sap flowing from the wound. That meant one thing…the sign had been hung recently, very recently. The cut in the bark was fresh…another sign of a recent event.

“Men, spread out and check the forest. The body has to be around here somewhere,” the commander yelled over his megaphone and with that the men, me included, started into the woods not knowing what, if anything we were going to find. We tried to stay within sight of each other but soon all of the people were spread so far apart that a visual contact was no longer possible.

I was alone for quite a while before I ran into one of the other searchers who, like me, had nothing to report.

By now the sun was a little past its apex. We were getting hungry so he and I walked over to a log that had been knocked down by some passing storm. I had a turkey sandwich and he had macaroni salad. It wasn’t too hard to figure that we shared our food and had a pretty good meal. He had a GPS in his backpack so, in addition to eating, we took a reading to see where we were. It showed that we were just about half way through the forest and getting closer to the mountain. I wasn’t sure if a stranger set on killing himself would travel as far as we had but after eating we decided to keep walking but we didn’t have to walk far. Beneath a nearby tree was a body. It was dehydrated as were so many of the others found in the woods and above it was a part of a rope, frayed at the end. A quick look showed the other end of the rope was around the neck of the body. Whoever this was knew what they were doing. The noose had thirteen loops and was placed on the left side of the neck. According to documentaries this was the most efficient way to die from hanging. It quickly snapped the neck assuring a quick and somewhat painless death.

I walked around the body and finally found a wallet. The body was that of a Daniel Dages of Pittsburgh. He was only 34 and, if you can go by the pictures in his wallet, he had two children both boy and they were 12 and 10 years old but there was no wedding ring so I was not sure if he was married or not. We weren’t sure how long he had been dead but the rope looked fresh with no weathering which meant that it was new…very new. That meant that he died recently. I put the wallet in my pocket and took a GPS reading as to the location and then we started looking around.

The ground was muddy around the site and there were not one set of footprints as you would expect with a suicide. There were at least three sets of footprints around the body and two of them led off deeper into the woods and toward the mountain. The thing was there was something strange about the footprints that neither my partner nor I could put our fingers on but we started following them anyway.

It was about a half mile that we walked on a muddy trail following whoever it was that left the body laying there. The trees faded away about 10 minutes after we started walking again. The mud turned into chips of pitch black granite and, shortly after that, they turned into sharpened rocks of pure blackness. The sky was dark with grey clouds that came in from the ridges out in the next county, the ground was black and the edges of the rocks were enough to shred the skin for your hands if you were not careful. There was no vegetation at all, not even the mosses you would expect in a warm, dark atmosphere.

On the hard surface the footprints ended but, after we discussed it for a minute, we decided that we would continue up the mountain in the same general direction we had been travelling. In the dim light we could see that the farther we travelled up the mountain the larger and sharper the rocks became but there was a trail about 3 feet wide weaving between the rocks and it was going up the mountain the same as we were. But, by the time we had hit the trail the only sound that we could hear was the wind blowing around us. The birds had given up making music a long time ago and we had not even noticed.

We followed that trail as it got steeper and steeper until we could barely keep or footing and then we crawled but we kept moving up the goddamn mountain. Then we saw the most amazing things…three caves that appeared to go deep into the side of the mountain. We talked again and decided to search the caves. Flipping a coin we decided on the one in the middle to check out first. Don’t ask me how that worked out but it did.

The center cave went back into the mountain about a half a mile and once we got in there we saw the most beautiful caverns, huge caverns with giant black crystals and a few white ones that created their own light. It was as if we had stepped into a cathedral a God himself was at the altar instructing the crystals where to rest so that they could make the room more beautiful than any artist could ever imagine. The cave on the left was more of the same but even more beautiful than the first.

By the time we got to the cave on the right it was nearly dark so we scampered back into the center cave and settled down for the night. That night we heard some animals screaming in the darkness and others growling and grunting and they seemed a lot closer than the others. That made us nervous so we didn’t get much sleep that night. We took turns telling stories and talking about how the Steelers/Browns game was going to go t the end of the year. That was very spirited since I am a Browns fan while my partner is a Steeler fan all the way.

The morning came faster than either of us wanted it to. There was something about that cave that bothered us even though we had not been inside and we did not know what awaited us.

We exited our temporary home and stepped into a world that was just as dim as we had left the day before. The sounds of the animals hadn’t faded yet as a matter of fact the growling had become almost unbearably loud.

We stepped into the last cave almost at the same time. The air coming from inside was a lot warmer than the air outside or even the air coming from the other caves. The entrance was a total black. It was not welcoming at all and we, at least I, had second thoughts but I knew that we had to man-up and go in to see what was going on in there if anything was going on.

The floor of the cave was smooth and yet dull. There was no light reflecting from the outside. It was darker than dark and rank smell was coming from deep in the blackness.

“What’s that,” my partner.

“It smells like rotten meat but not the meat you get at the store. I mean meat from a fresh kill,” I replied in a calm voice. I brought up the point that bears and wolves would sometimes carry their kills into caves to protect them but there had been a legend passed down for the last 100 years that I could not get out of my mind and I didn’t want to talk about. It was just too terrible to think about. We covered our mouths and noses with cloth, it didn’t do much good but it was an effort, and we continued down a slight grade into the bowels of the mountain feeling our way down as we went.

There were minerals in the roof and walls of the caves that became more and more illuminated as we moved farther down the cave.

The farther we travelled the more intense the smell became as well as the light getting brighter and brighter. Finally we could see the walls, ceiling and floor of the cave, There was no more sharp edges. Everything was as smooth as glass and not hot but comfortably warm. I would guess that the temperature was around 65 degrees but the humidity made it feel a lot warmer.

We had already travelled about five miles into the mountain when we saw something that shocked and surprised us…we saw bodies hanging on the wall. It was as plumb and fresh as a newly dressed chickens and it was easy to see that their necks had been broken as if they had been hung. I counted five in that spot. I couldn’t remember how many missing persons that town was looking for but so far we had six bodies and no explanation.

Travelling farther the smell turned from rotting meat into a kind of bitter smell and once we turned a corner we found out why…there was a small town of caves hidden deep in the cave and the occupants appeared to be home. I told my partner to stay where he was when I moved a little closer and when I did I saw something that I should have known was there but yet never expected to see.

The legend was that the caves on Black Mountain were homes for some creatures that should have disappeared a long time before man even thought of walking upright or creating fire. The story was that the caves has an intelligent form of, I guess you could say, lizard being that took humans for food. Well, at that moment at least the beings were true. The creatures I was watching were tall, almost as tall as I was and although they walked on two legs most of them still walked on all fours. Maybe they could go either way. Their skin was scaly and dark green with black stripes running from the backs to their bellies and their heads were definitely like those of modern day salamanders except for a massive set of teeth that kind of reminded me of the alligators down in the New Orleans delta.

I stood crouched down as I watched at least twelve of the creatures walking around the area. I must have been there for about 30 minutes when the largest of the group started walking toward the trail. Panicked I hid behind a huge rock and I hope that my partner was doing the same. It took about 5 minutes before the creature returned dragging one of the bodies I had seen earlier behind him.

As soon as it stopped a claw came of the end of each “toe”. They looked to be about five to seven inches long and man did they look sharp. I just stood and watched and the lizard ripped the body apart and it drained the blood to the extent of sucking out the last drop from the heart and veins of its victim. As it did others came, removed the entrails and took them to the others who were waiting nearby. As that happened the heat in the room “cooked” the rest of the body making it appeared extremely dehydrated and almost leather like. When they were done and everyone was fed the same lizard who had brought the body in carried it out of the room.

Slowly I came out of my hiding place and followed the lizard out of the cave, gathering my partner as I passed by. The sun was up high in the air as we stepped from the cave. God, it was nice to feel a breeze of sweet air after what we had put up inside. The lizard travelled down the same trail we had followed up the mountain.

The lizard was slow, very slow, but dragging the body of a man would slow anything down. It took several hours before we reached the wooded area at the base of the mountain. I watched as the lizard passed tree after tree looking up into each. It looked at a couple hundred before it stopped and it placed the body carefully beneath the tree.

After it had left I arose and walked over to the spot where the body was placed. Looking above the body I saw a broken rope dangling from a heavy branch.

I looked at my partner and he looked at me and we realized what was happening at the same time. People were committing suicide and the lizards of the mountain were claiming the bodies, devouring what they needed and returned the rest. We thought about it a minute and I said, “This is nature and that was all it was. The creatures intended no harm to anyone. They took what neither God nor man wanted. Most of the time no one knew, or claimed the bodies and they were buried in a mass unmarked grave outside of town. This way they meant something to something and I think maybe in a small way that justified their deaths.”

Did we say anything about what we had found? Well, we reported finding another body or two but we never mentioned the lizards, the caves or anything else that we had found. Yeah, dehydrated bodies are still found throughout the forest but I never went on the searches again. I knew what was happening and that was all I needed but as far as I know my partner and I were the only modern people to see the lizards and that was enough to keep me going and repeating the legend to keep others from climbing up there. They deserved to be left alone and be allowed to life.

So…that’s the end of the story except to say that neither me nor my partner ever went on the mountain and no one ever knew why.