Sunday Stroll at Reedy Creek Park

Saturday night the hospital called and asked Carole to come in to scrub for a C-section as they were short-handed. So she got dressed and went in. She came back home at about 3:00 am. Then they called her on Sunday and asked her to fill in at the maternity ward for six hours, so she did that. But she was so tired that she asked me to drive her to work. I did that, but decided to take my camera and go for a short hike at Reedy Creek Park on the way back to the house.

Reedy Creek Park is a pretty cool place, but I generally avoid it during warm months because of the thick crowds that take advantage of the picnic grounds and the lake fishing and biking trails. I go there to hike, since there's a pretty darned good system of woodland trails in the park. It's also a fairly large park--over 700 acres. I can almost get a feeling of wilderness and solitude if I can hit a day when there aren't many people (and dogs) in there.

Today was a Sunday, which would generally make it a crowd day. But the temperatures were in the high 40s so there weren't any picnickers in the park. Mainly there were just people playing disc golf and a fair number of hikers like myself. It wasn't too bad.

I've posted some columns about the park before. One of my favorite spots there are the ruins of an old farmhouse that has fallen to rocky bits. There are a couple of genuinely creepy ghost stories about the place, one of which I keep meaning to use as the basis for a short story or novella. It's percolating.

This is the site of the old farmhouse. This was the house of the son of the couple who originally owned most of the acreage. There's a ghost story attached to this place that genuinely scared me when I read of it. Not the ghost itself...I don't believe in such. But what happened to the person whose ghost apparently haunted the vicinity because of what happened to her.

This corner of the house was reassembled by the County some years ago. They pieced the stones back together. In fact, the house was completely in bits before they decided to cement some of it to its original state to give a better idea of the scope of the old place. It wasn't a huge house, but wasn't insubstantial, either.

The cursed farmhouse from the opposite side from where you arrive by way of the Sierra Loop Trail.

When things are just right, you can pretend you're really in the woods.