After 1935, nothing until 1966, when a developer named Charles Garner tried to put in a
golf course west of Milletville on Highway 93 butted up against the Barrens. I found in the
Milletville Post-Register a record of the project failing “amid persistent rumors of missing
workers.” A police investigation ran for a year but no charges were filed. Garner filed for
bankruptcy and left town not long after.
This was the last attempt at development near the Barrens, but not the last activity.
Greenpeace staged an environmental protest on the edge of the Barrens in 1982, against the
mining firm that planned on opening up the old copper mines. No one was lost, but several of the
protesters reported strange, eerie sounds and even odd lights coming from deep inside. The
police chief had no comment beyond mentioning “the dangers of psychedelics and suggestion.”
No investigation occurred.
This is the kind of pattern that someone in my field cannot help but seize upon. A small
place in a temperate zone where no human habitation, no human transformation of the ecosystem
has occurred, that is what we call a “portal”. A portal to what? Only investigation of it, as it, can
determine such.
So I enter the Barrens on a sunny Saturday morning the week after I arrived in town. I
came prepared. I am not only an expert amateur surveyor, I am a competent mystic and exorcist.
I walk with science on my left hip and the arcane on my right. I am the man for this.
Immediately I am struck with the scent of the place, a muddiness in the air, as I make
slow and careful marks with a digital rangefinder and some ranging rods, so my path stays
straight. I know what the pollen of scrub oak smells like, and while scent is present, there’s also
something else, something almost behind the air, pervasive. It smelled liked corruption. I cast