boocoda

Happy Halloween (belated), dear readers. This year for Halloween J. and I drove down to the town of Bucoda, which bills itself as the “world’s tiniest town with the biggest Halloween spirit”. I watched a video about Bucoda a year or two ago on the YouTube channel Pretty Gritty Tours, and ever since then I’ve wanted to drive down and check it out. This was my second Pretty Gritty Tours-inspired excursion, after Meeker Mansion in the winter of 2021. I don’t recall that Meeker Mansion had a particular reputation for being haunted, though I wouldn’t dare to spend the night there. I remember paying my silent respects to the Meekers as I toured their house, on the off chance that they were watching me from behind their portraits and were wary of my intentions. I played a couple perfunctory chords on an old reed organ (a harmonium, technically) in one of the downstairs rooms in an attempt to impress the curator I was chatting with (not sure if I succeeded). I don’t know if my great-grandmother’s organ in Calcutta sounded like that one. Hers wasn’t a harmonium, so probably not. It had stopped working a long time ago when I visited my grandparents’ house as a kid. They kept it on one of the landings on the staircase, where it served as a piece of furniture. It was made of dark wood and had a little oval mirror above the keyboard on the console that had become   clouded with age. The organ itself was silent. You could press the keys, but no sound would emerge. My mom tells me it hadn’t worked when she was growing up. Sometime over the last decade, it vanished from the house. One of my mom’s cousins doubtless sold it for a little cash. Who knows where it is now? Objects on other landings included great old wooden chests. I don’t know if they’re still there or what they contained. I’ve always loved old houses of Calcutta, with their high ceilings, dusty halogen lights, and air of Englishness.

    Anyway, back to Pretty Gritty Tours, you may have noticed a theme with their videos. Bucoda is no different. Bucoda was the site of Washington State’s first penitentiary — a place named Seatco, which in the native tongue meant “haunted place”. Long before the penitentiary was built, the native tribes associated the area with various manner of hauntings. The penitentiary didn’t do much to cleanse the place. Inmates were reportedly mistreated and are said to haunt the site today. The penitentiary is long gone. The only thing that remains of it are its decaying foundations. We didn’t actually go see it. Some things are too spooky even for me.

    Instead we walked around the town, heading up to the Boo-coda haunted mansion, which wouldn’t open before 7PM. We decided there was little else to do in that town before nightfall and set out looking for an abandoned mineshaft or the like to explore. Bucoda, like many other towns in and around the Cascades, was originally set up to be a mining town, but it never found much success in this regard. We couldn’t find any mines nearby that were not on private property, so we drove south to a ghost town called Tono, thinking we’d satisfy our craving for Halloween spook over there. We drove by an empty field with a large gate blocking a forest road at each end, and apparently that’s all Tono amounts to today. We circled back and pulled into one of the turnouts where another car had parked. Two people were standing next to the car. They sketched me out, but J. insisted it would be fine. As we drew near, I noticed there was a second car that looked a little worse for wear behind the first and several large pumpkins stood in a line on a low wall. We circled around the parked car. I tried not to look at the two people standing next to it who seemed to be following us suspiciously with their eyes. I asked J. if I should ask them what they were doing here. J., who was scrolling through his phone, very casually said, “I don’t think so, they’ve got assault rifles.” “So you think I shouldn’t?” “Dude, they’ve got fucking assault rifles!” “So I shouldn’t stop?” “No!” We circled around their car and went back up the highway toward Bucoda. It occurred to me that the battered second car, which I now realized was riddled with holes, and the pumpkins must have been used for target practice. Bruh, you should have tried sounding a little more urgent the first time.
   Hopes of exploring a mineshaft or ghost town dashed, we decided to do more traditional Halloween things and went to a pumpkin farm and corn maze near Cinebar, WA. They had a haunted forest, which was a trail that wound through a section of the forest with all kinds of spooky Halloween props lining it, including a bunch of naked barbie dolls tied to a tree. It would have been scarier after 7PM, with the paid actors, but that was over an hour away, and we had the drive back to Seattle to think about (almost two hours on its own).

    I also had two tickets to a Stephen Sanchez concert but no one to go with. I bought the tickets in January, apparently under the fanciful belief that I wouldn’t still be single or something of the sort. J. made an earnest attempt to get into Stephen Sanchez during the drive down to Bucoda. I tried to entice him by saying there would probably be a lot of college girls there, but that wasn’t enough to get J. to commit to enduring Stephen Sanchez’s old-soul voice and tendency to impersonate Elvis. I made a game-time decision after the haunted forest that I could either rush back to Seattle and make it just in time for the concert, which I’d be going to on my lonesome, or I could prolong the evening and do more fun things out in rural Halloweentown, WA with a friend. I chose the latter. We bought some pumpkins from the pumpkin farm, ate some funnel cake fries (delicious), and slipped into the corn maze without buying tickets. We found the treasure at the center of the maze in a little wooden chest that when opened contained a mirror and words to the effect that the treasure was YOU all along.

    We made another game-time decision to head back to Bucoda instead of Seattle when we realized that our last game-time decision meant that by the time we went back to Bucoda the famed Boo-coda haunted house would be open, and it was. So we stood in line, paid some money to get paid actors to jump out at us from behind walls and chase us out of the building with chainsaws, and all in all had a fun time. It was truly a boo-tastic Halloween weekend.