The Darkest Reaches

Like children with sharpened sticks for swords, we plow backward into a time when Buffalo still held mystery. When the woods and abandoned buildings around us were places to be explored, magical lands where things existed beyond the realm of day-to-day comprehension. We all have these childhood places locked away, teeming pockets of Zen inside our minds. Let us travel there with swords drawn, our minds open, and our souls willing.

Buffalo's old Central Terminal

Let’s first get on our bikes, call up our buddies, and meet at a designated location. Let’s head toward Tonawanda Creek and stop for an ice cream at Dutch’s Deli. Then it’s to an abandoned canal lock, a rusting metal cliff overlooking the inviting stagnant water below it. Let’ strike up cigarettes and marvel at the massive green wall. Who’s first? Who’s brave enough to climb the tiny ladder up to the catwalk and take the first plunge? We once heard that the water was so polluted that when a boy jumped into it he landed on top of a rotting dead cow.

Our crew could spend the whole day jumping, smoking, and talking, before dusk falls upon us and the journey home begins to seem longer than the it took to get here. But today, why not head deeper into the woods. Head up to Campbell Boulevard in Pendleton with a poorly rolled joint and leave our carriages parked across the street at the church. Walk across the street with clothes ready to be ravaged by thorns and thistles and head to the Castle. Two castles, actually, built of old gray blocks in the woods, separated by a moat flowing beneath. After the joint we sit and wonder who built these peculiar structures. Who was crazy enough to place two castles across the street from a church and down the way from a Wilson Farms? Both have winding staircases and are intricately built. We find out later from the woman who owns the property that the two castles had been an amusement park prop back in the late 1920s. Sadly, one castle’s ceiling collapsed a while back, so entrance is out of the question, but the second holds a dusty moosehead on the wall, and what looks like an old bar, with scattered, random antique bottles.

Time to visit the Maze, a strange colony built below the treetops on Saw Mill Road across from the old rock quarry. You almost break your neck going down, but when you get to the entrance (we usually travel at night) you know you are part of something big and wondrous. Wooden fences covered in ivy criss-cross one another to create a confusing pathway. Dark corridors are interrupted by sporadic obstacles on the way. There are rumors about the man on the hill who gets his kicks watching little children getting lost in the maze, which has two stories to the maze, all and is surrounded by thick leafy trees. Slides and staircases connect labyrinth’s two floors.

On each wall an ethereal photo adds to the surreal quality of the maze.

Who knows what kind of crazies are out here on any given night burning the flesh of goats in firepits as contribution to some weird séance? From a neighbor we learn that the musician and comedian John Valby owns the property, and he’s quite a nut himself. For those of you that aren’t familiar with him, check him out.

John Valby's two-story maze

(Valby declined an interview, saying that he wants to keep kids out of the maze. Well, if it was privacy he wanted, it was a hell of an idea to build a two-story maze and plaster weird pictures all over it, drop it in the middle of the woods, and say, “Hey, folks, just move it along, there’s nothing to see here.”)

Next we tear our clothes up hopping the fence to Buffalo’s old insane asylum, just a skip and jump from Buffalo State College. Equipped with flashlights we dig our way through a side door and down black hallways, with the sounds of imagined screams and cries in our heads. We make our way to one of the main staircases and begin to climb. We visit the bathrooms where the patients used to wash themselves. The rooms where they used to sleep. We imagine the ghost of some poor little girl still banging her head against the wall because she can’t get the monsters out. The only sound is the vacant echo of our shoes occasionally crunching on broken glass.

We carry on, to the New York Central Terminal, whose rusting signs mark the arrival and departure of long-gone ghost trains used to arrive and depart. A dim outside light pools in through the windows some 20 feet above our heads, the only illumination in the eerily quiet station. We know that the station is supposed to be haunted. We know that aching sounds and unexplained electrical impulses travel through these walls.

Lastly we park our butts outside Delaware Road off Transit as the clock inches toward midnight. No one travels down Delaware Road except fanatics like us: a dark road that never sees cars, surrounded by woods. We sit there and listen to the trees. We tell stories about local hicks who hang squirrels and like to eat 16-year-old kids. We look for the mystery of night. Then there’s no more talk, just the beating of our hearts, and the breaths that we take, until someone lights a cigarette and says, “I’m tired. Let’s get out of here.”