jeepers creepers

WARNING! A little of this post might be disturbing for some. Both for pictures and text. Not a lot, but enough. My justification for putting those parts in is that it represents our history and the way the world was and is. Perhaps then we can learn from past mistakes and not repeat them.

We had spent the night in Flagstaff, Arizona, only 30 miles from where we had started the day, but with a good part of the magnificent Grand Canyon now in our memories.

I spent two hours in the middle of the night looking for someplace between Flagstaff and Austin, Texas (where a former longtime neighbor from Essex Junction lives with her husband ... they are good friends and originally we thought they would be staying at our house in Essex for a while during our trip ... that didn't work, but now we get to see them at their place in a few days), that had some authentic Western history, or ghost history, or Route 66 history, or Western music history, or some other special appeal.

I found a few places that had one of these qualities (Tombstone, Arizona, for example), however, they each were too far out of our way. (Sure we have no fixed schedule ... but after so many miles, some decisions are based largely on how far out of the way they take us from places to which we are committed to going.)

Fort Tumbleweed (NO, I'm not making this up), near Austin, finally appeared under the scrutiny of Google radar. We may end up going there. We'll see.

Finally, just before calling it a middle-of-the-night, I decided to look in the Flagstaff area.

Bingo! A place that had it all!

The Museum Club - also known as The Zoo. And it turned out to be walking distance from the motel, although we drove there after checking out in the morning because The Zoo doesn't open until 11 am.

Its quick history.

Built in late 1920's by a man whose primary occupation was as a taxidermist. Called the largest log cabin in the world at that time. Through changing owners became a store, a mud and blood and beer bar, a music hall, a recording studio, a dance hall, and a haunted place - right on Route 66.

Google it for a more complete history.

The haunted part comes from the husband and wife who owned it when it first became a place on the maps of country music fans and stars. (The venue is super small for super stars, still they come to play before a live audience who dances to there music on the raised wooden dance floor in that historic building. That very night, a very well known singer was scheduled. Don't ask me who. My brother could tell you, but he's asleep.)

Anyway, this loving couple with contacts throughout the music world fixed up the place. People came. People recorded there. Then sadness. Late one night as the husband was finishing up downstairs, his wife went upstairs to their apartment above the hall. She slipped and fell near the top of the stairs and died from her injuries. Two years later, after a growing darkness in the man's mind, he killed himself in the hall.

There are claims of physical contact with her; sightings of them both, including people talking with her in one of the booths, not knowing the history, and having her disappear, only to find out afterwards the woman they were talking with looked exactly like pictures hanging in the bar area; one man living in the apartment upstairs years afterwards being knocked to the floor by her and warned that he only "need fear the living" (after which he jumped out an upstairs window onto a rooftop and never went back in the building); and, of course, lots of rattling of bottles and glasses and things strewn about when no one was there.

The place is creepy enough with a few of the thousands of original stuffed animals still there, along with plenty of dark corners and dark spaces in the high beamed ceiling. No animals were protected back then, that's why you see some of the threatened ones on display. (I've never liked taxidermy, but this guy was good. Remember the mountain lion in the picture was mounted in the early 1930's.) Study the photos carefully. Can you see anyone in the shadows that perhaps shouldn't be there?

Later that day, following historic Route 66, we stopped in a few museums and memoribilia shops, and there you could have found us "standin' on the corner in Winslow, Arizona" - some of you will know the song, the writer, and the group who sang those famous words.