Our first adventure continues.......Hell's Gate, Stop Sign Mary and Spook Light Hill

Hell's Gate  -  Rosedale, IN


Next stop on our itinerary:  Hell's Gate

First, the directions:  From the 100 Steps Cemetery you take 40 East to 59. Make a left onto 59 North.  Go about 4 miles to County Road 1350. Make a left. Go about 2 1/2 miles until you reach North Rock Run Church Road.  Make a right and about 1/2 into it you will come to an old train tunnel.  You have arrived at Hell's Gate.  

Now for the legend/s:  One story is that after a tragic train derailment, you can hear laughter, screaming and crashing noises as if the train was derailing over and over again.  Another story has you doing a little exercise.  Right before the tunnel you are to flash your car lights 3 times then travel through the tunnel.  When you get to the other side turn around and go back through the tunnel, this time stopping 1/2 way through.  Turn off your car and wait 10 minutes.  After the 10 minutes are up the graffiti in the tunnel is supposed to start glowing and blood is supposed to start dripping down the walls. If you see your name among the graffiti, then you will hear banging on the windows and roof of the car.  Once this stops start your car and finish driving through the tunnel.  On the other side you will see a tree with the ghosts of 2 teenage boys who hung themselves years ago.  Also if you see your name in the tunnel you are supposed to die by morning.  Dun....Dun....Dun (creepy music)

When you are passed this you will see a road that is on your left.  Turn on this road and when you are completely straight on the road and passed the stop sign, stop the car. Turn off your lights and honk the horn.  You will see a T sign behind you.  Now push on your breaks.  You will see blood drip down the sign.  This is known as Stop Sign Mary.  Now I don't know why this is called Stop Sign Mary or why they have you look at the T sign instead of the stop sign, but we looked at both signs and nothing happened.

Back to Hell's Gate. The tunnel we just went through is supposed to be the first of 7 Gates of Hell in the area.  Once you go through all 7, you are supposed to look back and see the Gates of Hell closing.  Unfortunately, this is the only one we found.  From what I understand many of the gates were destroyed when the old railroad tracks were removed.

Needless to say we didn't experience anything at this gate. Still it was a bit creepy sitting in a car in the dark in a tunnel for 10 minutes in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.  There are rumors of cults in the area and that was the biggest concern.  Don't need some wacko or wacko's jumping out of the bushes trying to get us.  LOL.  Pictures were a no go at night but we did come back the next day and took these:

We didn't bother taking any pictures of the stop sign or T sign because....what for?  I mean once you have seen a sign, you have seen them all.

Onward to Spook Light Hill.

To find this place, go North on State Road 59.  Turn left on the County Line Road before the Park County Sign.  The road splits and you want to stay to the left.  The road turns to gravel.  Keep on for about 4 miles.  Stop at the top of the hill and flash your lights 3 times.

Legend has it the Mr. Lowry was a home waiting for his daughter, Rebecca to come home from the Church Social.  The weather was getting bad and he was worried about her.  He finally saw her horse and buggy coming down the road so he ran out to meet her.  But when he got to the buggy he found it empty. He quickly jumped in and turned around headed back to the church.  Halfway there he found the body of his daughter with her head completely severed.  It is believe that the horse was spooked by the storm and threw her from the buggy, the wheels running over her and decapitating her.  They never found her head.  People claim to see mysterious lights on this road and say that is the ghost of Mr. Lowry looking for his daughter's head.

At Spook Light Hill we did see some lights.  Whether they are Mr. Lowry's ghost or a house in the woods or a car off in the distance, we couldn't say. But we did enjoy the drive up and down the hills on a narrow gravel road with no lights other than the ones from our car.  As seems to be the pattern here, the drive is better than the destination.......

Our first adventure.....100 Steps Cemetery

100 Steps Cemetery/Carpenter's Cemetery  -  Brazil, IN

This was the first stop on our weekend tour.  We got there just at midnight. We followed these directions we found on a website called Angelfire. Basically you go down 40 West until you reach the 4-way flashers in Staunton. You make a left and follow the road until you come to a 4-way stop. Make a right and go through town. Follow the road around the sharp curve to the left until you come to another 4-way stop.  Make a right and follow the road about a mile or so.  You will come to another fairly sharp curve to the right and the cemetery will be on your right on top of the hill.  The other directions, we later found out are to go down 40 West past the 4-way flashers in Staunton.  On 675 W you make a left and follow that road about 1/4  a mile.  The cemetery is on your left.  I definitely recommend using the first set of directions, especially if you go at night.  The roads are extremely dark, most of them gravel and single lanes.  There is a canopy of trees that covers any possible moonlight. You have to use your high beams and even then you can't see very far ahead. It reminded us of dozens of scary movies where people are out driving at night and suddenly some crazed maniac pops out of the woods into the middle of the road. All of this sets the mood.
Anyway, you definitely want to bring a flashlight (the one on my phone didn't do much).  Legend has it that you count the steps as you are going up.  This is pretty difficult to do since a.) it's pitch black out there and b.) the stairs are so old that many steps are broken and missing. Well, count them anyway on your way up.  When you get to the top you turn around and face the open field.  The ghost of the cemetery's first caretaker will appear and show you a vision of your own death. When you go down you count the steps again and if the number is the same as on the way up you are safe.  But if the number is different you are supposed to die in the manner revealed to you in the vision. If you try and cheat and go up the hill on the grass not using the stairs, you will get pushed to the ground by a phantom hand that will leave a red imprint on your back for several days. Definitely spooky.  
Now for the reality.  Nothing happened.  You can't really count the steps in any reasonable manner.  Parts of them are just grass.  Even still there aren't anything close to 100 steps.  More like 60, maybe.  What we did experience was an almost total silence and absolute darkness.  When we turned off our flashlights you couldn't see your hand in front of your face.  But when you looked up in the sky you were able to see millions of stars.  It was simply breathtaking.  Living in the city, we don't get to experience that kind of silence and see that many stars.  We tried to take some pictures but it was impossible to get anything to show up. So we came back the next day and took some.

It is an old cemetery.  Many of the grave markers are from the mid 1860's. Several are broken and there is a bit of graffiti on some of them.  But all in all it is a beautiful and peaceful place.  The creepiest part of this cemetery are the roads leading up to it if you are driving at night.  During the day it is a beautiful drive.

In the beginning

It has occurred to me that after living in Indiana for over 13 years, other than the area where I live and the town where my in-laws live, I don't know the first thing about this state.  I grew up in New Jersey.  When I was a little girl I would wake up on a Saturday morning and my mom would have the car packed and all 5 of us, my mother, grandmother, aunt, brother and I, would hop in the car and take off for the weekend.  This was a time before airline tickets, hotel reservations and car rentals.  This was a time when you pulled out a paper map and looked up a city and decided "we've never been there so let's go and check it out".  That is how many of our weekends started.  Other times we would get in the car and my mom would ask my brother and I which way to go and we would yell out left, right or straight.  We ended up in many an interesting place.  By the time I was 10 I had hit every state from Massachusetts to Georgia and as far west as Ohio.  We had also been to Canada several times.

Fast forward 30 some-odd years and my family and I are stuck in the same routine of work, school, after school activities and chores.  Come the weekend we would plop in front of the TV and veg out.  This is not how we like to spend our time.  Time for a change.

Hi, my name is Cynthia.  I am a wife and mother in Indianapolis, IN.  I am a travel agent that works for our After-hours Service on the graveyard shift.  I have 3 boys ages 22, 21 and 6 and a fantastic husband, Joe, that has put up with me longer than I can even imagine.  Our weeks are pretty jam-packed with things to do from work, errands, shopping and school, to karate, cub scouting, volunteering and birthday parties, oh and trying to squeeze some sleeping time during the day for the few precious hours that everyone is gone.  On the weekends, however, everything slows down and after an occasional Pack meeting or birthday party, we pack up and leave town.

Now being a travel agent has afforded us quite a few opportunities for travel through out the years.  We have been on at least 7 cruises, been to Denmark, Germany, Austria and France, traveled our way through the Caribbean and Mexico and even been to South America.  But still other than Florida, Hilton Head and Las Vegas we know very little about our country.  So we have decided to explore. 

Joe and I are really into creepy and scary.  Surprisingly so is our 6 year old, Keyan.  So we have decided to become Jr. Ghost Hunters.  We usually try to get some ghost hunting done wherever we go.  Occasionally our 2 oldest boys, Andrew and Matthew and their girlfriends, join us.  Come Fridays our bags and car are packed.  We are armed with an itinerary, a GPS and some snacks and we're off...