Both of my parents are out of town this weekend, leaving me with nothing to do but wander mindlessley around the house and watch TV. Well, that and read War and Peace, but it’s more fun to do that at school where I can enjoy the stupified looks of the other kids, whom have never read a single unassigned book in their life. This includes the supposedly smart overachievers who brag about their grades every single day, but that’s another rant entirely. Maybe I’ll get to it later.
Anyway, for reasons unknown even to myself, I started watching Scariest Places on Earth on the ABC Family channel. Dear God, that was a mistake.
To be blunt, where in the fuck did they find such fucking dumbasses!!! The show starts off with a segment about the ‘Bunnyman Bridge’ somewhere in the US (hey, I’m proud to admit I wasn’t paying that much attention. Basically, the premise of this place seems to be that the spirit of some escaped mental patient from a hundred odd years ago is still lurking near this bridge, violently killing people and hanging them from it. The show starts with a bunch of local students out in the woods, near the site of the mental hospital. The ‘mysterious’ events begin when they find some bones in the woods. Bones. In the woods. That’s highly unusual, and certainly smacks of a psycho killer’s spirit, because everyone knows that all animals crawl off to the local Bambi Graveyard before they die…:rolleyes: Then, something starts making noise in the woods. I think that’s what happened, anyway. I couldn’t hear anything over the kids screaming bloody murder. All the cameras and flashlights converged on this one spot, where nothing at all is visible. ABC didn’t even think to put night vision on the cameras for a nighttime shoot. Did they not figure on it being dark late at night in the woods? The students run off screaming like the Lord of Fucking Darkness himself is hot on their heels, while the cameras continue to show an ominous shot of-- absolutely nothing!. No explanation is ever offered for what the kids thought they saw.
They then visit the house of a ‘survivor’ of the Bunnyman. While in the house, bloddy handprints are discovered on a wall. Fresh blood, very pale red, and runny like water with food coloring in it, not at all like bright crimson, sticky, actual blood. The kids all start screaming hysterically and run into another room, only to discover ‘GET OUT’ written in “blood” on the wall there.
Did it ever occur to these kids that maybe, just maybe, ABC was fucking with them?? Did they pause to think that the cameramen were behaving rather calmly for people who had just seen ‘GET OUT’ written in blood on the wall of a supposedly haunted house? Nothing more is said about this event. I would be inclined to think that something of that magnitude, something that well-documented by numerous witnesses and video cameras, would be a rather important find in the history of paranormal research.
Of course, it didn’t end there. During the ensuing commotion, one of the kids looks up to notice that a chandelier is shaking! No small wonder, considering the ammount of running and trampling going on in the house. The segment ends with a ludicrous bit about walking through “The Bunnyman’s Tunnel” that I won’t even comment on.
For some reason, I continued to watch this show. It only got worse. The next segment was about the Jersey Devil. Once again, the mandatory bunch of college kids was assembled to go hunt the Devil in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. They pause to examine something labeled by the show as a “fresh kill”, which looks to me like every one of the dozens of decaying deer carcasses I’ve seen in forests around Georgia, where the scariest thing is a bunch of drunk rednecks with firearms. Later that night, the kids are walking down the road when their flashlights light up a pair of glowing eyes a few inches above the ground.
“Wow!” one of the kids comments. “Have you ever seen eyes glow like that?” Yes, I have. On every single possum/racoon/deer/fox/alligator/otter/etc. I’ve happened to come across in the woods at night.
“Oh man, oh man, it’s moving towards us!” one of the kids shouts. Yes indeed. It’s called walking. Many animals exhibit that behavior but, hey, I’m sure the Jersey Devil does, too. One of the kids announces “I’m going to end this right now!” and starts walking towards the animal, which continues walking along the edge of the road. Halfway to the animal, a loud snort comes from the woods in the opposite direction. To my constrained, unimaginative mind, this sounds exactly like a wild boar, but it’s hard to tell because it is quickly drowned out by an obviously edited-in screaming/grunting/shreiking noise. Once again, were this something legitamate, I would think that every wildlife biologist in the country would want a copy of that tape for analysis. The segment ends with the statement that the terrified girl “still refuses to talk about what she saw that night in the New Jersey Pine Barrens”. I, too, would be embarassed to admit running like a maniac from a racoon. I turned the TV off when they made the assertion that ‘The Jersey Devil is real.’
Back to War and Peace for me. It contains far more truth, and far less fiction to boot.
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