Frankenstein’s Shack

Cole Alty
Cole Alty
Aug 24, 2017 · 4 min read

It only stood about eight feet tall, and was only wide enough for two people, but it felt like every well-kept secret in the entire world was in that shack.

About a mile’s trek down from the park it stood, solemn, surrounded only by the verdancy of the forest. It rose high above the hill, staring down upon those who walked the trail. To me, it seemed more like a monolith than… whatever it was.

I was young and naive, and I never properly got the chance to ask my dad what it was for. Instead, every time we found ourself on that path, my father would proclaim unprompted that it was “Frankenstein’s shack.” To him, it was a off-hand joke that happened to crack him up just as much as it did the first time he told it. To me, it was a dark revelation. A sign that there is a lot more to life in poor old Illinois than cornfields and Frontier Days. Just like in the movies, there was a seedy underbelly waiting to be uncovered, a villain to be reckoned with, and a monster to be scared of.

Today, I would most definitely fail to appreciate the magnitude of what that shack used to mean to me. I would probably tell my dad that Frankenstein was actually the doctor, and not the monster, so his joke didn’t have much solid ground to stand on from the get go. People get a lot braver with age, but they get a lot more sour, and a lot less whimsical too.

But still, every time I think of that little dingy thing, something twists and gnaws and seizes up inside my stomach. It really felt like there was something else haunting it besides my dad’s lame attempt at humor. The rational half of me imagines it’s probably a storage area for the park rangers, or whoever tends to the place. But the irrational part of me, the child that walked that trail so many years ago, thinks less sanitized thoughts.

Perhaps, someday in the past, the Dam №2 Woods had their own Dr. Frankenstein, one that the town just likes to pretend never really existed. Sometimes it’s easier to rationalize or flat out ignore grim realities than to accept them with open arms. Someone who stitches together corpses in the heart of the woods isn’t something that you bring up during a wholesome family dinner.

“But they would have caught him!” you say. “You’re more naive than I was!” I retort. They never caught the Zodiac Killer, and he sent letters to police stations practically begging to be clapped in chains. They never caught the original Night Stalker either, and he left gruesome phone calls for his victims, twisting the proverbial knife in their open wounds. Sometimes bad people go unpunished. And I can bet you a lot of the worst people to ever walk this earth have already been forgotten to time. How many missing persons cases go completely cold, and are left to rot in a file closet for eternity?

Gacy wasn’t too far from here either, so it’s not a matter of location. Not every horror lives in Transylvania, and not every beast lives between the covers of a book.

Every time I walk that trail in my mind, I always expect something to creep out from behind that heavy metal door. My own personal Frankenstein, stitched together from my anxieties and fears, a nightmare come to life. I would dream about that place, from time to time, and strangely, I’d almost hope that something abhorrent would come out, just out of sheer wonder and curiosity.

I enjoy the occasional nightmare, to be honest. It breaks up the monotony of dreamless sleep. I very rarely dream, and when I do they’re very mundane. Until they’re not. When they’re not, they’re usually terrifying, and I’ve made peace with that. Ever since my young mind ran wild with speculation about the inside of Frankenstein’s shack, I’ve been attracted to the adverse and the unknown, especially the unknowable. You can learn a lot about yourself by stepping outside of the bonds of your reality and into something totally alien. Especially if it terrifies you to do so.

And so, I’d like to never see the inside of the shack, and leave it as a place that only exists inside a wonderful nightmare. When you get older, so many things get defined answers, and no question goes unsolved. We live unburdened by the chains of imagination. But the inside of that old shack is one of the few places in my life untouched by the rationality of adulthood, and I’d like to keep it that way.

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