Those who are traveling through the city of St. Louis may hear from the locals one of the strangest areas known in the state of Missouri. The name has been around for almost 60 years, long before the film The Night of the Living Dead popularized the term Zombie and brought the horrifying creatures into the mainstream. But it contains a strange secret that many who travel through the area say gives them reason enough to avoid the strange place.
It was built sometime around 1866 originally created to haul marble and limestone for the Glencoe Marble company. Workers in the area occasionally reported hearing strange sounds, but rarely were able to discern the source of the eerie sounds. After a few years it was rarely traveled after the stone mining operations nearby shut down. The two mile stretch of road became overgrown, and weeds and roots from scraggly trees began to break through the pavement like the unearthly hairs and fingers of a great monster from the underworld pushing from its world into our own.
Those who travel it, even those with no interest in the paranormal will tell you that if you travel the road and then leave it alone for even a day, when you travel it again it will look like a completely different stretch of road. The strangest aspect of this road, however, is that those who travel through it report hearing sounds from the woods just beyond the pavement – sounds that simply should not be there. Despite this reputation, or perhaps because of it, the road became a hangout spot for teenagers. Eventually it had to be chained off to ensure no one would get lost or harmed in the strange and hostile environment surrounding the road. There are urban legends, which are largely chalked up to superstition and storytelling of a killer who had hooks for hands and wandered the woods killing anyone who trespassed on his territory. And the tales don’t end there. Some say ghosts haunt the road and the woods surrounding them. There are several apparitions from recent history dating back from the time the road was built, but there are also others which are supposed to be from the time of the builders of the Cahokia Mounds nearby. These are often attributed with giving the strange location its unearthly gateway between the lands of the living and the dead.
One local tale in particular tells a tale of a man who was driving down this road and noticed a strange figure walking behind the truck but moving with incredible speed. As he accelerated the speed of his truck and looked in the rear-view mirror he saw this figure moving with incredible speed, but he did not seem to be running. It was almost like he was somehow walking “in fast forward.” Eventually he lost the strange smoky looking figure, but he refused to ever return to that stretch of road under any circumstance after that and warned others away from it.