The trail had grown in with weeds and it couldn’t be seen from the dirt road anymore. It took someone who already knew it was there to find it. Even then, Paul had trouble figuring out which break in the tree line was the right one.

The group of us, a bunch of high school friends, followed his lead down the road.

We were walking to someplace strange. There was something out in these woods that didn’t belong; I wanted to see it. I’ve never fantasized about white beaches; I think about fog settled in low-lying swamps. Strange places feel more real to me.

It’s part of why I came back to UPG. I remembered the fog. Paul was leading us to more than fog.

He stopped, peered into the woods and nodded. The lot of us insulted each other while he led us into the overgrown opening. The path was curved and narrow.

It had just stopped raining and we stepped over the high, wet grass and fallen logs as we made our way down a hill. My toe hit a rock and I almost tripped.

“Damn rock,” I said to myself. Tree branches brushed my face.

“That’s actually a curb,” Paul said. I didn’t know what he meant. Then I began to see the corner of a brown clapboard house. “This is an abandoned town.”

The woods cleared slightly around a cluster of crumbling buildings in dim light of a late summer forest.

“We’re standing on a street,” Paul said as people slowly gathered behind him. “This is the ghost town.” A ‘40s style blue Chevy was rusted and parked along side the house.

This place was a half mile from the nearest paved road.

A man named Warner and his family had moved out there, Paul explained. The buildings were once a dentist office and a clothing store. I could see a sink through a hole in the one rotting wall.

“He just wanted to be left alone except for customers coming in and out,” Paul said. “He started his own little town.” Warner left dogs out at night. The dogs weren’t domestic.

I thought of my own sense of distance, how it leads me to the quiet, away from others. I might want to go to a small campus, or maybe live out in the woods somewhere. But I wouldn’t use dogs. I don’t think I’ll become Warner. That’s something different.

There were also stories of a beast called the Grunaphin who stalked the woods that surrounded the buildings. Paul’s pap had told them you could hear the monster’s knuckles dragging through the leaves before it got you.

I imagined the Grunaphin with massive hooves and red flesh. It has the muscular body of a man with curled horns. Its club is made from a large twisted root. The Grunaphin was a wise grandfather’s trick to keep Paul and his two brothers out of the ghost town when they were kids.

A small road wide enough for Model A Fords and other early cars lead in and out of Warner’s town - which functioned until he and his wife died. The property was left to a daughter who lived in Pittsburgh.

She’s in her 80s now and won’t sell the land to the camp.

“There’s a lot of big deer down in here,” Paul said. None of us went near the buildings. We stood there near the curb looking at what was left of Warner’s home. Places where people once were and are no more always create an unsettling energy.

Without saying so, we all began to mill back up toward the dirt road.

The town was a strange thing to do, and as the woods slowly encroached, it grew stranger. To be left alone, Warner built an eerie place: a place of silent buildings, an isolated home for the Grunaphin, and a clearing where hunters spot the biggest deer.

The man gave us something to go find and then walk away from. Glad we can leave.