Indianapolis Region of the Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) hosts a Halloween event every October. Participants get a map of sites in the area and questions to answer based on items found at those sites. In addition to the many cemeteries on the list, there are decorated houses and old school buildings to visit. It’s a family-friendly event, and we encourage participants to load their cars with friends and family to help with the search. My role in these events is to pre-check the sites to ensure teams can find all items safely. While I miss competing in the actual event, pre-checking can also be an exhilarating experience. The following is a true story about the Werewolves of London RoadRally — named for London, Indiana, where one of the main cemeteries is located.
It was a partly cloudy, crisp fall afternoon when my friend Susan and I set out to pre-check the Werewolves of London RoadRally. In the daylight, we could get to all the cemeteries in about 3 hours. Still, there was a nagging feeling that we could add just one more place to the mix to make the rally more challenging. As dusk fell, we saw the perfect place on the map — Sleepy Hollow. I had no idea there was a Sleepy Hollow in Indiana. It looked like it was a small town on the Flatrock River which was fairly close to some other sites on the rally. We figured that if we could drive to Sleepy Hollow and find just one or two questions for the rally, it would be perfect and we were pretty sure that our Rallymaster would agree. The GPS said it would take about 15 minutes to get there. We had about 1⁄2 hour of daylight left, so we pluggefd the coordinates into the GPS and that’s when things got interesting.]
As we turned left onto 850S and started looking for Sleepy Hollow Road, the sun was setting behind us. I slowed to a crawl as we got near where the GPS wanted us to turn right, but still managed to drive past the road. We saw what we thought was another road ahead of us, so we drove there and then realized we had totally missed Sleepy Hollow. Being on a two-lane, nicely paved road, we considered turning around but decided, instead, to let the GPS navigate us back to where we wanted to be. 850S turned into River Rd, and as we drove along the river with no sign of civilization in sight, the dusk turned dark, and the moon cast eerie shadows through the trees onto the road. It was getting a little creepy, so we were glad when we could make three left turns to get back on 850S to look for Sleepy Hollow Road again. We remembered that there had been several mailboxes near where Sleepy Hollow Road was supposed to be and as we caught sight of them, we also noticed smoke filling the road in front of us.
“Wow,” said Susan, “This must really be a Halloween destination. They’ve even brought in the dry ice”.
“I’m not sure”, I said, “Halloween is still a couple of weeks away and we aren’t even on Sleepy Hollow Road yet.”
The smell of burning plastic filled the car and then we noticed smoke emanating from a trash can by the side of the road. We didn’t have anything in the car to use to fight a fire and it was only smoking – not really on fire, so we navigated around it and turned right onto the road by the mailboxes.
The GPS confirmed that we were on Sleepy Hollow Road. I use the term “road” very loosely here. We found ourselves on a narrow dirt pathway with more holes than flat ground to drive on. It had been raining, so all the holes were full of water. We had no way to know how deep they were. My VW Beetle doesn’t have much ground clearance, but that didn’t stop us from picking our way around the holes and very slowly proceeding up the path. The road deteriorated from bad to even worse and as we rounded a curve, we could see a few cottages in the distance. A boat was on a trailer parked in front of one of the cottages. Laundry hanging on clotheslines was illuminated by a kerosene lantern hanging
from a front porch. It looked like a fishing village out of some old mystery novel. We were pretty sure we would hear banjo playing if we got any closer.
There was nothing else around us. Nobody knew where we were, and we’d seen enough scary movies that even though we deemed it a bad idea to turn around on the two-lane paved road, we decided it was a good idea to execute a slightly more than 3-point turn on this moonscape terrain with the steep drop-offs on either side. We were still holding our breaths as we got the car headed back in the opposite direction and that’s when we heard — gunshots?!
Susan and I both jumped. It sounded like someone in the field to our left was shooting at bottles. I wasn’t sure whether we should duck or drive faster. I chose the latter. The sound of popping glass filled the air as we navigated the path rather quickly back to the main road. Then, as we came to a sliding halt at 850S, we saw — flames!!
We had totally forgotten about the smoking trash bin. It had caught full fire and the family that lived in the house had just pulled into the driveway. They were pulling the burning items from the trashcan and throwing them on the road to extinguish them. One of the teens was bringing the garden hose around from the side of the house. The sound of breaking glass we had heard wasn’t gunshots after all. It was the glass in the trash can shattering in the flames.
It looked like the family had it under control and we wouldn’t be much help. Susan and I surveyed the scene for a moment, thought about turning right and going by the river again, then decided to just navigate our way around the smoldering piles of garbage in the road and drive quickly to the next town. We pulled over in a parking lot to try and reconcile everything we had just seen and then found the fastest way back to I-74 and home.
Sometimes, pre-checking a RoadRally is almost as exciting as actually running the event.
