Legends & Lores

"At Rock River on 7th Avenue, many ghosts have been sighted along the Rock River along the bluffs and railroad tracks where many have died on the "blind corner" near the Dillon Museum hit by trains and also drowned in the river's strong currents. On the dead end road of Seventh Avenue it is said that you can hear a mother calling for her children and that a woman can be seen walking along the tracks and disappears in thin air." - Haunted Illinois

Thursday night, ABC, 8 o'clock - Grays Anatomy. While in college my roommate and I would often get a bottle of wine and plop down for our Thursday night ritual. Well, Laura may be living in Chicago now, but I may have found a Thursday night replacement - Sorry Loho. Only problem is, this replacement doesn't help me with the bottle of wine, which may not be in the best interest of my liver.

This past Thursday after watching Grays and finishing the bottle of wine, The Replacement and I started discussing "haunted" places. She informed me of the haunting at 7th Avenue in the town we live in, so naturally we had to go check it out. We drove over, parked the car and began to walk the tracks. After we came to the conclusion that we were not going to see any woman wandering the tracks we decided to venture down the steep hill and walk along the river.

After skipping a few rocks we came across what appeared to be an old wood dock/ramp that had washed up on the shore. It was about 7ft long and 3 ft wide. Instantly we had the wonderful idea that we could float down the river on this "raft". So we found a few boards to use as paddles and proceeded to push the raft out into the river and hop aboard.

To say the least, I felt like we were the stars in a movie and I was Huck Finn. All was going well as we slowly used out "paddles" to push out to sea. Suddenly we realized a couple of important details. 1 There is a dam up ahead and 2 we were sinking. Abort! Abort! So we hopped off and continued out adventure along the coast.

Soon we heard the train whistle blow so we quickly climbed up the hill, through the brush (collecting several kookaburras), and walked along the train on the parallel tracks. It was an interesting sensation, slightly windy and slightly terrifying that a train was going to come from the opposite direction and smash me to smithereens.

Eventually we made it out alive and returned home. No, we did not see a ghost *surprise surprise* nor did we float down the river, but it was a good adventure for a Thursday night. What next?

**Disclosure** Kids - NEVER EVER do what I do.