FALL 2015

One time was driving with 2 close friends from Morgantown, WV to Pittsburgh, PA. This is about 70 miles, normally takes about 90 minutes total travel time with traffic etc. Friend A & I left from Morgantown & went to Dunkard (near Bobtown) to pick up Friend B for the journey, which he had made dozens of times, if not more, for a monthly movie night. We had many times driven through Bobtown, a nearby unincorporated coal town, for its creepy ambiance on our night drives. This night was particularly overcast & foggy so we decided to keep with that tradition, stay off the highway, and take the longer, spookier route to Pittsburgh. So we set off from Friend B’s house through Bobtown, one of us commenting that perhaps we were in the mists of Ravenloft, as the fog had suddenly become very dense! We proceeded through the town slowly, noting the almost false-seeming stillness of the town and soon after emerged…. right outside Pittsburgh. None of us has ever been able to explain how we passed through 50ish miles of terrain in under 20 minutes (the car’s clock, and our phones’ timekeeping abilities confirmed that very little time had passed). None of us has memory of a shortcut or other detour and we all fully expected nearly an hour of driving. Somehow we went through Bobtown and skipped an hour of travel and a great distance in its fog. NB: The Allegheny mountains and the fact that we were in a ’94 Nissan Sentra *really* make this whole thing make less sense. Even if I had been speeding, there’s NO way I could have made that kind of time for that trip. Absolutely bananas. Weirdly, to this day I often have dreams about Bobtown, or about going there. It was never our destination, I don’t think I’ve ever even stopped there.

Submitted by Em