RV Parks in McAlester, Oklahoma - Top 9 Campgrounds near

My little corner of the world was never very exciting, I will admit. Being from this generation of computer savvy youths I was quick to realize there was a much bigger, more exciting world somewhere beyond the borders of my dusty county in Oklahoma. New York City, Bangkok, Hong Kong, London, Munich…all the places I’d read about and flood my mind with images of felt so far away and distant that when I turned eighteen I couldn’t help but wonder where it was I’d go to first.
Reality is never as kind as we’d like it to be. I wound up leaving college after my first year, mind I did not fail out, but I felt I had had enough academia for a while and decided to take a break and “find myself.” This ill advised journey involved a swift encounter with the harsh reality of coming from a lower middle class family with few resources, and eventually ended with me getting a job working for a casino, a pizza place, and the natural gas fields.
After saving up some money and making a few connections I managed to make the cross country move to Seattle, Washington to live with a girl I’d met on the internet. I’d like to say it was love and for a time I’m sure there was love between the two of us. Work was hard to find, and after being laid off from my contracting firm (I was working for a gigantic online retailer) the relationship slowly disintegrated and after four years away from home I was once again heading back home with my head out of sorts and not a clue as to where to go or what to do next at the ripe old age of 26.
I came back home that winter, having said all my goodbyes and pining for the city behind me, I was determined to forge my way in the world even if I would forever be stuck in the shithole that is Pittsburg County, so long as I lived and was not a burden I could be happy. I got a job for that same Casino I had worked for previously, a decent job that came with a phone and a company car. I lived with my brother who had bought a house in the old hometown and things were starting to look up for me. Several months passed as I re-established myself and that summer I turned 27. Four days after my birthday the earthquake hit at about three in the AM.
Oklahoma’s earthquake rate had been increasing rapidly since the advent of hydro-fracking, a process that too closely resembles actual rape of the planet. Every few months since 2010 a 2 or 3 pointer would make the news. That one though, that one was a solid six pointer if it was anything. I remember being on the john doing my nightly business when the toilet began to jerk up and down and the floor rippled beneath me. Just as quickly as it started it stopped. There were reporters from all over running around town that night and the next day, asking anyone and everyone for interviews and statements. Cynthia, a cook at the café my grandmother manages, made a very memorable scene for the Channel 2 news crew who ate up her shit like it was made of unicorn semen and Arby’s sauce. It wasn’t enough having to look at her gnarled, leathery face and hear her gravely smokers voice every time I wanted a cheeseburger but now I was seeing it all over the news.
For the little town I live in, the attention was a big enough deal to get the mayor’s panties all up in a bunch. Wherever the news vans were, she was right there waiting half smiling and visibly agitated, waiting for her turn to shine on the cameras. I could only guess as to her motivation other than pure vanity, any increase in tourism dollars was a good thing, and media coverage was about the only thing that could make that happen. A geological survey crew from the state college came down to take a look at the damage and check the old instrumentation left behind by previous survey crews. Eventually, like everything else concerning the town, the excitement died down and life got back to normal, for a while at least.
Winter came early, and one morning at the café before work I was reading in the newspaper (we don’t quite have a web presence just yet) that the earthquake had opened up several old mine shafts in the area. Southeastern Oklahoma was nothing but coal mining operations in the early 1900s. Immigrants came to work for the big companies digging coal up out of the ground, the ancestors of the locals plodding through oily mud in our present day. I guess it is the story of our lives down here, always having to eek our livings out of the dirt.
Once upon a time this had been a prosperous place. The largest town in the area is McAlester, a hub for the outlying coal mining settlements originally founded by J.J. McAlester as a trading post for westward bound travelers. The mines closed up after a large accident claimed the lives of around five hundred workers in 1909. When the mines went, the life and prosperity went with it, leaving entire towns and settlements completely empty for the wild to reclaim. “Excuse me, are you a local?” A woman’s voice inquired from the table behind me. I hadn’t even noticed them. She was attractive in a peculiar, offbeat way and about in her early thirties. Sitting at the table with her were three men, two were very thin and other stocky and thick in the middle and I was very confident that I had never seen any of them around town in my life.
“Yes. Can I help you?” I turned my chair slightly to get a face to face view.
She looked over to the heaviest man who had a dark red goatee who nodded in approval. “We’re an investigative group from Little Rock, Arkansas and we were hoping you could help us out.”
“Depends on what you’re investigating I guess.” They certainly were not police, but one of the thin men’s shirts gave them away. The black t-shirt read OPS, beneath which was the full title of their organization, the Ozark Paranormal Society. “Ghosts?”
“Well, yeah. See, we do investigations all over the south and southwest. We’ve come to take a look at uh…” She took a notebook from off of the table and flipped the pages. “Crybaby Bridge?” she shot a look to red-bearded man then went back to her notebook. “And the public school, and a few of the local grave yards, Lone Oak cemetery and High Hill.”
I had to stifle a grin. I’d grown up hearing all those ghost stories, my father, despite being a good and hardworking man, was very superstitious and claimed to have had many an experience. Whether or not these stories of his were “true” was beside the point, what mattered was that he believed them. And for a time, I did too. “Crybaby Bridge, and Baby Beach, huh?” These places were real enough outside of the stories. I’d been swimming at Baby Beach since I was five or six.
“Baby Beach?” She began writing in her book. “Is that close by?”
“You can see the bridge from the beach; it runs right over the creek that feeds the lake.”
“I take it you know the story behind the bridge?”
“About as well as anyone I guess…ah…some time in the 40’s a couple and their newborn drove off the bridge in their car into the creek. At a specific time of night you are supposed to be able to hear the infant crying or something like that.”
“Have you ever heard it?”
“No, but my dad claims he did one night. But then, he also claimed that a UFO flew over him and his friends one night while they were smoking ganja.”
The thin man in the OPS shirt laughed into his sweet-tea, the woman gave him one hell of a look and then turned back to me. I noted she had longish dark red hair she kept in a bun and a tattoo of a scarab beetle on the back of her neck.
“You don’t believe in the paranormal?”
“I believe my five senses, they’re pretty much all I have to work with.” I’d recited that line a hundred times before in my head while having those same discussions with my dad. While I thought it was clever enough, she seemed fairly unimpressed. “To be honest, you guys probably aren’t going to find much at Baby Beach or on the bridge. Why the school, by the way?”
“The mayor said that it was a hospital a long time ago, that a lot of people died in it.” And there the truth was laid bare. Having had a taste of the spotlight, the wonderful mayor had put in a call, likely several calls, to anyone who would listen.
“I never heard that one. But I guess it is as good a place to look as any.”
“Well…can you think of anywhere else?”
“I could take you guys to Lone Oak cemetery after work if you like. My name is John by the by.”
“I’m Fran, everyone calls me Frankie, though.” The name suited her perfectly. She motioned to the rest of the group and introduced them individually, firstly pointing to the red-bearded man. “That’s Tom, second lead investigator. This guy sitting here next to is Lewis our camera man, we call him Stretch, and the one on the end is Mikey our editor and AV guy.” None of the guys seemed excessively sociable; given the nature of their chosen professions it wasn’t very surprising.
I looked up at the clock hanging above the Waitress station and saw I had about twenty minutes left to make the drive to work. “What do you say?” They huddled up together and it only took a minute or two before she replied with a yes. We exchanged numbers and said our goodbyes.
I got off work at 4:30 and got home at about 5, halfway into changing into my jeans I got the phone call to meet up with the OPS at the café. When I got there they were at the same table, sitting in a slightly different order. They hadn’t ordered anything and were ready to leave straight away. Their vehicles consisted of a van I imagined to be full to the brim with their ghostbusting equipment, and a Honda SUV which all but Lewis packed into. We took the winding road to Dow, just outside of Haileyville and crossed the bridge and landed on baby beach right as the sun was beginning to set. The lake was calm, the beach pretty much deserted. The air coming off of the water was bone chilling.
“What was that we passed on the bridge?” Mikey asked as he helped Lewis unload the equipment. “Looked like another old bridge that fell apart.”
“It used to be the electric cart that went from here to McAlester.” My dad had photographs and news clippings saved from when it was still active.
“They had an electric trolley here? Where did the power come from?” Lewis said as he gingerly placed a camera case on the ground, straining against its weight.
“There was a water works plant at the dam that powered it.”
The rest of the evening was spent taking footage of the area, I walked them around and showed them what few key points and places there were, and where they could safely walk and trek with their gear up to the bridge. After shooting was done they settled in with a few audio recorders going, occasionally addressing them with time and temperature. When the sun set it began to get considerably colder, it must have been forty degrees by the time eleven o clock rolled around and we were waiting in anxious silence to hear the wail of the phantom infant. At around midnight I left, offering to take them to one of the cemeteries the following day.
That night came the first dream. I don’t know if you’d call them dreams or visions or nightmares. Maybe they were all of them at once, playing out in my subconscious. Leading me. Warning me. I dreamed that I was wandering and came upon a railroad which I followed through the woods to an old hospital. It seemed familiar but I knew I had never been there before. The forest cleared, the grass was very tall around the structure which encompassed almost two whole acres by itself. There was a decrepit, disintegrating wooden sign at the start of a stone walkway, the word “sanitarium” could be just barely made out. I walked beyond it and the air became heavy around me, pressure building on my shoulders, filling my shoes with lead and slowing my walk toward the large door with chipped paint which stood half open.
CAAAA! The shrill scream erupted from the tall grass. It sounded like a large bird. I turned to the door, now closed and tried it to find it locked. I turned around and saw in the tall grass a trail had been cut through it…had it been there before? Had I simply missed it? I plodded through the thick air down the trail leading me through the lot. The wall of grass to either side was too dense to see anything through it. As I walked there was a wet, meaty, smacking sound accompanied with a dry CLACK interspersed, and a smell began to grow with each step. When I was seven years old I’d wrecked my bike riding down a hill and landed near a pretty choice cut of road kill. I’d puked my guts up after taking a few deep breaths of the air around it. The smell from the grass was the same.
I know that you aren’t supposed to be able to smell or really taste in dreams…but I did. I stopped dead in my tracks as I noticed the cut grass beneath me was becoming wet and sticky, crimson colored patches that lead to a clearing. Vultures. Dozens…maybe a hundred…vultures, all in the clearing feasting on a pile of dismembered limbs. Hands, feet, legs, arms sometimes whole sometimes not. They were eating them and when I breathed the frosty, sickly air stung my lungs and cut it short and the vultures stopped, turning to stare at me with dull, beady…no…they were not just black. They were empty hollows where eyes should have been.
Following an instinct to get away as fast as possible, I edged around them to another path, I turned and as soon as I was sure I was clear of them, I ran as fast as I could down the next trail where I came to a hole in the ground. A deep fracture, what I imagined a fault line might look like I suppose. I couldn’t bring myself to look down into it, the nearer I got the closer my brain got to shutting down as terror tightened its grip on me. My chest was heaving…and then I heard it for the first time. A voice as smoky and acidic as I had ever heard, “Good morning” it said to me from the hole. I stood and watched, unable to move as a wiry haired, tall, black furred wolfhound climbed out of the hole. I could smell it as it inched closer, an acrid, oily smell that was probably coming from whatever it was that clung to its fur.
“good morning…” Its mouth moved in some horrible human facsimile, its canine mouth stretching obscenely to form the words. I noticed then that it too was missing eyes and was leaking black oil from the sockets. “The birds are out.” It said.
CCCAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! came from behind me, but this time it sounded less avian, it sounded like someone, a woman or a man maybe, screaming as loudly as they could through a megaphone right through my ear. I turned around to the path to the vultures… When I woke up, I was screaming. While at work that day I took the time to run a google search for old hospitals in the county, and came upon a picture that left me cold. They called it Rescue Gate, it had been a TB hospital before it was used to house dead and dying from the mines, located somewhere between Adamson and Coalgate in a ghost town called Coleville. I shot a text to Fran on my lunch break with the hospitals information who asked me to take them there on Saturday.