Spooky Places in Roswell, NM
Lately I have struggled to come up with a proper topic for The Pipeline. There have been some ideas brewing. I thought about doing some good old fashioned music writing on either the Grateful Dead or Professor Longhair, but music journalism destroyed music in the last ten years and the last thing I’d want to do is have some self-described “Steve Jobs of Trap” teenaged nerdo name drop Professor Longhair in conversation. I guess I probably had a bit of writers block too. Except I’m as much of a writer as these posts for The Pipeline are “articles” or “pieces”. Which is to say they most definitely are not articles or pieces. This is not some fancy smancy online publication you read on your iPad at Houndstooth Coffee. We at The Pipeline are the sons and daughters of plumbers, longshoremen, foundry workers, electricians, bricklayers, and ditch diggers. We are not here to make names for ourselves. We are here to tell you our stories. We give to you our tired and our poor as huddled masses to breathe free in a world submerged in unbreathable air and sound pollution. These are our final last moans of truth in a society that is almost finished. So, having said that, it is only proper that my next topic be about spooky places in my hometown of Roswell, NM. I realize this is spring, and the last thing on your callous mind is haunted houses and things that go bump in the night, but here at The Pipeline every day is Halloween. So without further ado:
Roswell, NM is a town in Southeastern New Mexico that people often laugh at. It is an aesthetically displeasing crime-ridden town in a ravaged old Wild West landscape that depends on oil, dairy, and alien tourism. To say this town is conservative is an understatement: it is pure Bible Belt country where every church is a faction of a faction of a faction of a non-denominational snake-pit that denounces vice while also enforcing it. Every single person who lives here owns a gun and will shoot it, either at you or at a plastic Mountain Dew bottle or at themselves. That smell in the air is either two things: dairy wind, that is the smell of cow shit blowing into your lungs, or the collective musk of pansexual Juggalo/ettes fresh from a three day methamphetamine binge at Hastings Entertainment. What was once a promising community built in a piece of land that had a couple of riches buried not too deep beneath it, it is now a place that isn’t struggling or flourishing. It just is. And there are ghosts all over town.
The spookiest place that immediately comes to mind in Roswell is the Pueblo Auditorium. Originally the former Roswell High School, this vaguely looking Art Deco building built near the center of town has seen neglect over the years. Although it would occasionally have some elementary school plays, it was basically left for prairie dust to collect. Kids would break in and graffiti the place. I think a homeless man lived somewhere in the top floor. Ultimately it became the center for the Roswell Independent School District, and it’s remained that way for about fifteen years. But what I’ve heard about this place is somewhere on the top floor there’s a room that is used as storage for unused musical instruments. The janitors who mopped the floor at night refused to go near it. Allegedly if you walked past it, you could hear a violin play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star at 1:40 AM. My mother worked here as a physical therapist several years ago. One morning she took me inside her office and allowed me to wander around. At about 7:30 in the morning, right after she turned off the security alarm, I went outside the auditorium and heard, to my horror, some crazy specter playing piano inside the auditorium!!!!! It haunts me to this day, and it makes absolutely no sense how someone could have gotten in there so early to play whatever horrifying piano jam this phantom was playing (keep in mind my mom turned off the security alarm just a few seconds before this). It clearly was the Phantom of Pueblo Auditorium.
Another presence in this town besides alien head street lights is the military. The New Mexico Military Institute (NMMI) has trained future military personnel since 1891. Having earned the distinction of being “The West Point of the West” by none other than former President George W. Bush, this ominous and disgusting playground of American fascism has seen its history. Ranging from violent hazing rituals that included broom sticks being shoved in places not worth mentioning to being a mecca of punishment for wealthy Mexican grandsons who sold ecstasy to Roswellian teens, there have been first hand accounts of amphibious creatures emerging from the NMMI swimming pool and a child’s sinister cackle heard exactly at 3:33 AM every morning near the clock tower. The story that always got to me was the account of the lieutenant who had to enforce curfew on his cadets one night. He went from room to room with a flashlight making sure his boys were asleep. When he came to one room in the barracks he saw two grown men in a uniform from 1904 standing at full attention right next to the boys who were sound asleep. The lieutenant was so traumatized at what he saw he refused to enforce curfew ever again. Despite NMMI having had such cadets as Owen Wilson, Sam Donaldson, and Conrad Hilton JR and SR., the place is a mystery to most Roswell citizens and I should probably write about the hazing rituals some time. Who knows, I could save some poor kids life.
West of town are the Pecan Orchards. Crazy stuff goes in those orchards. Typically it is used as a place for teens to take LSD or have unprotected sex, it is also home to a man who was born with goat horns who lives in the trees to protect it’s pecans from trespassing thieves. This Goat Man has been seen for decades. Like La Llorona, the weeping woman who you can hear screaming late at night in Cahoon Park, this Goat Man has a legacy. Pecan vendors can hear him bleating within the trees. He is loyal to the pecan men as the pecans are his only real form of sustenance (other than the flesh of trespassers of course). I myself went on a hunt for The Goat Man years ago. Having my flash light and Red Rider BB Gun handy, I went into the orchards ready for anything. Unfortunately for me, all I came across were hooves on the ground. However, his legacy remains and most recently a good buddy of mine swore he saw the Goat Man dangling in the trees while he drove on West Berrendo. The truth is out there, my friends.
I should also mention the place of business of my father’s. This place is called Fuller Plumbing Supply. It is a business on West Virginia that sells everything from toilets to air conditioning units chiefly to plumbers who are busy installing top of the line products at soon to be sushi restaurants out north of town. The building itself has a special history. It was built at the end of World War II, just right when the United States was developing a paranoid anxiety against the Soviet Union. As such, this building was used as a bomb shelter. It has two stories. It has an old freight elevator that you were required to use to get to the basement. It makes a real creepy sound that should be sampled. It kind of sounds like a Sunn O))) track. The place itself is special to me. For several years, my parents would turn it into a haunted house around my birthday (which coincided around Halloween). They would dress the place up and turn it into a full-on spookhouse with my father acting as the creepy caretaker and several members of my parents church acting as scarecrows, severed heads on plates, demons, ghosts, witches, Jason from Friday the 13th, etc. I also used it as a practice space for my high school funk-metal band Banjo Pussy Whistle. Though despite all of my memories there, there is one sinister memory the place does not want to share with you. That is the suicide of a former worker there by the name of Mack Oody. This man is said to linger around the place late at night, often frightening my dads employees by pulling weird pranks on them (turning out the lights, throwing down their brooms, patting them on their shoulders only for him to vanish into the dusty basement air). Although he is friendly to my dad (my dad has never met Mack), he is downright devious to my dad’s employees. His life in the afterlife lingers on…..
While I could go on and on about the weird and the wild things that happen in Roswell, I am also a busy man. I work hard for the union and have dues to pay. I encourage you to go to Roswell, not for the alien bric-a-brac alone, but for the spooky stuff that goes on there. It is a full on Monster Mash that never ends. Although you can laugh at the shittiness of the city, it laughs right back at you because you do not understand. And the truth, my only friends, is out there.
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