In the 1800s Thomas ALVA Edison ran a mining operation in the woods of Sparta Mountain. They were eventually abandoned leaving pits in the earth along Edison road, which is the single road That goes directly over The Mountain connecting the side I live on the to valley.
I drove past them every day on the way to school but stopped to walk around there for the first time in November. I made my way up Edison road and first encountered the monument that I’d seen every day and decided to pull over there. I found a cul-de-sac with a few paths that split off. Maneuvering around the unpaved pull-off with my dad’s car, I was thinking about how my best friend told me a story once about pulling over near the side of the road here with a group of friends where they all decided to kiss so that they could experience a sort of sacred level of platonic love and affection rather than their first kisses be with relative strangers. Past the monument was a trail completely hidden from the road. Walking a few yards down brought me to a very round pit of still water.
I walked past the pit in the ground and found the caverns that ran along several of the informal trails. I kept getting stuck at the initial pit though. I tried to drag my attention from the leaves and to the ground but I eventually was pulled back towards the fluorescent still water. Perhaps it’s something about the way the still water accumulates iron and mined minerals that makes it nearly impossible to move beyond. I felt sluggish and weary and suddenly very paranoid moving any deeper into the woods.
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What follows here is a collection of photos from the site, which are stills from a fifteen minute slideshow proving a fib of paranormal phenomena connected to the excavated pits.
Luca Budofsky 