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June 9, 2009 —
Usually when people talk about affordable housing being a "nightmare," they don't mean it literally.
But The Town of Vail housing project planned for Arosa Drive in West Vail certainly has some ghoulish qualities. The project, which will be discussed at the next Town Council meeting June 16, is planned for a plot of land with a strange and storied history.
Lonely and deserted for nine long years, the Town-owned lot is slated for construction of two family-friendly housing units. They will be the first domiciles on the lot since 2000.
Before that, an A-frame house squatted at the base of the hill, overlooking I-70 with a malignant, hooded eye.
I remember that old house clearly, not just because of its 200-yard proximity to my childhood home, but also because we all knew – everyone in West Vail knew – the house was haunted.
The legend began with screeching tires and a loud crash somewhere in the night, sometime long ago. Yet another winter driver had confused the North Frontage road with the highway on-ramp, but this time the mistake had been fatal. Just as the driver accelerated into high gear he slammed on the brakes, but not in time to avoid hurtling over the precipice and down into the drainage below.
Emergency medical personnel tried to resuscitate the man, but he perished in the driveway of that old, creaking A-frame … where many say his spirit made a phantasmal home.
We didn’t think much of the event in the years that followed, but then stories began to circulate. Lights flickering on and off, doors slamming, dogs howling and barking at the walls, and always the sensation that there was someone – something – there under the apogee of that A-frame, watching.
The home passed from one owner to the next, never one staying long, until the Town of Vail bought it in 1995 and used it for employee housing, renting it room by room.
Trouble seemed to plague the place. I once met a young couple in the old Jackalope (now the Sandbar), who looked stressed, harried, and guarded their luggage at their feet. They were homeless for an evening, by choice, because they had been living in the A-frame on Arosa but simply couldn’t stay another night. Haunting, they said, was their sole reason for abandoning their room. They stayed with friends until they could find a more peaceful place to live.
Peace was hard to come by at the A-frame ever since it was built in 1971. My dad was one of Vail’s early home builders, and as he completed our house up the street he helped out on the A-frame from time to time. A good ol’ boy named Frank Higgens ran the show, and to save a dime he decided to buy and build one of those “kit” homes, a kind of mail order home which falls somewhere between “double-wide” and “tenement housing” on the home-quality hierarchy.
Bob Armour, a former Vail mayor, has lived across the street from the lot for 20 years with his wife Mary Lou. He remembers a nice young couple who worked for the town, stayed in the house for a while before they were driven out. Their dogs, it seems, were constantly barking at thin air, appearing to chase specters round the house.
Armour believes it was mice, not ghosts, that were chased by dogs through that house. Doors slamming without warning, lights flickering on and off – it seems the symptoms of a haunted house are one and the same with symptoms of a slapboard, clapboard, murky old A-frame that creaked and splintered with even the slightest mountain breeze.
Still, the legend lives on. At a recent Town Council meeting, when someone asked why the original place was torn down, Vail housing coordinator Nina Timm roused old suspicions when she replied that it was torn down because it was haunted.
Lamentably, she told me she was only kidding around. “We didn’t tear it down to rid the neighborhood of supernatural forces.”
But how can we know for sure? I remember the signs, I remember the stories. And if the place wasn’t haunted, then why the long, nine-year wait for reconstruction? Why do all of us who live, or once lived, in that close-knit, congenial community simply know, without question, that something strange was afoot at the old house on 2657 Arosa Dr?
And why does Armour still keep the wizened skull of a Big Horn Sheep on the corner of his property, it’s cavernous eyes unceasingly fixed upon the empty vacant lot across the street?
“To ward off the evil spirits,” he told me over the phone … and I could barely, just barely, hear the sound of Bob and Mary Lou getting a good chuckle out of it all in the background.
So when new strangers move into our little hamlet on Arosa Drive in West Vail, we’ll have to quote them the old verse from Hamlet, act 1, scene 5:
And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
- Hamlet Act 1, scene 5
And then we’ll wait, and watch, and see what rich legends arise in the next incarnation of that mysterious place at 2657 Arosa.
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3 Comments on "Town of Vail may face supernatural forces in West Vail"
Nevena — June 11, 2009
I come from Bulgaria and I really fell in love with your story. I would very much like to hear more details about the actual hauntings.
Jed — June 11, 2009
I totally remember that house. I don't know if it was haunted, but this is a glorious tale of old Vail. Nice!
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Photo by Dan Davis trekkerphoto.com
2009 Teva Mountain Games results
June 7, 2009 —
It’s been another all-around successful year at the Teva Mountain Games in Vail. I know a lot of you out there are hankering to check your results – so to make it easy I’m posting the link below:
http://tevamountaingames.com/results.htm.
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Photo by Tom Boyd
Don't be fooled by Teva Mountain Games weather forecast
June 5, 2009 —
The Vail weather forecast for June 5-7, during this weekend’s Teva Mountain Games, is about as dismal as it could be - cloudy skies and 58 degrees according to weather underground.
But you can’t fit mountain weather into a little box, and you can’t sum up the temperature with two numbers.
The forecast isn’t wrong, but it’s certainly not accurate. Yes – we’ll have rain. But it will likely last for an hour or less, it will feel good for our Games’ overheated competitors, and by evening we’ll be grilling out and chilling out to all the music, events, and parties planned for the Games this weekend.
As evidence of what a "rainy" day is like in Vail, I'm sporting a brand-new sunburn, earned during a sun-drenched bike ride yesterday afternoon. And although it's a bit overcast as I write this (on the afternoon of June 5), this morning was clear and blue.
I’m sure we’ll have our normal afternoon showers, but the rest of the Games’ weather will be plenty warm – and I’m personally guaranteeing sunshine in the a.m., when many of the events take place.
OK, enough of me playing weatherman (isn’t that Reid’s job?) – I’m out the door and heading to the village to see what’s cooking at the Games’ today.
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I m texting ths blog while drivin thru a roundabout
June 2, 2009 —
“Hey r u reading? I m doing 50 through Avon rndabouts right now bfor guv ritter makes txting illegal this December.
“Key is to keep Iphone b low dashboard so cops don’t c me.
“And reli heavy on autocorrecct.
“Have 2 go … just drove thru median and smshed into BC gatehouse.”
While the above message is (quasi) fictional, it’s also not too far a cry from what I’ve seen from friends, relatives, and in one case a Mexican cab driver who insisted on texting while rocking 80 kph from San Cristobal to Tuxtla while I was down there for a wedding last spring.
Moments before plunging into the rio, I asked the driver to alta the car and por favor text from the side of the road before we ended up muerto all over his windshield.
He acquiesced (despite my rotten Spanish) and I returned safely to the United States, only to find the texting-while-driving syndrome had grown even worse domestically.
So how do we handle problems like this in Coloradey? Do we take responsibility for our actions and all personally vow to stop texting while driving?
No!
Do we all speak up and make texting while driving socially unacceptable?
No!
Do we pass a law that is almost impossible to enforce and will likely be ignored, dismissed, and averted by the populace at large?
BINGO!
Gov. Ritter signed an almost meaningless bill into law Monday, June 1, which will make it a CRIME to send a text message while driving in your car, officially adding to the incredibly long list of laws that we are all destined to break at some point during our lives, if not often.
Busted, and we will pay a $50 fine … which I imagine will increase as soon as an activist group gets together and demands more stringent government action (I’m guessing a group called MATT – Mothers Against Teen Texting. Their motto: “If it can save ONE life!” will guide them when they storm the capital sometime soon).
Like most laws, this will only drive the action in question underground. Or, in this case, under the dashboard, where those addicted to communicating with thumb taps will be forced to lower their mobile device lapward, typing with one hand, staring downward and upward in hurried glances.
What’s interesting about this law is not its inevitable ineffectiveness, nor its lack of ability to do anything concrete in the way of lowering the rate of traffic accidents, but rather that once again our society is counting on the fatherly hand of the law to shepherd us through the dangerous daily act of existing.
Apparently we need cops – not parents, friends, relatives, or other drivers – to go out there and do the impossible dirty work of forcing people to stop making ill-informed decisions.
How are police supposed to accomplish this? Will they have “text-radar” guns that will capture all texters on I-70? Will they x-ray our cars as we speed past the employee housing on our way to our gated communities? Will they cross-reference our text phone records with geo-tagged microchips implanted in every citizen's neck?
All we have gained is yet another unenforceable rule which does almost nothing for the populace at large.
Except, possibly, raise the fines collected by police each year as they unravel fender benders in this roundabout and beyond.
Verdict?
Lame.
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