We headed out before breakfast north toward our next stop. We stopped in Cusseta, a small village just outside of Fort Benning, GA. We found a little cafe across from the county courthouse. Now the place was not worth mentioning except the cook was telling the young woman (the only other employee) about his plan for the haunted house. He came out to ask our opinion about having live snakes, rats and other rodents under Plexiglas as the floor in one of the rooms for the Halloween Haunted house they sponsor every year. I told him I didn’t like the idea since so many people don’t like snakes.
He went on to tell us that the town has been sponsoring a haunted house for 15 years as a way to keep the kids in town out of trouble. A group of 15 townspeople keep topping themselves with room designs. Last year they stopped one scheme for safety reasons. They had a pickup truck with the headlights on rigged to come at you as if it crashed through the house. It would stop right in front of you. They had soldered rails, had chains and such to stop it. After two runs they stopped that lunacy. He proudly reported that one man “went to the bathroom on himself.”
He is thinking of having someone in a coffin under a floor covered with Plexiglass rise up as an unsuspecting person enters a room. He was more concerned about possible problems if girls were thinking he was looking up their mini-skirts rather than the scare factor.
When I asked if he was in charge of this event, he replied his brother was the ringleader. This haunted house was his “Christmas.’ It has been an expense repairing the rented houses for the event. The repairs are needed AFTER the event as people have ripped doors off hinges and jumped through windows in reaction to the action in the rooms in the house. Sounds like a little too intense for my taste.
It was an easy drive from there to the F.D. Roosevelt State Park located on the ridge of Pine Mountain of between Warm Springs and Pine Mountain.
We spent the afternoon in town, checking email with free wi-fi at the Purple Cow Cafe, exploring the antique stores on the Main street and then having supper at the Country Store (part of the Callaway Gardens complex).
The state park has filled up since our arrival so most of the sites are taken, lots of families with many bikes, chairs, lights around the awnings and even Halloween decorations.
