Near my old high school, there's this weird little area behind a cemetery. Ostensibly, decades and decades ago, it used to be a Christian retreat camp, designed as sort of a summer camp for all ages sort of thing. To get there, you drive down a steep hill until you arrive at the base of the retreat center. The houses are painted with bright pastel colors, and would suggest nothing ominous about the place as a whole. There is a small church in Monkeytown, with a big, brass bell about twenty feet above the ground--and that bell was the ultimate proof that you had visited.

Of course, with high schoolers being high schoolers, rumor began to spread after fewer and fewer people were seen going during the summers. For whatever reason, the doors to most of the buildings were boarded up and the camp appeared to be shut down. The most popular theory was that it wasn't that people stopped coming...it was that nobody ever left. Instead, they stayed...and started inbreeding. The name Monkeytown comes from the appearance of the inbred Monkey people. Someone always had a friend of a friend who had actually seen the Monkey people.

One of the rites of passage of our school is to go to Monkeytown with a group of people and ring the church bell. The first time I ever went, my best friend drove and forced me to go out and ring the bell. I threw rocks from the ground until one struck it just right--and it reverberated throughout the camp. I jumped back in the car and my best friend punched the gas. On our way out, we noticed two things--first, there is definitely someone living in the house closest to the entrance to Monkeytown. We could see the electric glow of the television set against the window as we raced out of there, determined to get away without being captured. The other thing we noticed is that there were a few lights on in some of the houses.

I'd guess that the real explanation was something mundane, like funding for the retreat dried up or something and people stopped going. I certainly never saw any of the monkey people during any of my trips. Of course, the entire thing is somewhat ridiculous...but when it's late at night and you're slowly driving past the boarded up windows and the community has the unsettling appearance of being most abandoned--but not entirely--you begin to wonder...