As I stood in the middle of the empty street, the sky became increasingly grey and the wind had much more of a chill than expected. It had been about twenty years since I was last at Carey Place—or as we called it back then, Scarey Place—but the eerily quiet neighborhood was still a somber place out of time in Oklahoma City.
Back in the late 90s, I got my first reporting gig writing for Christopher Sharpe’s Okay Magazine. With the motto of “The Oklahoma Cultural Survival Guide,” it was a well-meaning cross between a free alt-weekly and a well-to-do ‘zine; it seemingly lasted about as long too. But, within those scant couple of issues, we covered so much of Oklahoma City’s outré culture that it gave us a loyal fanbase that followed many of us and our works for years on end.
It was for our first “Horror-ific Halloween Issue” that I bravely volunteered to write a screed about Carey Place, the much-mythologized Gatewood sub-neighborhood that was the supposed home to numerous murders and unholy cold-cases, with apparently plenty of specters and phantasms roaming about, all looking for some form of vengeance.
I was a mostly brave kid, about 19 or 20, and had generally no fear about walking up randomly and cold-knocking on doors, brazenly asking residents about the supernatural spooks that apparently ran amok in their houses and streets. Even though a few told me to rightfully take a hike, most were surprisingly accommodating and happily eager to tell me about what they heard and especially what they’ve seen while living there.