On Buffalo Ridge
by Haven B. Greene
It's that time of year again: leaves are falling all around, kids are gearing up for another Halloween (and, this year, they've already got their masks), and you're fed up with the house you've had for the past century or so. You have a certain amount of equity built up, and you're seriously looking to move within the next six months—if not sooner. You want to stay in Virginia but fear the costs of a move would be out of sight. What to do?
We know scores of neighborhoods throughout Northern Virginia that would fit your budget. One of the areas we'd like to recommend is in northwestern Fairfax County, not far from the Oak Hill Battlefield (A.K.A., Chantilly). Don't worry, we're not going to bore you with Civil War stories or tales of “ghosts” or other hauntings. (We're looking at real estate, not unreal estate, places where you can find the home of your dreams for a lot less than you might think).
Still, with Halloween just around the bend, we'd like to pass on a cautionary tale or two about Chantilly real estate that we just can't keep to ourselves. (We believe in full disclosure to all our clients.) And with this part of Fairfax County in mind, we feel you ought to know what you might be getting into.
The following is a composite of several stories that actually happened in the area, involving Battlefield High School students from 2000 to 2010. All character names are fictitious, though the locale – and the events depicted – actually occurred during the early 2000s. One of the students involved was a Senior at Battlefield High whom we'll call “Bill,” starting quarterback on the Varsity football team and owner of an old, third-hand Volkswagen Bug. It was in this vehicle that Bill and three friends took a tour of historic Chantilly, focusing on one place in particular: Buffalo Ridge Road.
* * *
Bill Miller was an exceptionally gifted athlete, student and driver – as good a driver as any other 18-year-old, he thought. His only problem was the car he had to drive: Volkswagen Beetle. His parents, God love 'em, had given it to him for his 16th birthday, and he'd been stuck in it ever since. Although it had never ditched him yet, there was always a first time.
This night, the old Bug chugged up the hill along Buffalo Ridge Road, wheezing and sputtering as it reached the spiny summit. The four Battlefield High students couldn't help but scoff at the local scenery. It looked nothing like the rest of Fairfax County. (But, then, it was a place of legend).
Along both sides of the road stood spindly, withered trees, like sentinels guarding the street. No other vegetation grew here, no other signs of life, save the four in the car, their faces only dimly lit by the muted moonlight filtering through the trees. Eventually, they stopped and pulled over to the side of the road. There, they climbed out of the Bug, laughing, as had so many others before them, their voices boisterous with beer and false bravado.
“Well, I'm certainly terrified,” said one of them, an attractive blonde named Carol. She'd been Bill's girlfriend since they were Juniors. “How about the rest of you?”
“Oh, shocked,” said the other girl, whose name was Dusty. She, like her boyfriend Mike and the first pair, was 18 years old, brash, young and unafraid of anything in this life or the next. Except, perhaps, for boredom.
Which was why Bill Miller, Carol Schneider and their friends Mike Walker and Dusty Cameron, had taken the long, winding drive through the hills of northwestern Fairfax County to this isolated place, this eerie, surreal hilltop known as Buffalo Ridge. It was a time-honored rendezvous for Battlefield High students, not only because of its secluded location, miles from nowhere, but also because of the legend. Or legends, plural.
There were several stories – some many decades old – concerning the history of the bony protuberance hidden in the woods along Buffalo Ridge. And the crater there.
And the stones.
Huge, cyclopean blocks lay scattered about the hilltop for hundreds of yards around. Some of them, weighing in excess of several tons each, were actually as far as half a mile from the vast, gaping maw of the crater. The center of the blast.
Which was the most popular theory: that the site had once been a crematorium, and that it had exploded, or something, back in the 1940s. Others believed it to be the remains of funeral home that a prominent undertaker had begun building there in the 1920s, only to abandon for some unknown reason. Whatever the explanation, there was no accounting for the pronounced pall of desolation that hung over the place, the lack of green vegetation, and the overwhelming sense that this was the scene of some ancient catastrophe, or tragic accident.
In fact, local farmers referred to it in guarded whispers as “Hell's Hill,” or the “Blasted Heath.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know all about the 'local farmers,'” Bill said, as they stepped through the gnarled, twisted trees. “And, believe me, (burrrrp!) they constitute the only danger around here.” He was a cheap date, and usually became fairly squiffed after only a few beers.
“What do you mean?” asked Mike from behind him.
“They're (hrrrup!) they're crazy, thash what I mean. They'd jush as shoon shoot you as look atchyoo.”
“What?” the girls asked in unison.
“At's right. Lunatics. All of 'em. They carry guns, y'know.”
“Oh, bull,” said Carol, who didn't approve of drunks, unless she was one of them. “The only real danger here is that one of us might fall into that . . . that crater.”
For, now, as they emerged from the wretched tangle of trees, they could see the gaping cavity coming into view ahead of them.
“Wow, would you look at the size of that thing?” Mike marveled. “It's hyooge.”As they stepped closer to the crater, passing man-sized chunks of block and stone, they gradually became aware of certain . . . sounds . . . emanating from the pit.
“Dogs, prob'ly,” said Bill, before taking another swig of his beer. “Or rats.”
“Or wildcats,” Mike offered. “I've heard there are lynxes and bobcats out here.”
“Oh, Mike, I'm frightened,” Dusty whimpered as she pressed close to him. “Nobody told me there'd be wild animals.”
“What the hell'ja expect, gerbils?” came Bill's drunken voice from out of the darkness. Night had fallen like a ten-ton shroud upon the bleak, infertile hilltop. If not for the harvest moon peering at them through the trees, they would have been blind. But there it hung, like a bloated, orange spider over their heads.
“Let's get out of here,” Carol suggested. “Farmers are one thing, but wildcats . . .”
“Oh, knock it off, you two,” Bill grumbled. “Damn cats are more afraid of us than you are of them, believe me.”
“Bill, I'm serious,” Carol persisted. “I think we should—”
“Ssh!” Bill quieted her, stopping dead in his tracks. And the other three stopped with him. “Listen. You hear that?”
“What?” someone croaked.
“That sound. That . . . scrabbling sound.”
“Oh Bill . . .”
“Shut up!”
“Mike . . .”
“Sssshhh!”
And now all was silent in the inky blackness, illumined only weakly by the moon. The bloated, spider's-bodied moon. All four of them by now had reached the rim of the crater; and, peering down into the yawning void, they could just barely make out the tremendous stones, the broken rebar, the
scrabbling, scrambling thing.
It skittered up the rocks with sickening speed, on all its legs, with idiot, mindless need. Bill's scream of horror died in his gushing throat as the . . . thing . . . skewered him with bristling, pointed limbs, then shoveled him into its maw. Scrabbling forward slightly, it grabbed Mike and most of Dusty before Carol finally turned to run–
–screaming, into the spindly trees, like bristles on the back of some gigantic beast. Three steps, four, then five before the spidery thing shot forth another limb, impaling her like a piece of meat, a tasty treat for nameless things that live . . .
. . . on Buffalo Ridge.
--30--
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