98
Wolf Woman
tI
Kathryn Engelmann
t
n the sleepy mountain community of Ridgway, Colorado, there are no secrets. There are roughly eight people per square mile, and most people have a half-hour commute minimum to get to work. In a town like Ridgway, where the days coast by like ships on glassy water, people stir the stillness with the salacious juices of rumors and whispers. “Did you hear that so-and-so got pregnant? She’s only sixteen–I wonder who the father is. I bet we won’t see her in church for a while.” “Oh, I hear the dad is some druggie from Montrose. Not surprising, really. Her poor parents never could keep her in check.” “What about that new family that just moved into Solar Ranch? What do you think of them? They’re from Chicago, if you can believe it! What on Earth are they doing out here?” “Witness Protection, I bet. They don’t have any family nearby.” And so on. There are, of course, rumors that are universally accepted to be true. For example, Log Hill is haunted. Nearly all of the residents in that area of town have experienced some kind of paranormal phenomena. It could be the loneliness of the place playing tricks on the mind. Log Hill is a heavily wooded mesa looming over Ridgway Valley. The only way into Log Hill from the town below is County Road 24, an ill-maintained, winding mountain road, many of its guardrails rusted to oblivion or taken out entirely by an unlucky driver. No one is entirely sure why Log Hill is haunted, but as you might imagine, the citizens of Ridgway have concocted a long and muddled history for the place, ranging from the tragic to the absurd to the horrifying. There are some who believe Log Hill Mesa was not a natural formation, but a burial mound constructed by the true citizens of the land thousands of years ago. Others believe there are monsters–Bigfoot-esque to shadow beast-y–that call amongst themselves at night, rustle garbage cans and open windows, and generally create a spooky nuisance for those who reside there. And there are some true stories of unfortunate accidental deaths that contribute to the lore of ghost hauntings: a boy, inexplicably flung from his car and run over; a young man who, while riding in the back of a pickup truck, fell to his death into the ravine along County Road 24 after the truck hit a pothole. It takes a special kind of no-nonsense person to live in Log Hill. There’s no time to worry about ghost stories when you’re trying to stay on the icy road right at the place where three people slid into the ravine the night before, or think twice
