Countdown to Hallowe'en 2017: Death in the Park

Image Source: Dan Bell/Twitter.

Today's post follows urban explorer Dan Bell again (see my earlier posts on him here, here and here), as he visited Gwynns Falls - Leakin Park, which spans 1,216 acres (492 hectares) in his native city of Baltimore, Maryland, USA. Leakin Park is famous as a murderers' dumping ground; it is estimated that some 80 people have been murdered there or their bodies have been abandoned there, and the number is probably higher.  The area is so heavily forested that it was the film location for The Blair Witch Project sequel, Book of Shadows (2000).

Baltimore’s Leakin Park : The Scariest Place in America / A Creepy Documentary Featurette (15 September 2017). Video Source: Youtube.

A blog which catalogues murders in Baltimore has a special page dedicated to Leakin Park: "Since 1946 79 Bodies have been found in Leakin Park. Below is a map of where the 68 of those bodies were found." Image Source: Cham's Page.

Dan Bell has decided to make a documentary about Leakin Park and in August 2017, he began visiting the park every night at 2:30 in the morning alone, or sometimes with one of his friends, with a live feed running directly to Youtube. Several hundred people logged on each night to follow him in real time as he made the videos below. The place definitely has the air of a horror movie. His takeaway quote as he trembled in the dark in the first video was: "I should've stayed in school." You can watch more on his 'director's cut' channel, Film It, here.

LIVE : Creepy Leakin Park Murder Spot (24 August 2017). Video Source: Youtube.

Viewers commented on the video above: "There's ... someone at 10:44. It can be seen as a silhouette crossing the road behind the car's tail lights."; "look around 13.07. That cant be another branch"; "Dan @ 17:00 into the video someone walks across the street!!! you w[ere] not alone sir!" Some were unimpressed. In a major urban area, it's not surprising that there were people around, although it is a strange place to be wandering in the middle of the night. At one moment in these videos, Bell entered a neighbourhood on the edge of the park, which was startling and eerie because there was no boundary between parkland and the streets.

LIVE : More Leakin Park Body Dump Sites (24 August 2017). Video Source: Youtube.

As was evident in my previous post on neighbourhoods on the edge of parks, urban parklands are unsettling places, because they give city dwellers a glimpse of their landscape in an undeveloped state. They are reminders that the city is not in control. Walking into a park is like traveling back in time. One can imagine a park as a time capsule, as with the New York park, Time Landscape, in Greenwich Village.

Greenbelts and parklands are also places of urban release. They have a liminal quality; there is a sense that they are fateful places where destiny may go one way or the other. This was a theme in Martin Amis's novel, London Fields (1989), which shares a name with a London park in Hackney. Amis symbolically recalled the time when London was still agricultural. In his vision, the park became a place where a sleeping, unrecognized history could come back to life and timelines, contingencies, catalysts and outcomes overlapped and were unstable. Through free will, they could come together in an algorithm of destiny, about which I have blogged here.

LIVE : Abandoned Road in L[ea]kin Park (26 August 2017). Video Source: Youtube.

See all my posts on Horror.
See all my posts on the Paranormal.
Posts on the Occult are here.
Click here for my posts on Ghosts.

Check out other blogs observing the Countdown to Hallowe'en!
Image Source: 4Chan.