The Witchcraft Connection: Metaphysical Investigations into the Paranormal: Part Two: Investigation: Primrose Road – Adams St. Cemetery, South Bend, Indiana
True to the legend, cell phones appeared to be useless on Primrose Road. Was there some supernatural force at work suppressing the signal as the legend suggested? Considering Primrose’s relatively remote location and the thick canopy of trees surrounding the entire area, this seemed highly unlikely. Earthly forces were undoubtedly to blame for the lack of any signal. As we continued our slow drive along Primrose’s gravel surface, I asked my teammates to open themselves to sensing any unusual feelings or sensations and to report anything they felt to the rest of the team. About a half a mile down the road, Amber and I simultaneously experienced an uneasy feeling and felt a profound sense of sadness that seemed to be emanating from an area of woods along the roadside. I had reset the van’s trip meter at the point where Primrose changed from pavement to gravel, and I made note of the mileage so that we could pinpoint this exact location on our return trip later in the evening. Sensing nothing else unusual, I decided to test another part of the legend of Primrose Road; vehicular trouble.
The legend states that if you drive along Primrose at exactly twenty miles an hour your tires will be slashed, and that if you drive exactly thirty miles an hour your vehicle will simply die. Even though it was still daylight, and for whatever reason ghostly activity is more commonly experienced after nightfall, my curiosity got the better of me. I brought the van up to exactly twenty miles an hour and maintained that speed for approximately half a mile. Nothing happened. This didn’t surprise me, as I really didn’t suspect that anything would. That part of the legend seemed so farfetched to me that the mere thought of it put a cynical grin on my face. I applied more pressure to the gas pedal and brought the van up to exactly thirty miles an hour. The surface of Primrose is anything but smooth, and even though the increase in speed made for quite a bumpy ride, I somehow managed to keep the van at an even thirty miles an hour. Before long I could see a stop sign in the distance with nothing but woods beyond it. We were quickly running out of supposedly haunted road. I was just about to take my foot off the gas pedal and apply the brake when something happened that I had never before experienced with my van; it shimmied, coughed, and acted as though it were going to stop running altogether. Although the vans engine never completely died, I had to put the transmission in neutral and coax the gas pedal to keep it going. The van’s forward momentum was enough to allow us to reach the stop sign, and as we did, the van started to idle normally once again. There were a few moments of uncomfortable silence in the van at that point. It was as if we were all waiting for something really bizarre to happen. Nothing did. Sampsun asked if I had ever had trouble with the van dying on me before. My truthful answer was no. I explained that the van had never given me a lick of trouble before now, and that the shimmy and cough were just plain weird. Having neither a natural or supernatural explanation for the van’s strange behavior, I turned right onto Adams Street and we went in search of the cemetery.
Adams Street Cemetery, also known as Portage Prairie Cemetery, turned out to only be a short drive from Primrose Road. Most of the written accounts by previous ghosthunters that have researched Adams Street Cemetery only described strange lights and ghostly mists, so we really didn’t expect to see much of anything during daylight hours. Upon first sight, Adams Street Cemetery appeared to be very old. There were reportedly graves in the cemetery that dated back to the seventeen hundreds, and judging from the dilapidated condition of the cemeteries iron gate and a large number of the tombstones, this seemed likely. The cemetery is located on the outskirts of several mid-sized neighborhoods, and I was immediately suspicious that the purported strange lights and ghostly mists were of earthly origin. There was no way to validate my suspicions until after nightfall however, so I asked my teammates to disperse themselves throughout the graveyard and see if they could pick up on anything unusual. After about fifteen minutes of looking around and inspecting tombstones, no one had anything to report. Adams Street Cemetery in fact seemed oddly devoid of otherworldly feelings or sensations. Amber did pick up on a singe tombstone that seemed to emanate a sensation of sadness very similar to the one we felt on Primrose Road, but even it felt weak in comparison. The oldest gave marker we could find with an intelligible inscription was dated 1856. There were tombstones that appeared to be even older, but time and weathering had taken their toll on the stone surfaces. Reports of graves in the cemetery dating in the seventeen hundreds could be either proved or disproved. It was getting late in the afternoon at that point, so we decided to head back to the ops base to prepare for our late night incursions into Primrose Road and Adams Street Cemetery. Unbeknownst to the members of team WISP, one of these two locations would become an entirely different world after nightfall: A world literally crawling with ghosts and paranormal activity.
