TheShadowlands.net is a wonderful web 1.0 archive of the supernatural
Good morning, afternoon, or whenever you read this.
When I was in college, I became obsessed with ghost hunting. I was pretty sure the paranormal didn't exist, but, much like Agent Mulder, I want to believe.
I would seek out stories of the supernatural and the macabre. Human violence really didn't interest me - I wanted things that went bump in the night. One night, alone in my college apartment, I was looking for information about black dogs - an omen in Scottish folklore. This brought me to a gloriously and unapologetically Web 1.0 website called TheShadowlands.net.
A Bestiary of Cryptozoology
The website has been operating since 1994, just a short six years younger than I am, and possibly older than my wife depending on the month. What I found was a treasure trove of real people sharing their stories. There was no concern about clicks, content generation, or capitalizing off of sensational stories. It was just ordinary people, either emailed by the admin or gathered from other paranormal web rings.
Oh yeah, things back then were fucking rad and inefficient as hell. I had a Pokemon website that was part of a web ring for a hot minute in middle school.
But they also had contributing writers who would share essays about folklore, cryptids, and conspiracies. Its admins, Dave Juliano and Tina Carlson, have lovingly maintained the spooky corner of the old internet that is The Shadowlands over all these years. Updates to the site have been extremely thin in recent eras, but they have an active Facebook presence. There was a while where the site was basically abandoned, but it seems they are still actively performing necromancy on the site.
The initial place I explored was their extensive collection of cryptids. Vampires (using the old school picture of Strahd Von Zarovich from Ravenloft for the thumbnail), Roanoke, to famous ghosts and hauntings, I must have read every page they had (it was how I took a break from reading my textbook - I know, I'm a weirdo). It was everything young ConchCat wanted. But, then I found my favorite part.
A Grimoire of Testimonies
After I ran out of pages, I stumbled upon the best part of the site: the Haunted Places page. In addition to their extensive record of ghostly encounters (all submitted by visitors of the site), they also collected and categorized stories of haunted places by country and, in the USA, by state, and then by city.
I naturally looked up Huntsville first, as that was where I was living at the time. To my surprise, there were four haunted locations within easy driving distance, including the infamous Bowden Road.
In the rural parts of Huntsville, Bowden Road has a reputation for infamy. It is unofficially called Demon Road, because it is arguably one of the most haunted roads in Texas according to the people who believe in it. It's got a reputation on campus, too, with The Houstonian (Sam Houston State University's student paper) running stories on it in October and driving down the road being added to the Bearkat Bucket List. They covered Bowden Road just last year, so it's big local folklore.
There was also an entry for the Sam Houston Memorial Museum, literally right across from campus. Supposedly you can see things get knocked off Sam Houston's desk in his law office. My friend and I actually did use this little lead to go on our first ever ghost adventure, but I'm saving that story for October.
A Time Capsule
I'm not the voracious consumer of this website that I was in my early 20s, but I still get nostalgic for this place every Halloween season.
It's the perfect balance of weird and sincere. There's so much inauthenticity on the internet these days, and connection has gotten increasingly difficult in this new, dystopian cyberpunk world. It's a breath of fresh air to remember that, for a while, weirdos like us could extend our hands over the internet and brush fingers with a stranger who shared our weirdness.
It's something that, while harder to find on the expansive and overblown modern World Wide Web, is still here. And it feels like there's a swell of people also seeking to authentically reach out toward others again. Slow web, small web, whatever you want to call it, one thing is clear: much like TheShadowlands.net, this part of the internet didn't die forever - it's just in need of some necromancy.
Stay weird, friends.