| A Trio of Strange Tales
The Fidget Widgets In 1989 folklorist Patricia Meley began interviewing teenagers in Columbia, Pennsylvania, about "legend trips" – an activity which consists of driving to spots where crazy people, ghosts, or monsters are supposed to lurk, just for something to do in a small rural community (one informant dismissed Columbia with "This town sucks"). An older informant had to put his two cents in:
"A thirty-five-year-old Harrisburg man told me that, as a teenager, he and his friends walked to a city graveyard to see 'Fidget Widgets,' creatures that he described as 'outer spacemen.' Teenagers at the Harrisburg Middle School report going to the same cemetery to see the Fidget Widgets, but they claim the scary creatures are video game characters." [p.24] Various other things reported in the Columbia area by the local teens included floating blue lights, "half-cat, half-fox" animals that love dashing in front of cars; houses that move or vanish entirely; winds that come out of nowhere, capable of pushing a car off the road; and various ghosts and homicidal hermits. "A group of teenagers referred to 'the night we saw the gas cans.' but when pressed for details, they could not tell me why the gas cans frightened them." [p. 8] Meley, Patricia M. "Adolescent Legend Trips as Teenage Cultural Response," Mid-America Folklore (Vol. 18, No. 1, Spring 1990), pp. 1-26. The Booger Dog The Ozark folklorist Vance Randolph writes: “One of my best friends told me seriously that as a little boy in McDonald county, Missouri , he once met a spotted hound that was bigger than a cow, and made tracks in the snow nearly two feet across. At the time he was astounded that a dog should attain such a size, but it never entered his head that there was anything supernatural about the animal.” When the informant grew older and wiser, he realized this giant canine could not be an ordinary animal. He dubbed it the Booger Dog. Randolph assumed that his friend made up the story just for him (the famous folklorist), but he learned from the man's relatives and neighbors that he'd been telling of his encounter for over twenty years. Randolph collected tales of similar colossal dogs in the Ozarks, some of which were headless. Randolph, Vance. Ozark Magic and Folklore (New York: Dover, 1964 [1947]), pp. 224-225. The Wazooey Man "The Wazooey Man" is a bizarre entity that haunts an arroyo off Red Creek Road , several miles southwest of Pueblo , Colorado . Jim Brandon writes:
“Around May 15, 1973, two boys who were plinking with an air pistol in the arroyo one evening gradually became aware, in the fading light, of two huge red eyes. They looked like bicycle reflectors, and with a jolt of youthful ebullience, one of the boys took a shot at them. The next thing they knew, both youths had been picked up and dumped unceremoniously into a nearby ravine by some unseen force.” As if this weren’t enough punishment, a wooden fencepost uprooted itself from the earth and hit one of them on the head (presumably the one who shot “it”). The boys ran for their truck but lost the keys somewhere along the way. They started back along Red Creek Road , trying to hitch a ride. Any time they tried to head west -- the direction of the canyon -- something like a "mobile haystack" with big red eyes would appear and frighten them away. The red eyes like bicycle reflectors put one in mind of Mothman. The "mobile haystack" is a little stranger, but perhaps, if West Virginia 's famous bogey, with its peepers set into its shoulder-area, were to spread its batlike wings, the silhouette might look, from straight on, like a haystack with red eyes. At any rate, this is all we’re told of the Wazooey Man. Brandon, Jim. Weird America (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978), pp. 49-50. | 
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