Photo by Andrew Ebrahim on Unsplash
The night watchman swore to it: an apparition pacing the battlements, its resemblance to the late king uncanny. Surely it couldn’t be true. When the young Danish prince went to investigate, his heart in his mouth, he took his most sensible friend, a no-nonsense scholar who didn’t believe in supernatural things. But lack of belief did not stop the phantom materialising before them. Could they trust their senses?
Oh day and night, but this is wondrous strange, marvelled Horatio.
There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Hamlet replied.
I cannot prove I was there - you’ll have to take my word for it. In this era of pics-or-it-didn’t-happen, I have no images to share with you. They weren’t polite requests, like no photographs, please. The consequences were dire: If you are caught taking photos, you will be thrown out.
What happens in the ABBA Arena, stays in the ABBA Arena.
What happens in the Mystery Hole, stays in the Mystery Hole.
I was drawn to the Mystery Hole because I’d never before seen an attraction described so prominently in its promotional literature as ‘UPSETTING.’ The winding uphill journey to Hawks Nest starts the upset off well, churning your guts and depositing you dizzy and nauseous in a car park whose jaw-droppingly scenic overlook barely merits a mention on the trifold rest-stop leaflet that probably led you here. The view is vertigo inducing, a perfect preliminary for us to see the laws of gravity defied. Wide-winged birds of prey soar in the vast open air of the gorge above the New River, which ironically beats the Nile by the thinnest of hairs to capture the crown for the oldest river on the planet.
Looking at the tumbledown cabin, festooned with motley decorations like some deranged carrier shell, you start to feel more attached to that $10 that was only moments ago burning a hole in your pocket. But there on the front porch is the young man in the trucker cap with the West Virginia accent, throwing his arms wide and welcoming you to the Mystery Hole. You can’t turn back now.
‘Many come time and time again just curious to know if they really did see what they thought they'd seen, or if their eyes were playing tricks on them,’ the website says. But this is our first go round, we tell Trucker Cap, explaining that we live in England, a statement that seems to have the impact and cache of announcing we’re visiting from Saturn. A colleague joins him, a teardrop tattoo dripping from his left eye. We try to look without looking. Is it hollow or filled? Is he mourning someone killed, or is he a murderer himself? It seems impolite to ask. Maybe, after some horrible night he’s trying to forget, after wasting his young years behind bars, giving tours of the Mystery Hole in the backwoods of one of the poorest states in the union is what turning his life around looks like in practice.
Trucker Hat disappears briefly into the cabin and emerges behind a half-door no more substantial than a child’s wooden puppet theatre from IKEA. Hitting two cow bells suspended above his head with either fist, he introduces himself as though for the first time, as though we’ve not just spent 10 minutes chatting about what British people call elevators. He does not say roll up, roll up like an early 20th century sideshow showman. Instead, he quizzes us about epilepsy, seizures, heart ailments, and mental instability. He verifies our cameras or phones are stashed away, for the mysteries of the Mystery Hole must never be revealed to the outside world. With great ceremony he takes our red ‘Admit One’ tickets, obtained moments earlier from a perforated roll behind the till. And then he ushers the six of us onto a sloping plywood ramp that descends through a narrow corridor into the musty depths of the Mystery Hole.
That sound you just heard, he said, referring to the two-by-four barrier falling back across the entrance, is the sound of no return.
Trucker Cap continually invites to question whether we can trust our eyes, implies that perhaps we’re experiencing the incipient signs of madness. At the end of a hallway whose walls are covered with fading and dog-eared psychedelic posters, a cracked mirror hangs. In the warped lower half of the mirror, our hips expand. As you can see, our guide intones, you’re already a little bit different than when you came in here.
We cross through a beaded curtain into a short black-lit passageway, neon bacteria-shaped squiggles fluorescing on the carpet, dollar-store rubber Halloween decorations stapled to the walls and oozing greenish light. Anything white on our persons starts to glow - T-shirts, teeth, socks. See how you’re starting to change, Trucker Cap says.
The bit of corridor before the main attraction is overseen by a row of department-store dummies, flaking paint accentuating their staring eyes with blue shadow and daubed-on eyelashes. They’re wearing mid-century dress and beauty-queen sashes. Now here’s three beautiful ladies, Trucker Cap says. Miss Mystery Hole, Miss Hawks Nest, and my personal favourite, Miss New River Gorge-eous! Now, they’ve been down here a good while. Funny thing is, they ain’t got no wrinkles, even after all that time! Must be the air down here in the Mystery Hole. As you can see, they ain’t got no wedding rings neither, so you never know.
We are about to enter the inner sanctum, the beating heart of the Mystery Hole, what people have come from every corner of these great United States to see. Can we handle it? It’s been known to send some folks so bewildered that they turn out of the car park and become hopelessly lost, brain-addled by what they’ve just witnessed.
Teardrop Tattoo is in the room as we enter, standing at a gravity-defying 45-degree angle and as unmoving as a Victorian corpse done up to look alive for the photo. He’s waiting for his moment. We’re having a hard time taking in much of what Trucker Cap is saying, because the world has gone askew. We’re trying and struggling to simply stand. We went off kilter the instant we stepped over the threshold, staggering like drunks and flailing at the walls for support, our bodies listing wildly to the left.
Teardrop Tattoo springs to life. He takes a ping-pong ball, a perfectly ordinary ping pong ball, and as we all know, a spherical object would roll down a course of tracks like this, wouldn’t it? But what’s this? It rolls upwards, landing in in a little cup. He swings balls at the ends of strings suspended from the ceiling, and they don’t act like they ought to act, do they? He ladles water from a bucket on the ground. Perfectly ordinary water, he says. As we all know, water flows DOWNstream. But I got this here log from out back and hollowed it out, and look what happens. The water seems to run upwards, ploshing over the upper edge of the log and plunging into the bucket below.
For his finale, Teardrop Tattoo places a straight-back chair onto the wall with no apparent supports. Climbing spider-like up the wall onto it, he performs a comfy mid-wall sit, swinging his legs without a care in the world.
The entirety of the experience has taken a quarter of an hour. Still reeling and crashing into one another, we exit into the normal gravity of the gift shop, with its packaged plastic toys from faraway China and figurines whittled from local coal. Racks of tie-dye T-shifts proclaim I Survived The Mystery Hole in wobbly, optical-illusion lettering.
Donald Wilson founded the Mystery Hole in 1973, the Wikipedia entry says. Maybe the tattered psychedelic posters tacked up in the corridors were once on his bedroom walls. Maybe he was a kid in the 70s, fancied a bit of LSD, wanted to blast open the doors of perception. Maybe he just wanted to be transported to some different place where the usual rules didn’t apply.
The structure he built doesn’t look like he went down to the local lumber and hardware stores to buy supplies for his new roadside business. No, that place can only have been cobbled together from junk yards and yard sales, from stuff lying around in Donald’s basement and garage, Halloween decorations from the Dollar Tree down in Fayetteville, maybe some timber and roofing from a neighbour’s building project, whether the neighbour was actually done with the project or not. I imagine him commandeering his friends to help level the land in a way that would create the illusion, digging down and building up to construct the artfully tilted room. Maybe he bribed them with weed and cases of beer, or a cut of the proceeds that the Mystery Hole would eventually enjoy.
Donald died in the 1990s, and the attraction lay fallow for years. But then a family stepped in and restored it to the kitschy glory of its 1970s origins, as the Atlas Obscura describes. The Mystery Hole might not hold a candle to some of today’s ‘sophisticated technological wonders,’ the entry says. But still, ‘the site is a monument to the simple entertainments of a bygone America that have never really lost their charm.’
That statement at least cannot be defied, no more than the laws of gravity can be, at the Mystery Hole or anywhere else.
The train disgorges hundreds of people. The ones who look most overwrought with anticipatory excitement are fully tricked out in bell bottoms, sparkly jackets, berets. I know the venue will be full, because tickets were tricky to obtain, the prices eye-watering. The posters have been plastered everywhere in London, writ large on the sides of red buses and Tube-station walls: Must be seen to be believed.
The tickets are not paper, of course - the folks at the entrance scan them from my phone’s Apple Wallet. The lobby looks like the executive-class departure lounge at a Swedish airport, with phalanxes of Prosecco glasses ready to be filled covering every surface of the central bar. The merch shop does not need to work to hawk its wares; the queues to buy tie-dyed shirts, ‘Dancing Queen’ caps, and rainbow-accented satin bomber jackets are 30 deep.
Everything is pristine - the building in which we stand has been only recently constructed to house the spectacle. There are no posters or tat pinned to the walls as we walk down the corridor to the dance-floor, only colourful glowing neon bars overhead to light our path. We have awhile to wait. We look ahead at the huge animated Swedish forest before us, its gently drifting snow, the occasional scampering pine marten. We look around at people taking selfies, their eyes shining out with unhinged excitement from glitter-covered faces. We look up and see that even this view is beautiful, covered in round, smooth reflective discs hanging suspended at various levels from the ceiling.
The tannoy booms with an instruction utterly antithetical to everything about the modern world - we must put away our phones. Anyone caught taking photos or videos, anyone who threatens the integrity of the performance by diluting its mystery, will be summarily ejected from ABBA Arena.
Four silhouettes emerge from the bottom of the stage, their sequinned clothing glinting in the dark, and the crowd holds its collective breath. As the lights come up and they are revealed, the crowd exhales and gasps. Agnetha, Anni-Frid, Björn and Benny stand before us, for all the world as though they are present in the flesh, as young and dewy-faced as they were in 1973. No 19th-century Pepper’s Ghost illusions here, no Princess Leia help me Obi-Wan projections, no mere holograms. Whatever they are, whoever they are, they are there. It is an extraordinarily sophisticated and technological wonder. A frisson runs through the audience, a mixture of shock and awe, excitement and joy. Oh day and night, but this is wondrous strange.
What we go on to experience for the next 90 minutes is one of the most expensive musical extravaganzas ever staged, created at the cost of $175 million with the aid of George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic company. All the contextual cues that you are experiencing something real are there - the sweaty, dancing bodies, everyone’s gaze fixed on the stage, their hands waving, synchronised, to the chorus - it’s indisputably a concert experience, just the slickest, most well-produced and impeccably orchestrated concert you’ve ever seen. Ceiling-high close-ups right and left of the stage give you a more detailed view of what’s happening before you. The human emotion is in their faces. Their eyes are alive. When they open their mouths to belt out the high notes, you can practically see the fillings in their teeth, the taste buds on their tongues.
My eyes flicker back and forth as my brain tries to understand the methods behind this magic. As I’m pulled into my mind, into how is this possible cogitations, I notice I’m blocked from full immersion in the music, not fully there. The power of the illusion is undeniable, but it’s simultaneously removed another kind of power - the ability such moments often have to transport and transfigure me, to catch me up and sweep me away into an emotional place beyond time and space and technology. My daughter interrupts my reverie to ask if the apparently live band at the left of the stage is really there. Completely untethered from my ability to believe my senses, I am forced to admit that I cannot say for certain.
The four wave goodbye as they file offstage, followed by the polite pause that always precedes an encore because after all, you shouldn’t assume the audience wants you back. But they do, of course they do, they are stamping their feet for the return of the band. But it isn’t the ABBA of the 1970s that returns, but instead their 2022 selves. They are looking well for their ages and are clad in flowing white instead of colourful spangles. Their lined faces beam, their eyes twinkle, as they take their final bow. Having travelled back in time for 90 minutes, they have aged 40 years in 40 seconds.
Only then am I overcome with emotion, struck in the centre of my chest with an existential sucker punch, a visceral explosion. Tears well up and spill down my cheeks. I don’t have to ask myself what they’re there for, because I feel it in my bones. The tears are there for how fast time goes, and how inevitable its relentless passage is. For how much I have yet to do on Earth, and how many I have lost and have yet to lose to Heaven. For how many dreams I will fulfil in what time I’ve got, and how many dreams I’ll leave behind and regret. For the knowledge that one day, not so long from now, I will blink with astonishment at my wrinkled reflection in the mirror, wondering if my eyes deceive me.
And it won’t seem real.
Remarkable writing on a perfect set of complimentary stories. Quite the experiences you’ve had and so well related!