Once a popular attraction at Bloomington, Indiana’s Lake Monroe, the 480-foot Zoom Floom, featuring a 40-foot tunnel near the middle of the descent, was shut down in the early-to-mid 1980s.
During its heyday, hundreds of kids, including John Cougar Mellencamp, would line up for the slick, concrete slide. They laid down on a mat and slid down feet or head first. When they got to the bottom, it was up the stairs and back in line. Some fell off the mat and cut themselves on the concrete.
It was common for blood to be on the slide.
That didn’t matter to local Hoosier kids in the late ’70s, early ’80s. It didn’t matter to their parents, either, until the new and little understood HIV/AIDS epidemic got rolling. At least, that’s the story.
Today, there is an abandoned home at the end of the driveway that leads to the Zoom Floom. The house is so torn up it seemed amazing to Trent and I that it hadn’t fallen into the ravine behind it yet. The floors were rotted and gone in some places, as was the roof and the foundation. Insulation was on what was left of the floor on the inside. We poked our heads in, but lacked the fortitude to go much further. Maybe we were just smart this time.
Credit: Cleveland Dietz II
The Zoom Floom is eery. The Indiana Daily Student called it a ghost slide.
At the front, there’s what I believe to be the old ticket kiosk and probably a concession stand. Leftover, rotted AstroTurf covers what was the floor. Empty Dos Equis bottles and a broken cooler were hidden on the inside. Around ten feet in front of the kiosk, the slide started.
Trent and I walked down the slide and I marveled at a lot of the graffiti. Cartoonish dinosaurs and animals, words, words, words. Some of it seemed more creative than average Bloomington graffiti, but for the most part it was more of the same.
Credit: Trent Deckard
We stopped to take some pictures here and there until we got to the shallow pool at the bottom that stopped the folks on the slide. We were slightly disappointed to find that the Zoom Floom didn’t go into Lake Monroe, but we agreed that made little sense (at the time, but I think it would’ve made more sense to go into the lake financially due to elaborate plumbing required by the slide in its actual state). At the bottom, we could see some of the PVC piping burst from the side of the hill and the mutilated stairway that used to see so much use.
Trent went back up to make the video for YouTube and I went exploring, but there was little to look at nearby besides the ghost slide.
When I made the mistake of buying a $900 1983 Datsun/Nissan pick-up that had clearly been sitting out in the elements, unmoved, for several years, I learned about the location of an abandoned water sanitation station in Bloomington, Indiana. This was the first place that someone else wasn’t able to direct Trent and myself to, so we had to do some legwork. We’d had this idea that we could find abandoned buildings and sites of interest around the area using Google Maps’ satellite function, but it wasn’t until this building that we proved ourselves right. I found it right before we set out for it. It was next to Griffy Dam at the mouth of Griffy Creek.
Griffy Dam was built in 1924 as the water source for Bloomington and established Lake Griffy. It was the second large-scale water source for the city after Leonard Springs Dam. Today, both are nature parks, but Griffy Lake remains a backup water supply. It was outfitted with pumps prior to the year 2000 for the Y2K scare and its aftermath. Now, because it has taken a lot of damage from people and animals over the years, an outside engineering firm must inspect the dam every two years. On the ground, in front of the dam, there is a dog park. The dog park is an open field with a questionable assertion from Bloomington Parks and Recreation that it does not nor will it ever contain copperhead snakes. Across the road from that is the water sanitation station.
A green fence surrounded the building. We didn’t think we’d be able to get a closer look, but as we walked around the outside, we found a tree had fallen on a section of the fence and knocked it down. Another section of fence was torn apart from previous explorers. Since we were seasoned veterans by this point, we took advantage of the entry points and went in. There were no No Trespassing signs this time around, so we were unsure whether or not we should worry that some places made us entirely visible to passing cars. I wasn’t too concerned about it, but Trent was. Every time a car passed by, we ducked or hid somewhere. We stayed low, mostly behind the building.
Almost every window was blown out or bashed in. Barrels of somesuch were empty, files were strewn about everywhere in one room. Forty year old water purity charts and elevation charts. We saw an old abandoned crane and looked into the building to find many, many empty, rusty tanks. Having no understanding of how any of it worked, it all looked complex, scary, confusing. All we did was gawk at stuff and then we left.
The whole time we were there, I was thinking about Griffy Creek and the few times we attempted fishing it over the summer. Our fishing lines turned brown in the water populated by large carp, large gar, and very little else. We knew about the creek entry because of a water pumping facility we’d found while biking around town. The pump is abandoned and one unlocked and full of interesting electronic and mechanical equipment that probably hasn’t been touched in decades. The doors were unlocked when we discovered it. We poked our heads in and had a look at the General Electric interior. Again, not understanding anything that we were looking at, it all seemed very complex. We took some pictures and left.
Credit: Trent Deckard
The pump, the dam, the water sanitation station—they’re all relics from when Lake Griffy was the main water source for the city of Bloomington (1924-1954). They helped the city grow beyond what it was capable of with the leaky failure that was Leonard Springs. In much the same way, various trips to Lake Griffy and areas linked to it helped to grow me and Trent’s friendship. We can look back at our harrowing rowboat trip through the summer vegetation and laugh, the failed fishing in polluted Griffy Lake and sigh, and the shared experience of our first really long bicycling trip from the southwest side of Bloomington to Old State Road 37′s crossing of Griffy Creek where we discovered the old water pump and our love for urban exploration.
Between 2,295 and 2,307 feet long, standing an incredible 157 feet off the ground, and weighing in at 2,895 tons, Bridge X75-6 is the longest rail trestle in the United States, third longest in the world. These are all things I didn’t know when Trent Deckard, Sarah W., and I visited in late November 2011. I didn’t even know where we were at back then.
Trent knew the place because his dad used to go there. Bridge X75-6 (Aliases: Greene County Viaduct, Tulip Viaduct, Tulip Trestle) is one of those local landmarks that everyone and their brother seems to have gone to at some point in their lives, everyone since 1905, that is. Back in 1905, people made up picnics to watch strong Italian immigrants build the railroad for $0.30 per hour. It was funded, in secret, by Illinois Central Railroad and built for the purpose of transporting coal mined in Greene County to Chicago, Illinois and other large Midwestern cities. Until 1948, passengers got the phenomenal and terrifying experience of crossing the trestle.
We, on the other hand, got the phenomenal and terrifying experience of meeting a family there. The father, the driver, smelled like alcohol when he rolled up in his beat up, rusted out, used-to-be-blue Nissan pick-up truck and the wife and kid smelled like the spray paint they were using to tag the one of the trestle’s 18 support towers. Anecdotally, the spray paint from various taggers over the years has helped to sustain the health of viaduct’s supports by being thick enough to protect it from rain and snow so maybe they were doing something nice.
Credit: Trent Deckard
Soon after we arrived, we heard a train far off in the distance. Our original plan was to go up top and survey the area from the track, but with the train in the distance, we decided to hang out at the bottom and climb support beams like they were built as an oversized adult jungle gym. Sarah and I climbed to out to the center of one beam, maybe eight feet above the soft, wet mud of the ground. I worried for her safety because she was wearing Uggz. Fashionable boots aren’t often functional boots.
We heard the train whistle blow again. Trent and Sarah talked with the drunk father and I took pictures of the monolithic train trestle from various angles. The trestle, as well as spanning the gap between two relatively large hills, also crosses Richland Creek. Being the water geek that I am, I had to check it out. After a few moments, Trent and Sarah began calling my name. The train was coming.
As can be seen in the video, the Indiana Power and Light company was moving coal elsewhere at an incredible speed. To be honest, I wouldn’t have had the chutzpah to drive a train across a bridge fifteen stories high. I’m glad someone does. Chicago residents are glad someone does. I hope the conductor is reminded every now and then. After the train passed, we decided it was time to go up top. We knew about a path to the top, but we didn’t know where it was so we chose the more direct route. We went up the run-off bed on the side of the steep hill the trestle begins on. I ran, Sarah and Trent walked. All of us stopped occasionally to take a picture. As has happened many times in the past, I gave in to the temptation of taking a picture of the No Trespassing sign posted at the bottom of the hill.
Credit: Cleveland Dietz II
At the top, there were two large barbed wire fences, both sporting large metal No Trespassing signs posted by CSX. The barbed wire fences didn’t go very far, so I went around them. It was eery being alone behind the fence, I kept thinking of some train barreling down the tracks and running me over or some little trolley officer coming by to arrest and trespassers, but neither happened. I walked to the beginning of the railroad bridge and surveyed the land. Sarah and Trent finally made it up, Sarah choosing to go the more difficult route and getting herself stuck because her fashionable boots lacked traction. Trent returning to collect her so that we could all stand in awe of the sight of the fields and Richland Creek and the beautiful train trestle.
The boy from the white trash family made his way up. He wore oversized galoshes style boots, maybe even waders, and ran with reckless abandon. He was far ahead of his drunken dad and his irresponsible mom. We decided to leave before we saw something we didn’t want to see. The kid ran onto the railroad tracks as we exited and got on the real path up to the railroad (a nice and comfortable, slight downward slope). We stopped frequently to gawk at the white trash family, waiting for that inevitable moment that someone lost their shit and fell off the bridge. A quarter of the way out, the drunken dad had the wife and boy stop for a picture. They were halfway across when we got back in the car with full bladders and concern for the safety of that white trash family.
Maybe they made it alright. Maybe.
The continued popularity of the bridge with the local people, railroad lovers, and bridge lovers illustrates both its incredible form and design, as well as its ability to not just span the gap between hills, but the gap that separates generations.
There’s, at least, one well-known gravity hill in 24 of the United States and in 25 more countries. They’re an optical illusion created by the landscape immediately surrounding a slight uphill grade in the road or the land giving your eye the impression that the slope is actually downward.
In this video, Trent Deckard and I are on Gravity Hill in Mooresville, Indiana. It’s the only one of its kind in the Hoosier state. I give the optical illusion away immediately when I film the car from the wrong direction and its painfully clear that we’re moving downhill. Once I get pointed in the right direction, though, you can see the optical illusion that makes Gravity Hill and places like it (in)famous.
Trent and I drove down Indiana 37 South headed for the backwoods of Lawrence County. At work, he’d heard about the Big Tunnel and he wanted to check it out. “It’s haunted,” he said, “but I’m not really interested in that.” He went on to tell me that most people went at night. We went during the day because I had a couch coming to my apartment between 3 & 5 p.m. Neither of us said it, but I suspect we both felt good about going during the day. No dark, no orbs or headless watchmen or whatever.
We took 37 down to Bedford and turned onto Indiana 450 East through town. Then to Ft. Ritner/Devil’s Backbone Rd. where we drove on the spinal chord of a hill whose rib cage landed in the White River on the right and in a farm on the left—50, 60 feet down on a steep grade. The name was appropriate. We missed the turn onto Tunnelton Rd. the first time we passed it so we had to turn around and go back. We drove into Tunnelton, passed some derelict abandoned trailers and a building of nondescript purpose, also abandoned, and passed some typical rural Indiana households and… then there was a boat in the road. We couldn’t go any further. We had to turn around. Trent suggested an alternate route to the tunnel. I reminded him that my gas tank was seriously low and he said he figured I had enough, so we tried. I thought chances were good everyone that lived out there had a gas tank on hand, anyway, or I, at least, told myself that. Turned out the road he was looking at was a dirt track that led straight into the swollen river. We had no choice, we drove back to the boat.
Credit: Cleveland Dietz II
The boat was parked in the archway of a railroad bridge. We were supposed to drive through it onto River Rd., but River Rd. was a whole lot of river and not much road. I parked the car next to a beat up horse trailer and we got on the rails and walked. It was 12:30 and we felt rushed. Trent thought we wouldn’t have time. I agreed with him, but we pressed on, passed the myriad jumping spiders and bleached box turtle shells, occasionally catching a peek of the road we were supposed to be driving to the tunnel.
We walked the former Ohio & Mississippi Railroad that stretched from Cincinnati to St. Louis for three miles. When we’d just about given up on seeing the tunnel, we saw in the distance the flood plain houses on their stilts, some in the river then, and the gaping mouth of the Big Tunnel. There used to be a Little Tunnel, but it was “daylighted” in 1899, 42 years after the initial construction of the two tunnels, which combined to be just over half a mile long on a curve. Dangerous business for the men charged with looking for limestone rocks fallen from the ceiling. One might get hit by a train if he wasn’t careful. One of the urban legends suggests that’s what happened to one of the watchmen. He’s been looking for fall limestone on the track ever since.
In 1908, the railroad was renovated. The cut limestone walls were lined with concrete and bricks. Cubby holes in the walls from the original cut were left to protect anyone who might be in the tunnel when the train was coming. If a train came, without the cubby, a person would get sucked into the locomotive’s violent path. That’s what happened to that old man and, in a separate incident, that little girl. That’s what the legends say. In fact, if a train is coming, the story goes, you can still see one of them, or if you’re especially unlucky, both of them.
Credit: Cleveland Dietz II
Walking into the tunnel, I was struck by how nice rural people are. They voluntarily painted the walls. Sure it was a bit narcissistic. “Ronald was here,” “Suck my dick,” “2007,” etc., but it was more interested than the red brick wall alone. I also thought about the man who found the two murderous bandits hiding a body in the tunnel. He got his head bashed in and left with the other. Left in the tunnel for all time, long after the Baltimore & Ohio Southwestern Railroad company took over the railroad in 1900, long after CSX Transportation took it over some time later, and, I suspect, long after the trains stop coming. That was the story anyway.
I wondered what the afterlife might be like for these ghosts when I found one of the cubby holes was also a Gate to Hell. Given its connection, it may not have been a good place to be if a train came by. Next to it, I don’t remember how close, there was a caricature of a male-male-female threesome on the wall. That little sinful corner of the tunnel made me wonder if it had ever been flooded. I wondered if, during the Great Flood of 2008, trains still passed through all those spectral bodies taking up residence in the tunnel. If the conductor felt a pang in his heart as the train passed the Gate to Hell. Mostly, I wondered how often trains come through the tunnel. I’d heard only once or twice a week, I suspected less, but the tunnel wasn’t welcoming and didn’t make me feel more comfortable when we encountered water leaking from the ceiling and pouring out of the walls at the other end of it. A drain pipe was pouring water onto the limestone next to the tunnel entrance. I didn’t look, but I thought there was a creek or stream on top of the tunnel. I didn’t know about the graveyard.
Legend was, there was a graveyard on top of the tunnel and, during construction, some of the caskets fell into it. This happened before, maybe after, a man on the construction crew died. He was decapitated in an accident, cursed to work the rails forever, moving caskets and hiding in the cubby holes with the old man, the little girl, the watchman, and the man chasing bandits when the train passed.
When Trent Deckard and I first met, he was really into a game called geocaching where people hide containers such as ammo boxes, film canisters, pill boxes, etc. with paper and, possibly, a pencil and provide the GPS coordinates for others to find them and sign them later. The game sounds kind of dumb in writing, but it’s rewarding in that it forces you to look at your surroundings in a different way and, many times, takes you places that have always been nearby, but well hidden or gone unnoticed. Such was the case for Trent when he found Leonard Springs Nature Park because of the game. Such was the case for me when he took me there to go after a couple caches he hadn’t the chance to get yet.
The city of Bloomington, Indiana bought the property on which Leonard Springs Nature Park is located between 1914 and 1917 to build a reservoir large enough to serve the growing community Operation of the Leonard Springs Reservoir began in 1915. In 1921, Bloomington had a population of 12,000 people that needed water. The location was undesirable. Mitchell limestone would not hold water well enough to provide a stable water supply and in 1921, the large marsh that had developed in front of the Leonard Springs Dam was proof. A pump was used to pump lost water back into the reservoir from the other side. It was woefully inefficient. Attempts to correct the problem were unsuccessful.
According to the April 1921 edition of Municipal and County Engineering, there were numerous opportunities for better reservoir sites no further than the one the city had built to the east and south of Bloomington. Nearby creeks had cut deep valleys over Knobstone formations that simply didn’t lose water. The natural topography made for ideal locations to hold a large supply of water. To that point, the reservoir constructed to supply Indiana University with water was staggeringly successful. So successful, that the city of Bloomington stopped using the Leonard Springs Dam by 1943.
Credit: Cleveland Dietz II
Shortly after the city abandoned Leonard Springs Dam in 1943, it breached during a period of high water. The land was not used again until 1998 when Bloomington Parks and Recreation began work on the park. The park was dedicated in 1999 and remains a hidden gem on the south side of the city.
One of the geocaches Trent and I eventually collected at the park was my favorite then and is still my favorite today. It was called “If I Only Had a Brain” and poked fun at the debacle that was the Leonard Springs Dam, its poor conception and engineering. Large pieces of concrete and rebar still litter the hillside from where the dam was and collapsed. The cache was in an ammo box amongst the rubble on the other side of the creek from the park. Trent and I had to make a decision. Stay dry and go home empty-handed or man up and cross the creek.
The first time, we went home empty-handed and talked about buying waders. Trent is notoriously cheap, however, and when we came back some time later, I managed to convince him to cross the water even though it was somewhat cold outside. We crossed through the cold water and got on the other side. Back then, we were pretty new to the outdoors game so we felt like Bear Grylls when we made it across that ankle-deep creek. The celebration was short, though, as there was the geocache to acquire. We were running short on daylight, so we needed to find it quickly. The GPS was sort of messed up and not really guiding us in any particular direction, so we just had to use our heads and look around. Right before evening, we found it. I made Trent go in and get it due to my fear of snakes and spiders. He raced in and out as quickly as he could. We opened the box.
The song “If I Only Had a Brain” began playing. I immediately thought, half-seriously, that it might be a bomb. I’ve been polluted by too many bad action movies. The other half of me won out and we signed off on the sheet and looked through the swag in the ammo box and congratulated ourselves on being real men and getting shit done like they did in the old days. We were inexperienced and kind of dumb back then.
Our friendship began, in earnest, at Leonard Springs Nature Park, much the same way the City of Bloomington hoped that the town could become a booming metropolis with the aid of the reservoir. The reservoir of geocaching brought us together, but as the glue that bound us together it, like the dam, didn’t last that long. Like Bloomington, we’ve found other things to keep us going since then and we’ve managed to keep growing over the years.
Two things inspired Trent and myself to take up urban exploration. The first thing was the movie Urban Explorers: Into the Darkness. The second was a few YouTube videos that Bloomington locals collectively known as Bloomington Fading (who are now doing quite a bit of archival work with the Monroe County Historical Society) posted. That’s how we found out about the Amoco Standard Distribution Center–an abandoned oil distributor that was hiding in plain sight, the same as the Rogers Building complex–right across from the ‘ghetto’ Kroger on 2nd Street.
This was the third place that we visited. We were still full of fear and trepidation and excitement and innocence. There was little for us to compare this experience to so this relatively small area held a lot of wonder for us. The things we knew about it–that it was once an Amoco hub, that the homeless used it for shelter in the winter, that there was apparently a fire that did serious damage to part of the building, that there weren’t any No Trespassing signs–did not put us at ease as we walked through the open gate. What was immediately apparent was the tracks in the snow. We were afraid we were going to run into the crazy homeless.
-Credit: Cleveland Dietz II
It didn’t take much exploration before we found evidence of them, but bless our scared little hearts we didn’t run into anyone. That is, of course, unless you count the gargoyle Trent found amongst the refuse.
We were tentative in everything we did as the fear of the police overcame our fear of the crazy homeless.
We didn’t check out the insides of the main part of the building, but we did look inside the side of the building that took the brunt of the fire damage. Months later, while walking the freshly minted B-Line Trail, we saw some dumb college kid standing on top of that cinder and ash roof showboating to his friends. We just looked at each other and rolled our eyes. We knew what that building looked like from the inside. We knew what kind of idiot that college kid was.
