Mystery of the Disappearing Barn

Disappearing Barn

This post ought to begin with “it was a dark and stormy night” Because it was. I  was driving through the rain, on a stretch of back road, on my way home from work. It was close to midnight and, as I approached the intersection of Locust  and rte 641, I saw a tractor-trailer on the road just ahead of me.

I kept my eyes on his tail lights, until I saw the truck pull across the road and back into a space next to an old abandoned barn and chicken coop. As I approached the curve myself, the driver tuned his lights off. When I passed the barn, the trailer was just a barely-distinguishable shape behind the ruin.

Not wanting to stop and confront a tractor trailer in the dark, I drove on by. But I had an overwhelming feeling of suddenly being trust into the plot of a Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys Mystery.Lots of questions occurred to me.

1. Why would anyone need to park a tractor trailer at that site?
2. If the driver wanted to sleep, there were lots of other, more accessible free truck stops and off-the-road spaces to rest;
3. Why would he wait until midnight to show up?
4. Why did he turn his lights off when he saw me coming?
5. What was so urgent that he had to go there in the rain?

I was off from work for a few days, but when I passed by again, the was a backhoe parked about 25 feet behind the barn. Later that week, I noticed that someone had been excavating behind the barn, and there was a large  pile of crumbling wooden planks in what appeared to be a scrap heap. I assume someone had been dissembling the barn itself.

The past few weeks there have been daylight escapades with  UHaul trucks, and later, an SUV, all parked with their tags out of sight of passing drivers. The upper structures of the barn are gone, and the concrete foundation has been dug up and moved to a space outside the structure. The chicken coup has collapsed on one side, but that foundation is still in place. it’s all verycurious…

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