There’s a place near my hometown of Scranton, PA whose name I know but, having had no occasion to go there, I don’t know much about.
On the way to my brother Jonathan’s wedding last month, it struck me as we drove through it at night. I can’t say exactly what it was — the zigzag of its few-block downtown? The two little bars lit with the energy of a Friday night in a small town? Something else entirely unseen but acutely felt?
When I mention to my youngest brother, Thomas, that I want to go check it out, he asks if I’ve heard of The Mystery of Olyphant.
I have not.
About 10 years ago, he tells me, he stood in line at the local Borders Books and a man by the name of John Peruka approached and proceeded to regale him with theories that are splayed across several websites dedicated to the topic.
Both polite and genuinely interested in people, Thomas listened to the impassioned man, who left enough of an impression to stay with him for a decade, only to be unearthed by my own piqued interest in the town.
The sites about The Mystery of Olyphant are stuffed with buzzwords you’d expect to accompany most modern theories with their own websites: pyramids, Free Masons, aliens… it would be easy to either dismiss them out of hand or rabbit hole on a topic like this, where one question generally leads to several others.
Instead of reading about it, I opt to take a short 15-minute drive and conduct my own experiential, first-hand research.
When I arrive, around 5 pm on a Saturday, the liveliness I could have sworn emanated from these same streets had vanished. The town greets me with a train station that looks like a colorized postcard from the early 1900s. The two-story building on the adjacent corner looks as old or even older, with a pair of wicker rocking chairs on its balcony and chipping paint showing its age.
I park on the main street, across from two old men sitting in lawn chairs smoking cigarettes outside a darkened antiques store, a table packed with junk laid out in front of them.
“Is the store open?” I ask cheerily.
They nod, adding, “‘Ss just dark in there.”
I snake my way behind the table and open the door holding back the dusty attic smell and the type of items that always seem to accompany that smell. I’m five steps in before my body rejects it. I can’t breathe — or at least I have the visceral reaction that I shouldn’t breathe.
I back out and around the table set up outside. It’s adorned with boxes of sparkling broaches and tarnished chains holding onto bedazzled pendants, crusty with the oxidation of time. There is no order or organization, though a few pairs of clip-on earrings are clasped together. A locket-sized black and white photo of a young boy hangs loose amidst the tangled pile of jewels whose stories alone I’d pay to know.
After some digging, I find a thick gold bangle with two onyx ovals facing each other like an abstract ouroboros. I walk to the end of the table to get the attention of the older-looking man who seems to be in charge. He’s in the middle of a sentence when I step in front of him holding up the bracelet. He does a double take, as if mentally sizing me up as a serious customer before breaking from the story he’s telling.
“What’s the price tag say?”
A tiny tag dangles from a delicate string with writing faded to near-invisible ink. I think I can make out a 5? I shrug my shoulders.
“I can’t tell.”
“Alright, how ‘bout $5 then,” he says. I hand him a $20 and ask if he has change.
“Oh sure, hang on a second.”
As he pulls out a box with some cash in it from under the table and sifts through it, I ask, “Have you heard of the Mystery of Olyphant?”
He lays down two fives and counts out some ones under his breath before looking up at me, shaking his head no and smiling, all his teeth gathered up front.
“I have,” his friend speaks up almost begrudgingly.
The old man turns to him, dismayed. “You have? What’s that?”
“Oh, that nut job Peruka told me all about it the one time. Somethin’ with the pyramids and stuff.” He shrugs.
“Oh really? Huh. I hadn’t heard that,” the old man grins, wide as a jack-o-lantern. “But makes sense — as soon as you cross the border into this town, it’s like the Twilight Zone.”
“How so?” I ask. Now we’re getting somewhere.
The friend pipes up again. “This whole town is full of nut jobs. Everyone’s crazy here — everyone.”
The men exchange head nods and grunt in agreement. Then they recite a rap sheet of fun facts about the town: There’s more churches per capita here than anywhere in America — there’s literally a bar or a church on every corner, for a population of only about 5k (up from 3k when they all would have been built). They mention an aquifer of sorts hidden underneath the bank and the Dollar General next to it a block away that no one knows who built it or why.
They tell me the friend owns the old building next to the train station that I noticed coming in, and that it was the first building built in this town.
“When was that,” I ask.
The friend takes a puff of his cigarette and squints, as if trying to remember, or maybe forget.
“When Lincoln was in office,” he answers as he blows out.
“Do you think it’s haunted,” I press, hopeful for more substance than the guarded one-word answers I’m squeezing out of them with my line of questioning.
The friend pauses, careful with his words, careful not to say anything to implicate himself with the “town nut jobs.”
“I did at one time,” he admits.
“I could tell you some stories,” he shakes his head, almost in disbelief at himself, “but you’d never believe me.”
I thank the men for their time and as I pull away, they hang on, rapid firing questions: Where am I from? Why am I here? What do I do for work in Hawai’i, and can they come live in my basement, haha?
I show them the same courtesy they showed me, answering just enough to satisfy a lie detector test but not giving too much away. I thank them again and they yell after me with the banter of old men from small towns. I smile politely and wave them away as if I regret to part but must.
By the time I’m at the end of the block, I realize I’m in a hurry to nowhere. Every building on the rest of the block is either closed or abandoned. A few stores have signs hanging in the window with a phone number to call if you want to see something inside. A dead albino pigeon lays in the corner of a doorway amidst detritus from the street.
I can see what they mean about The Twilight Zone. It feels like I walked onto the set of an episode about one of those sleepy little 1950s towns where something’s not quite right. As if time got frozen and the people that would normally be walking the lively main street in trench coats and duster jackets with white gloves and handbags were replaced with downtrodden counterparts salty that time had moved on.
I stop into a bar to find some more locals to talk to. It’s nearly empty with a football game on a giant screen. I scan the room and see one party of youngish kids huddled around a table together deep in conversation and decide to walk on. Up the street, just past the antiques shop, is another bar that has the look of a gothic basement. It’s dark and wooden with dramatic lighting, as if Halloween is celebrated here year-round. This is the spot.
It takes a few minutes for someone to greet me, sliding a menu across the bar. I half-apologize as I order a simple soda water with bitters, please. The bartender walks away and I sit there reading up on the mystery on my phone and working up the courage to ask what I came here to know.
Another bartender approaches, side-eyeing me as he washes a few glasses on the other side of the bar. I seem to have the “not one of us” vibe that draws suspicion from the locals. I smile and say hi, and he says, “Saw ya walkin’ down the street earlier when I was driving by. You from around here?”
“I’m from Scranton originally,” I say, and then mistakenly add: “But this is my first time in Olyphant.”
“You’re from Scranton and ya never been to Olyphant?” he scoffs.
“No… I mean, I never had any reason…” I’ve got to tread lightly here. I’ve noticed that people’s pride about where they live tends to surpasses whatever misery they may feel about living there.
“Well I been to Scranton.” I shrug, at a loss for what I can say in response to break the tension.
“Did you grow up here?”
“Yeah, I grew up here. On the other side of town.”
“Oh, what was that like?”
“I liked it.”
He proceeds to recite the same stats about the churches and bars that the old men outside told me. A church on every corner… How does everyone around here know the stats enough to recite them verbatim, but not have any curiosity as to why? I try digging.
“Yeah, I heard that… why do you think that is?” He stiffens and looks caught off-guard, like I’m asking him questions he didn’t study for and wasn’t expecting to see on the test. He recovers quickly though and spits out an answer stated as fact that could be another memorized sound byte or full false self-confidence.
“Lots of immigrants came from all over, all different nationalities and religions, so they all built their churches.” According to the lore, they’re in the configuration of the Orion constellation, which has some connection with Ancient Egypt and thus the pyramids.
I nod as if what he said answers my question, but all it does is introduce more, like: why doesn’t every town that had an influx of immigrants have the same over-index of churches? And why were immigrants coming here, of all places. And why on every corner? And how, in a small rural town with a population of 3,000, did they have the money to build these elaborate shrines?
“What do you know about the mystery of Olyphant?” I blurt out, cutting to the chase. I detect a millisecond of a pause in the dishwashing as it registers. He takes his hands out of the hot water and dries them on a towel hanging from his back pocket as looks up, half-grinning.
“We don’t really think about that too much around here.”
I realize I’ve exhausted his hospitality and swallow my questions with the last few sips of my drink. I can’t tell if it’s the weather turning or the proximity to Halloween or whether it’s the train station, or the you’re-not-from-around-here-type comments that’s giving me the Twilight Zone vibes. But I have nothing to refute the feeling, and only the word of two old men sitting on a sidewalk amidst abandoned buildings they think are haunted to confirm it.
Out of town, I get into the wrong lane and am forced to go straight instead of turning left in the direction home. I drive up a hill and make the first left I can, running parallel to the street I want to be on.
That’s when I see it: a large pyramid-shaped pile of shale surrounded by a ring of trees, embedded in an otherwise nondescript northeastern Pennsylvanian neighborhood.
I drive toward it, cutting in and up, past two churches and their adjoining schools, following it as it hides behind rooftops and re-emerges in plain sight. I circle it, driving along the side of it and then on the road above it.
I park at the top and get out of the car. It’s peaceful up here. A row of tightly packed modest homes lines the opposite side of the street, overlooking the pyramid. A dog barks. Someone drives up the hill and turns in the opposite direction. It seems like a perfectly normal street in Anywhere, USA.
I don’t know what I expected to find here. Maybe the same thing all those immigrants who built an overabundance of temples and churches came looking for. Or the people who grew up here and decided to stay. Or the guy who assigned meaning to an otherwise unremarkable 1950s town with a main street and spent a good portion of his life circulating a rumor about how special this place is.
And who’s to say it’s not?
Because it seems to me that if you look hard enough for pyramids in unlikely places, you will find them; and if you think something’s important enough to build, you will find a way to build it; and if you keep going far enough when you are lost, you will eventually stumble upon vistas of endless green valleys in the golden hour light of early fall.
Credits
Let Go by East Forest.
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