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Tumblr Thread Goes Full American Gothic

This Tumblr thread employs an American Gothic style of writing to highlight stereotypes --- imagined and potentially accurate --- for different places in American. The resulting descriptions are vivid and unsettling and might just chill you to the bone. It's almost like the whole place is cursed. 

Posted by mattstaff
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  • 1
    Text - chromolume it's all you americans talk about.. liminal space this... cryptid that sasstricbypass america is big, we got.,. its a lot happening here darkbookworm13 It's at least 3,000 miles just from the East Coast to the West, depending on where you start. If I try to drive from here in Maine to New Mexico, it's 2,400 miles. From here to Oregon, 800 miles from my current residence to my relatives in NJ, then another 3,000 miles after that.
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  • 2
    Text - A brisk 8 day drive that meanders through mountains, forests, corn fields, dry, flat, empty plains, more mountains, and then a temperate rain forest in Oregon. The land has some seriously creepy stuff, even just right outside our doors. There is often barking sounds on the other side of our back door. At 3 am. When no one would let their dog out. It's a consensus not to even look out the fucking windows at night. Especially during the winter months. Nothing chills your heart faster than s
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  • 3
    Text - Giant stretches of forests, swamps, pockets of civilization, more trees, farms, wildlife, and winding roads. All of which gives the feeling of nature merely tolerating humans, and that we are one frost heave away from our houses being destroyed, one stretch of undergrowth away from our roads being pulled back into the earth. And almost every night, we have to convince ourselves that the popping, echoing gunshot sounds are really fireworks, because we have no idea what they might be shooti
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  • 4
    Text - This is the gentle stuff. I'm not going to talk about the whispered tales from those that live on, or close, to the reservations. I'm not going to go on about the years of drought, or how the ground gives way once the rain falls. The frost in the winter stays in the shadows, you can see the line where the sun stops. It will stay there until spring. People don't tell you about the elevation, or how thin the air truly is. The stretches of empty road with only husks of houses to dot the side
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  • 5
    Text - Roswell is a joke. A failed National Inquirer article slapped with bumperstickers and half-assed tourist junk. The places that really run that chill down the spine are in the spaces between the sprawling mesas and hidden arroyos. Stand at the top of the Carlsbad Caverns trail. Look a mile down into the darkness. Don't step off the path. just don't. kaasknot The Land of Entrapment jumpingjacktrash here in minnesota we're making jokes about how bad is the limescale in your sink pretending w
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  • 6
    Text - pretending we don't suspect something lives down there ceruleancynic dammit jesse now I want to read about the things that live down there meanwhile in maryland the summer is killing-hot, the air made of wet flannel, white heat-haze glazing the horizon, and the endless cicadas shrilling in every single tree sound like a vast engine revving and falling off, revving and falling off, slow and repeated, and everything is so green, lush poison-green, and you could swear you can hear the things
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  • 7
    Text - jhaernyl @gallusrostromegalus gallusrostromegalus The intense and permanent haunting of a land upon which countess horrors have been visited, and that is too large and wild for us to really comprehend is probably the most intense and universal American feeling. thebibliosphere here in minnesota We're fucking what now
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  • 8
    Text - moonyinthesky colorado is a strange sort of place, a passing-through kind of place, a place that holds just as many people who stay as leave. the highways stretch like ley-lines or the lines of old palms; 25 north and south, 70 east and west, 76 and 470 and 285 curling all around and tangling in the middle like loose thread the mountains are their own place, the plains their own, too, with the hogback and the foothills in between like a strangely-comforting barrier, "this far, and that's
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  • 9
    Text - heywriters Summertime in California, when it's 110 and you wake up in a sweat at 7am and can't fall back asleep regardless of how much sleep you actually got. You open a door or a window and smell smoke. The air is hazy, the sky is orange, the sun bright red. You go back inside. You stay inside. You don't worry about the fire, it's probably miles away. The smoke lasts for days and even after a shower you can't get the smell out of your nostrils, can't get the taste off your tongue. You ho
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  • 10
    Text - Then, after New Year's, it rains. And rains. And gushes. The ground is baked stiff and won't absorb water after an hour of moderate rain. The water rises. It fills streets, houses, threatens levees and dams. After days of this the ground finally softens. The plants, their root systems shriveled and mostly washed away by the flooding, can't hold the dirt in place. Where it has no choice,the earth gives way to landslides. The Sierra Nevadas, riddled with abandoned gold mines and in some pla
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  • 11
    Text - You're hiking and you find a massive flat rock with fist-sized holes bored into it. Trees and fenceposts that look like they were used for target practice with a machine gun. You hear what sounds like a lawn sprinkler go off and you get as far away from the rocks as you can, watching where you step. Sacramento is a concrete jungle of one way streets and sky-blocking towers before endless miles of ugly industrial wasteland. San Francisco is a twisting maze of clogged overpasses where you d
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  • 12
    Text - The Central Valley gets funnel clouds that touch down even less often than snow falls, but you remember once as a kid getting sleet in the Valley and thinking that's what snow was then later hudding in the school cafeteria because of a tornado warning. You remember visiting the ocean and bringing home kelp and colored glass. In the mountains you found a sticky pinecone the size of your head and a snake with miniscule legs. An owl with a broken wing was brought to your classroom, there are
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  • 13
    Text - boogiewoogiebuglegal San Diego. The ocean is blue, except where it isn't, where it's just a touch of dark green, in exactly the place your eye tries to focus. Go inland fifteen minutes and it's scrub-land, irrigated enough that you're not supposed to see the desert and the cactus waiting, always waiting their turn. The hawks are there too, and they don't give a damn. They're waiting and they don't care if you know it. There are mountains with giant boulders cleaved in half-to make a path
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  • 14
    Text - The people here are just like the mountains, quiet, and selective about what they tell. And none of us asks any more questions than we need to. We know better than to follow the haggard people walking down the road with two shovels in hands. We know better than to stare at a man and a woman handing each other, something, in front of a graveyard behind the stop sign. A sonneillonv In Ohio, something walks behind the corn. Possibly multiple somethings. Possibly many, MANY multiple something
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  • 15
    Text - If you find a scarecrow in the field, treat it with respect. Then walk away. Straight away. Don't look back. DON'T LOOK BACK. Do not look down at the corn fields at night. Do not look for the scarecrows while you are sitting on your bed in the small hours, looking out your bedroom window.. If you see them, they will know it. If you see them, you may see things that you cannot forget. defilerwyrm Texas is a land of ghosts and lies. Foreigners imagine a vast, flat desert when there's no des
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  • 16
    Text - Everywhere is haunted. We touch the visor and lift our feet off the floorboard and pedal as we roll across a railroad track. We drive out to the crossroads in the dead of night with flour on the trunk's lip to see the tiny handprints of dead children trying to push us out of the way. We see things in the shimmering curtains of heat that aren't there when we blink. I've seen things moving in the fields in the dark. There are so many churches, dead and living, because frightened people will
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  • 17
    Text - winneganfake Pacific Northwest- more people just plain disappear here. The trees and mountains eat sound and attempts at civilization at an almost violent rate, lone feet still wearing sneakers wash up on the beaches. And l'll just repeat what @gallusrostromegalus said: The intense and permanent haunting of a land upon which countess horrors have been visited, and that is too large and wild for us to really comprehend is probably the most intense and universal American feeling.
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  • 18
    Text - iblicron yes, people disappear here, but it doesn't have to include you. the forest demands your respect and if you give it you can return home at the end of the day. keep to the well trod trails and greet everyone you go past. you don't know who you'll insult if you don't pay attention to which trails you do and don't see others on. if you go more than a few hours without seeing anyone coming from the other direction then you need to turn around. there's a reason no one else is coming ba
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  • 19
    Text - you don't go into the woods at night. you just don't. if you're camping, stay in your tent once the fire is out. ignore that sound you heard. it will be gone by morning. definitely-a-human-person Florida is sweltering hot, but not because of the heat, but the humidity, even in the low 70s, you're still likely to be covered in sweat. In all but the largest cities, woodlands cover almost everything, the brush almost thicker than the earth you stand on. There's a strange presence following y
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  • 20
    Text - be a futile effort. Never go in the woods at night. Never go into the woods alone. Never trust the Atlantic. Even the nonbelievers have to admit the legends come from somewhere. And most importantly, never follow the sounds you may hear, and keep a cautious state of mind wherever you may be, even if it's not in Florida. Spirits, malevolent or not, exist everywhere. Source: chromolume
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    mattstaff
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