Devil's Kitchen Cache Traditional Cache
PamelaJune: I will be away from this area for several months and unable to maintain this cache.
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Magnetic key holder. BYOP
This area is known as the Devil's Kitchen due to the fact that moonshine used to be produced along the creek valley. It is also the site of several hauntings.
It is said the a group of teenagers left a friend at the bridge where this cache is located. He apparently fell into the creek and drowned and legend has it that you can still see the figure of this young boy awaiting the friends who abandoned him.
In the 1980s a huge flood hit this area and washed away two children who had been placed on the roof of their car for safely while their mother went for help. If you are here at the right time, folks say you can still hear their screams as they were swept away by the rampaging waters.
A few hundred feet south of the bridge is a derelict house known as Key's Castle. The property surrounding this house used to be a grape vineyard in the late 1800s and this is also the site of ghostly activity. These legends started in 1962 when a woman named Mary Newman was taken behind Key's Castle and strangled to death.
Mary was killed due to an affair that wasn't going as planned. Two men watched her as she went to the grocery store and they hid in her house while she was gone. When she returned, the men kidnapped her and took behind Key's Castle, where she was killed. Following this, they dumped her body in a well near Friendship Church in Muscadine, Alabama. The legend says that you can hear Mary's screams coming from Devil's Kitchen, and from the well near the church.
The house has stood vacant and derelict for many many years. The last time I drove down this road (about 3 years ago), you could only see the house if you knew exactly where to look, as the vegetation had totally overtaken the area. Recently it looks like Key's Castle has a new owner as there is evidence of land clearing and bulldozer work. The driveway and surrounding area has been cleared, but access is purposely blocked by tree limbs and piles of dirt. I parked on the shoulder of the road and scrambled far enough up the drive to get a couple of pictures, but the house itself is obviously on private property, so please do not go poking around.
This road is not heavily travelled, and there is a place to pull off at the north end of the bridge. If you are really brave, do this cache at night... be sure to let us know if you see or hear anything out of the usual!
*** Sep 27, 2009 Update *** Devil's Kitchen has apparently claimed a new victim.. the original container and log were washed away in the recent "Great Flood". I have replaced both, but they say that if you go hunting this cache when it's raining you'll be able to hear tiny little magnetic screaming sounds as the ghost of the old cache relives its last hours in the face of the rising waters. The new cache lives in fear....
***May 2, 2012 Update*** Even though it was found three days ago I could NOT find this cache when I went to put in a new log. So once again the cache has been replaced; same kind of container; fresh new log.
Additional Hints
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