George wasn’t going anywhere. He was born here and he’d die here. He wasn’t really much for socializing anyway so it mattered none to him that Lawerence and June were packing up to move to Gallup.
They weren’t the first to head out after things started falling apart. In fact, they were the last. Well, except for George. George was now the last man left in town.
It was a little funny how the tourists started coming sometime after. At first they were stopping to see if the gas station was still open. It wasn’t.
Then they were stopping overnight on the side of the road, figuring no one would mind. He didn’t.
But then they started to wander. And George didn’t really know how he felt about that. It was his town now. And he considered himself the protector.
So George started thinking up some sort of plan. How would he get people to go away and leave him alone?
He had found some old VHS tapes left in the convenience store and started watching them. One of them was pretty creepy. It was about a town with a family of freaks that were the only inhabitants.
And that’s when George formulated his plan.
There were a few buildings the tourists always flocked to and the Baptist church was one of them. So he set everything up. He planted the evidence to suggest there was something strange going on here. He planted all kinds of “evidence” and left it alone. After all, he really just wanted to scare people from coming around any more.
But it didn’t work out. In fact, George’s plan backfired. People got word of the mysterious findings and started flocking to the town.
Ghost hunters showed up with ghost detecting equipment.
News crews showed up to do stories.
And the state police came.
George took all the stuff down in the middle of the night and threw it out.
But, two days later, as George was on his usual patrol of the town, he found it all put back up, in almost the same way, in a new building on the other end of town.
Now George was the one who was scared.
The History
It’s a ghost town…
The location has been a waypoint since the 1500’s, but it wasn’t until the first trains came through in 1902 that Cuervo, NM became a “town”. Like much of the technology we experience today, the first “boom” was short-lived and the train companies chose different locations for their cross-country routes in 1910. Without train revenue, the town continued to struggle.
In 1926, a new cross-country road came through town. It was called Route 66. But, while many towns embraced the new tourism, Cuervo failed to adapt and was little more than a gas station along the route.
The new interstate arrived in the late ’60s, delivering a crushing blow to the small town. It’s easy to say it never recovered, but did it ever truly thrive?
Today the town remains with many dwellings still standing. Almost all of them, including the two churches, are abandoned. There has been some evidence of real life horror stories happening in Cuervo. I’ll let you do the research on those. Just know the content you may find is not PG 13.