Saturday Adventures: In Search of Rod Serling

top of page

Indy-Anna Bones was on a special investigation to the real-life Twilight Zone.

In Search of

...Rod Serling

Binghamton, NY

Binghamton is the place she began her career as an explorer, archaeologist, adventurer, and cryptozoologist.

It is a mysterious place in Upstate, NY with a storied history of crime and industry.

Hints of an esoteric legacy can still be spotted around town.

Tombs are marked with ancient symbols.

The Masonic lodges and clubhouses have been long ago abandoned or repurposed into beer halls and churches.

Many of the old houses now stand abandoned.

But it once was a place of innovation, where the first flight simulator was built, and Guglielmo Marconi tested his method of shooting telegraphs through the radio to moving trains.

In the cemeteries she found great monuments to the powerful people who once lived here.

Atop the hill in Spring Forest Cemetery showed who bore the brunt of the progress.

Here in a circle were the graves of 23 people, mostly women, burned to death in a factory fire.

Not far away, Indy-Anna found the grave of an actress who traced her lineage to the famous thespian, John Wilkes Booth. Ogarita Booth Henderson collapsed on stage when she performed in Binghamton in 1892.

Indy Anna loved this place though, and it was not all morbid.

All her life, Indy Anna's favorite monument was a little pagoda at the edge of a park.

It was built by workers as a factory pump-house, because the company owner enjoyed Japanese architecture.

The local-history museum, who took that history far back into the beginnings of mankind.

In addition to a collection of stuffed local wildlife, the museum boasts a planetarium and genetic lab.

This day she searched for a different monument, hidden behind an old carousel.

It was here began an episode of the Twilight Zone, where a man finds himself in his hometown of his youth.

A pagoda was erected to mark the spot where the man injures his child-self, after scaring the boy off the carousel.

The true-life carousel remains in operation to this day, along with five more around the city. Indy-Anna once earned a button for riding all five in a single summer.

In this park and on this carousel Rod Serling played as a child. He wrote the Twilight Zone and Night Gallery, and Planet of the Apes, tackling social issues that could not appear on television any other way. Indy-Anna believed there was a little bit of truth in ghosts and gremlins Serling saw himself on the strange streets of Binghamton.

bottom of page