Tim Gilmore is the author of the forthcoming This Kind of City: Ghost Stories and Psychological Landscapes.

Some kids from the trailer park had gone into the woods and were coming back with arm bones and skulls.

The Yukon Cemetery is a graveyard for slaves and freed blacks in the woods between a trailer park and suburban subdivision and the present location of a place that has moved from two other places. It was last moved just before World War Two, when the federal government moved it off land it wanted for a military base. When Yukon moved to its present location, it disbanded the black community living there, and the slave cemetery was left for the forest to hide it and take it back.

Yukon, Florida is a part of Jacksonville, Florida, inasmuch as Jacksonville is a placeless conglomeration of places. (This paradox means that Jacksonville does not really exist, or that it exists in the in-between of all its places.) But Yukon is Yukon, Florida, its own entity, which means mostly a post office, a former mail drop-off along the railroad tracks. The Yukon Post Office has its own ZIP code, 32230.

The post office manager lived in the adjacent building, which shares the ZIP code of the surrounding area. When she was mad at the world, she said, she would hide by standing in the doorway between ZIP codes.

One side of 120 th Street is known as Uptown Yukon and the other side is Downtown Yukon. There’s a tavern, a seafood restaurant, and a church. There used to be a town here. It was settled in the 1880s, but the federal government closed it in the 1960s, claiming it was unsafe for the town to live directly in the line of takeoff for the military jets from the base. They had their priorities. All the small houses soon disappeared.

Conspiracy theorists talk about Yukon, all the old roads grown over with weeds and blocked off with signs warning people not to enter property of the U.S. Government. They say a plane crashed in the area recently, but was never found. They say something’s in the water back there. They say “SOMETHING” was going on back there, mid-60s through the 80s, something that would explain the ever-present armed guards and patrols in the woods.

It’s said by people who know things that can’t be documented that when Roosevelt Boulevard, Interstate-17, was paved, a number of the graves of former slaves were paved over.

A.M. Reed’s Mulberry Grove Plantation was located on land that now holds the current military base. He deeded part of the property to his former slaves at the end of the Civil War. Many of the families who worked that farmland are buried in the Yukon Cemetery.

Now there are only shallow depressions in the ground to indicate the locations of many of the graves. When the wooden coffins decayed, the ground above them sank.

Supposedly A.M. Reed left treasure buried somewhere on his plantation. Nobody has ever found it. Supposedly a fallen piece of NASA satellite was recovered in Yukon. The Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist George Smoot was born in Yukon, Florida, before the federal government dismantled it. Several Internet directories call Yukon, Florida a ghost town located within Jacksonville, Florida.

Sometime in the early 2000s, the Yukon Post Office was decommissioned. No one seems to know precisely when it happened. The doors and windows are boarded up. The letters are falling off the building, so that the faded signage now says, “P Office.” With the building that had its own ZIP Code now abandoned, not only is Yukon a ghost town, but 32230 is a ghost ZIP Code.

The things that seem real are turned into dreams by things that seem real that are turned into dreams. The post office manager used to hide between ZIP codes, and the highway and the townhomes and the military base are all built on the real lives of slaves who became their own owners with the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865.

Some kids from the trailer park had gone into the woods and were coming back with arm bones and skulls.

1932, local architect Roy Benjamin builds an ancient Athenian temple in the part of town where will soon cluster the first public housing projects.

Hard to recall, but it’s true, when public housing was new, he said, it was a fine thing. Never used to tell people he lived in the ghetto, but then public housing come along and he told people where he lived. Something hopeful. Two-parent families then. Nobody planned to live in public housing forever. It was a leg up. Was gonna work themselves up to their own homes. None of us knew back then what public housing would become, what “the projects” would come to mean. None of us knew “the projects” was gonna become a trap. We didn’t know that this place we was proud to be welcomed into back then was just gonna concentrate the worst of the community’s problems in the future. We didn’t even know what a lot of those future problems would mean. No, we were proud to get a chance and proud to show what we would do with it. Now, the last 10, 20 years, they done torn down most of the projects. They had become like laboratories for producing monsters. Well, not back then. Then, they was our ticket to having a home.

In the middle of Jacksonville’s two-mile nexus of public housing projects stands an ancient Greek temple. Its stone colonnades open out like an embrace, weathered by hurricane, snow, baking sun, graffiti, murder.

The structure doesn’t fit its surroundings. One palm tree beside it. A vast blank field and a playground at a medium distance. Ancient religious and political structure in the center of a stretch of public housing projects. As though two millennia older than its surroundings. As though timelessness stands up through the triviality of passing time. As though a goddess should choose to reside in this forlorn and impoverished immediately-old new world. These neighborhoods become centuries old in a couple of decades.

Nymphs dancing across the pediment. Bas-relief. Underneath them in red spray paint: “19 Bitch 25 Live Bitch CChhAAA” “I LUV My PaimJAG BaBy” “45 1200 BWB 1200”

Then 27 cyclists ride through the park and around the bandstand, 2009, on the recommendation of one bicycling urban explorer who says he doesn’t even know how he happened to discover this strangely out-of-place Parthenon, but says it’s his new favorite place in the city.

Classical Greek architectural details include trigylphs, guttae, metopes, taniae, architraves, abacus, echinus, annulets, trachelia, hypotrachelia, flutes, stylobates, Doric columns.

And no one seems able to say why it exists at all, why it was ever built. Certainly the out-of-place completely focuses and defines the place. The bandstand or temple or whatever it is defines Brentwood Park, Brentwood, the surrounding streets. The out-of-place is this place.

But there’s no known reason for the sinister energies of place to require sacrifices. At cold December dawn, 2004, construction workers come to the park to renovate the bandstand and find the dead body lying at the base of the bandstand’s steps. Detectives cannot put a name to the dead man, nor an age, nor a cause.

For about six months in 1976, an old woman with dreadlocks, neighbors think she’s a voodoo priestess, frequently stands among the columns and tells anyone who comes close enough that the New Virgin will sacrifice herself in this temple to give birth to the next Messiah. Nobody knows where she’s come from. Everyone tries to avoid her.

Dustin McLeod says this place is the only place in town he knows that’s north of downtown. He doesn’t know why he knows this place. He doesn’t remember how he found out about it. He’s a business major at the University of North Florida and lives in a dorm there, but he comes out to this place once a week. He says that when his older brother died in a car accident three years ago, when Dustin was still in high school, he lost all his faith in God. He had been raised in a strict Southern Baptist family. He says he doesn’t know why, that it’s really not rational at all, but that this weird place is the only place he can pray. He can’t go to church anymore, but every Sunday morning he drives across town to the Brentwood Park Bandstand and Comfort Station and he sits among the columns and he prays. He prays that one day, one day, somehow, he’ll get to talk to his brother Brendan again.

Intuition Ale Works and Bold City Brewery, Growlers of Pale Ale in Old Warehouses by the Railroad Tracks, Feedback Loop Tomb, Shadows and Patterns down King Street into North Riverside

Because if anybody asked him whether it were day or night, because if anybody asked him where he was, if anyone asked him in what part of town this couch on which he found himself might be, he would only be able to say, feedback loop.

How somebody got to this point, how somebody could drive away all his friends, how someone could so successfully have alienated himself—

He remembered walking down into a narrow brick-walled well behind the railroad tracks. An iron spiral staircase led down so deep into the ground that he had forgotten the smell of citrus blooms and car exhaust. And after he had descended for weeks?, months?, months and months strung into years?, he awoke to find himself on a hard couch in a dank room deep underground in his own last moment. He didn’t recognize his body or the way it had shriveled. He didn’t recognize the angles of these bones. He didn’t recognize the smell of his own rotting.

He remembered a friend telling him to get out of himself, saying he was stuck in a feedback loop. The songs he was writing now weren’t channeling the feelings inside that he needed to get out. They were creating new problems for him to consume and then to channel back out.

They went for a walk. Over the railroad tracks and back. King Street, Stockton, Rosselle. Friend offered to buy him a beer. “You could use some fattening, man. What’s going on with you? You’re all shriveled up.”

They walked down Rosselle Street to the taproom at Bold City Brewery, and the friend ordered two 1901 Red Ales. He only sipped it. His face showed nothing. He looked sucked-down into himself.

The friend said he would explain, he said, “See, we think art is therapy, right? And it can be. You have this need to write your songs and sing your songs, so whatever your issues are, those mommy-daddy things you don’t ever get worked out, you write that stuff, right? That song about nobody asking to be brought into the world and whose shoulders carry the burden of proof and that song where you just wail, ‘Save me’ over and over at the end. You still with me?”

His eyes moved toward the door. The taproom was dark. People laughed at a nearby table. Two people had walked through the door with empty gallon growlers to refill with Smokey Porter or Mad Manatee India Pale Ale.

The friend said, “So you write these songs and they work this kind of therapy. You release what you’d bottled up inside that you had no way to express. But that only works up to a point. You listening to me? ’Cuz I got a warning for you. So I hope you’re listening to me. See, that only works up to a point. Then something tips. You got it? Something tips and you’re not channeling that inner mess into beautifully damaged music anymore. Now, and this is crucial, man, this is crucial. After something tips, you’re regenerating that beautiful damage just for the music. You regenerate it, you recreate all that shit you purge out of your heart, you recreate it just for the music, and then what do you do? You swallow it back. You drink it down. You put it all right back in your heart, that place you were trying to get it out of. You’ve made this dangerous loop, this vicious circle. It’s a feedback loop. You put it back into your heart, then you’ve gotta rip it back out to put back in your art. But since that’s the kind of art you’re making, and it’s beautiful, and you become addicted to it, you have to create it all over again in more art and that puts it back into your heart. Pretty soon, your art and your heart, they’re both poisoning each other. And that’ll kill you. And by then you’ll think it’s worth dying for. I see that. I know what that is. And I’m seeing it in what’s happening to you. I know the beauty of suicide, but that’s a stupid beauty, man, cheap beauty. Then you’re just a rock n’ roll cliché, a Romantic poet cliché. And then the sad tragic beauty of your suicide, it’s just gonna bore people, man, and you won’t even know where you’ve gone, and you haven’t even touched that beer.”

He didn’t even know where he had gone. Somebody said that to him once.

Now he was down underground in this apartment beneath the railroad tracks and he weighed 99 pounds on a 6’ 2” frame. Somebody in his head sang his poem. Mad torrents of inspiration once. He did not remember how he had come to be here.

His friend walked down the stretch of King Street from the St. Johns River to Riverside’s breweries, block after block of art galleries, restaurants, bars, tattoo parlors, dance studios. Past Green Street and Ernest Street, old warehouses built in the 1920s, 40s, and 50s straddled the railroad tracks. In a couple of these old warehouses were microbreweries and taprooms.

The friend walked into the blue-gray brick warehouse that housed Intuition Ale Works Taproom and Brewery. A chalkboard near the bar listed King Street Stout, Riverside Red, Willow Branch Wheat, and Shotgun Shack Black Rye. He sat down at the bar and had a Riverside Red. He read the description on the board and thought the beer names were landscape marker poems for the neighborhood. He though the description was a found-poem: “An aggressively hopped, high gravity red ale…Magnum hops for bittering and Simcoe hops for flavoring, aroma, and dry-hopping.” He thought about his friend nobody had seen for three weeks. He remembered when his friend was “aggressively hopped” and “high gravity.”

“I know where he went.” An amateur sometime jazz drummer sat down next to him at the bar.

“Where?”

“Into his own tomb. He walled himself up in there. He went down and down, around and around, until nobody could get to him.”

“I told him he was doing that, but I don’t think he could hear me anymore.”

For years, the friend and other friends and new friends walk up and down King Street that slices its axis up and down Riverside. Sometimes they play some kind of funky hippie jazz in a couple of bars. For years they meet up in the taprooms and drink Mad Manatee at Bold City and Shotgun Shack Black Rye at Intuition. A beer garden goes in and out of business. This gay bar and that gay bar. King Street is a living river, but Riverside itself is a bigger animal, its own octopus of an organic town inside a larger uncitied city. Riverside’s its own life bigger than their lives, comprising their lives and their life, and it doesn’t mind making ghosts of them or bringing back their ghosts at intervals. Their ghosts become patterns, patterns of light and dark like shadows of leaves thrown by sunlight through windows onto very old hardwood floors. Full of everything they ever felt, their shadows come and go on King Street and Rosselle and Green and Cherry, at an obtuse angle in a doorway, in a glance through a window, in a crowd in the wane of sunlight beneath a magnolia tree, in ideas that recur every so many years at the crossroads of this street and that street.

In the warehouses of the breweries, the yeast strains are reused from one batch in a 10-barrel tank or a 20 or 30-BBL tank to the next batch to the next. The same genealogy of living thing as one long entity, generations and generations, shadows and patterns in the culture.