My interest in tunnels and subterranean mysteries goes back a long way. I suppose it all got started when I was a boy and my family lived in Maryland, not far outside the Beltway around Washington D.C.
Back then, and this was nearly fifty years ago, our little suburb was really on the line (or the edges) between urban Washington D.C. and what then was pure old American countryside. Hills and dales, scenic barns, valleys, etc. I am trying to paint the picture for you because today that area is just part of the massive cityscape around D.C. When I was ten or eleven, we could hop on our bicycles, and in fifteen minutes we’d be out on a country backroad, fishing in a pond, or hiking into the woods. But we lived in a suburb and most of our neighbors worked in government. My dad was in the Air Force and stationed at Andrews Air Force Base. We had neighbors who were FBI, Park Service, etc.
Under our little suburb there existed a network of storm drainage tunnels that were quite large. Large enough that we could ride our bikes through them. We weren’t supposed to, but we did. If you wanted to, you could come back up to ground level through the storm drains or up through a manhole cover – sometimes we did – but mainly we just ran the tunnels or rode our bikes through them. When you ran the tunnels you had to hop the little “creek” of water at the bottom and try to stay up on one side or the other, which became uncomfortable if you weren’t moving. Riding our bikes, we would swerve to one side or the other as we rode. If you could remember the route, you could ride all the way underground to the area’s public pool or other location. There were dozens of miles of tunnels. Behind our house was an old, abandoned golf course, and following the creek through the golf course you would find an entrance to the drainage system and then you’d be in your mystery world of subterranean intrigue. Of course, none of us had read Stephen King’s IT at that time, so we weren’t scared of running into Pennywise the Clown.
Anyway, I think that is where I got my interest in “underground” things, mysteries, tunnels, etc.
As a writer, I have included tunnels in many (almost all) of my novels. I wrote a novel with my friend Nick Cole that was called Tunnel Rats. It’s no longer in print because it was part 1 of a proposed series and we both got busy and never wrote a part 2. It was a post-apocalyptic story of a “family” of orphans who, after an apocalyptic event, live on a small farm on an escarpment in Texas and defend themselves against all kinds of enemies. When their farm is invaded by villains, they find a system of underground tunnels built by a Vietnam Vet and use the tunnels to survive.
My epic apocalyptic novel WICK features a small, authentic Russian town in New York (Warwick) where America trained spies to grow up “Russian” and be sent to Russia to spy for America. This was based on the very real town in Russia that, during the Cold War, was used to train Russians to blend in seamlessly when they got to America. In my novel, there is an uprising after a winter storm and some of the protagonists escape through a series of tunnels.
In my popular novel Brother, Frank (one of the novels for which I’ve sold a film option to Hollywood,) some members of a hacker group are fighting against an evil government agency. They escape an attack and flee into the real tunnels that connect with Underground Atlanta. My sister, who lives in the Atlanta area, took me to Underground Atlanta in the 1990s and I found it fascinating.
Not too many years ago, not long after Brother, Frank was published, my wife and I went to Knoxville, Tennessee to visit the artist who designed the wonderful cover for the book. The book cover for Brother, Frank had been awarded as one of the best sci-fi book covers for that year by TOR publishing, so we decided to stop in to see the artist who had an art studio in downtown Knoxville. Ben is deaf, and we’d communicated completely online, so this was my first time meeting him face-to-face. After some meet and greet and looking at a lot of his artwork, because Ben knew I was fascinated with tunnels, he took us to the back of his studio (which was in a building that was constructed in the 1800s) and then down into a subterranean type of basement that led to a series of tunnels crisscrossing underneath downtown Knoxville. As you can expect, I was very excited to see that tunnel system.
When I first moved to downtown Brownwood, several people told me about an old system of tunnels that exist (or used to exist) underneath downtown. I’ve heard several iterations of the story. When I went to work at Lucille and Mabel, we did some exploration of the old basement under that building, which was fascinating. And on another occasion, I got to tour one of the old mansions downtown, and there were some very interesting underground oddities in the basement.
As always, I’m either writing or planning on writing, and one of the things I’m outlining now is a mystery novel that takes place in downtown Brownwood. I’ve found a few things online for research, but not much. I’d love to include stories, mysteries, or real information about Brownwood’s legendary underground. If you have such information, give me a shout. I can keep a secret when I need to. Contact me at: [email protected] (why I still have a Hotmail account is a great story for another time.)
Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear on Wednesdays and Sundays on the website.