Visitors near Beach 6 reported an object descending from the sky and moving toward the woods. Police were called. The area was searched. Whatever had arrived that night seemed to disappear just as quickly.
Almost.
One of them never left. His name is Six.
When the others returned to wherever they came from, Six was left behind at Beach 6 with no way home and an entire planet he knew absolutely nothing about.
So he started walking.
What he found
At first he stayed close to Erie — the shoreline, the back roads, learning how people lived from a safe distance. The farther he went, the more one thing became obvious.
This place was weird. Really weird.
People told stories about creatures hiding in forests. Lights moving across empty skies. Buildings where footsteps carried on long after everybody had gone home. Monsters under lakes, abandoned towns, strange museums, giant roadside statues, unexplained landmarks — and places with stories nobody outside the county had ever heard.
Six wanted to see all of it. So he did.
Over sixty years he crossed the country looking for anything strange enough to be worth a detour. He followed Bigfoot reports into the woods. He visited towns built around their own monsters. He stood outside haunted buildings after dark, and went looking for lights in the sky that reminded him of the night he arrived.
And he wrote all of it down. Every stop. Every story. Every strange little place he thought somebody else ought to see.
What it turned into
After decades of it, Six realised he had built something larger than a list of places. He had built a map of the weird side of America — a way for people to stop treating the space between one place and another as something to get through, and start treating it as the point.
That became OddWay.
He is still out there. Still travelling, still looking, still adding places whenever he finds one strange enough to make the list — all 7,093 of them so far.
He may never have found his way home. After sixty years on the road he seems comfortable enough here, and he has a good many people to show around now.
So next time you are heading somewhere, do not just take the fastest route. See what Six found along the way.