It just doesn’t feel like it. Too big a burg? Too entirely modern, both in its shiny surfaces and its rusty ones? Not haunted enough, not like the way Minneapolis shimmers in the night like Tir na Nog’th?
Dunno. Anyway, that’s where we’re going to meet the folks and pick up Ray.
Update: I’m still not sure about Omaha, but Nebraska (at least along the I-80 corridor) is hereby christened as Limbo. The river of forgetfulness wends nearby, and the twisted elms nearby resemble the grove(s) of suicides.
Maybe it was just my frame of mind. We stopped at a gas station on the way out there. As I was leaving, I noticed a reward poster–$10,000 for information leading to arrest of murder of a blonde woman. As I walked back to the Jeep, I saw a dead yellow butterfly on the ground. Brrr…
“The West” starts at the Missouri River, both in feel and in landscape.
Omaha is home to the sort of faded-rust weirdness you’d see in a haunted Gary, Indiana.
Perhaps. I’m disenchanted (ha!) with Omaha in general that I have trouble seeing it as magical.
You need to be in Downtown Omaha for Haunted, it’s a Ghost Town in the way that St. Joe and Detroit or any of the old dead rust belt cities are. Omaha is the middle ground, or the gateway, the boundary between the Rust Belt and the West.
My point of view is that the West starts at the boundary of the Mountain Time Zone (or put another way, when humidity is no longer above 30% you might just be in the West), east of that is Midwest, old dead, dying and that Places like St. Joe, Omaha, Kansas City are like ghost cities that hold you, letting you look at the empty nothingness of 1000 miles and asking you if it is really worth it the risk of heading into the West.
So, on I80 the “west” starts at some point between North Platte and Ogallala, and on I70 it starts between Colby and Goodland. In SoDak, Rapid City, in Montana, Billings.
For south of Kansas the west is a straight line south from Liberal Kansas to the border with Mexico.