I Took A Job In Northwestern Vermont: Entry Five: Investigations Part 1

Okay, so I have some friends from Castleton coming up for a week-ish long vacation. I’d already got the week off from the MILF (paid, thank god) so we’re set to drive around the area and check out some of the touristy places I haven’t gotten a chance to visit plus do some good old fashioned ghost investigating. They’re all pretty much like me – kind of spooky people interested in the morbid and gory – and I’d been telling them about what I’ve been discovering and experiencing since I arrived, so they’re pumped up and ready to explore.

Jamie, Meg, Alice, Downie, Ken, and Terri are all coming up after getting settled back home after finals and, thanks to Ken’s super-rich parents, are staying at the Four-Points Lodge for ten days. Ken’s the kind of friend everyone wishes they had: filthy rich but magnanimous and happy, easy to get along with, and above all generous. I know that a suite of rooms at the Four-Points is expensive but to book a private bungalow for almost two weeks must be astronomical! Plus, he’s paying for van rentals to get everyone and the equipment up here. Apparently, he’s only making the rest of them pay for gas! I kind of miss going out with everyone at midnight to the Denny’s near campus and eating omelets and drinking coffee until sunrise – discussing ghosts and demons. But, well, I’m the one that dropped out

Ken, Jamie, Alice, Downie, and I founded the Castleton Paranormal Investigation Team our sophomore year (off the University books, of course…) and spent the summer between sophomore and junior year running around West Castleton recording EVPs and trying to catch the ghostly row boat on Lake Bomoseen, eventually attracting Meg and Terri to the group. We didn’t catch anything but it was fun. I dropped out quickly into junior year, languished at home all winter, then took the job here, but the guys kept at it and they sent me an EVP in January they said was captured at Emily’s Bridge in Stowe (I didn’t hear the ‘GET OUT’ they said was there, just some wavering static). So they’re really excited to investigate the woods around town and some of the other places I’ve read about. Thanks to both Ken’s money and Steve’s connections in the area they managed to secure an overnight investigation for all of us at a paranormal hot spot in Cold Spring.

I’ll be staying with them at the Four-Points while they’re in town.

I’ve known Jamie and Alice since Freshman year (we were all in the same dorm) then Downie showed up and started hooking up with Alice and he brought Ken into our cadre sophomore year. Ken lives in Castleton – or rather his parents bought him a house just off campus – so we all lived with him while we were setting up CPIT (“spit”) and doing our night investigations last summer. Meg and Terri were a year behind us but got involved through the horror movie society at Castleton. They’re a couple of serious goths and ‘spiritualists’ that believe in some weird offshoot of wicca. They’re also usually the first to ask “do you feel that?” during investigations…take from that what you will…

Anyway, according to Jamie, Ken bought brand new 4K camcorders and an old (but still expensive) thermal imaging cam to use in their investigations. Aside from that they’re bringing CPIT-dedicated laptops, night vision security cameras, and cots in case we need to crash during our Cold Spring visit.

Once I knew they were coming I told Jamie and Alice to get in touch with Steve. Turns out they foisted it off on Ken and he asked Steve if there were any good paranormal spots to investigate. Considering the fact that the whole county seems like it’s one big paranormal hotspot and Precipice Bay seems to be at the heart of a lot of it, I was surprised when Steve suggested a location in Cold Spring. When I asked him about it he just said that Ken had a particular list of prerequisites and there was really only one place that fit the bill.

Here’s our tentative itinerary: we’ll start off in town, walk around the woods and try to get into the area around The Point. Then we’re staying for two days and a night in Sky Dells visiting the slopes and the abandoned Esther Cavitt Sanitarium. Then an overnight investigation at “Hole Bar”, an abandoned bar in Cold Spring across Frazier Lake. Then we’re going to the Morgan Hollows railyard (a local hotspot for ghost activity) followed by a trip to Bleak Hill Asylum. If there’s still time we may try to get down to Petersham and sneak into the abandoned Copper Mine camp supposedly haunted by the ghosts of miners killed in a tunnel collapse back in the 80s.

Day 1: The Point, Precipice Bay

It took the better part of the morning just to get everyone together between Steve and the townies and my group. Steve’s cadre was made up of his sister, Kitty, Cecily, Jimmy, and Alex. We were all in pretty good spirits and since it was the afternoon by the time everyone was ready we got lunch at the Lodge then trucked down to The Point. The Point is the single tree at the very…well, point…of the Javelin. Steve and his group weren’t that enthusiastic about trying to duck the Ranger cordon but I guess being in a bigger group changed their minds.

The Point has had a cordon around the actual area since the Javelin 10 and it doesn’t show any signs of stopping. The area is fenced off with chain-link fencing and a ranger station is right at the parking lot heading down. Since there’s nothing but open fields around The Javelin there isn’t much chance anyone, let alone a group of twelve plus, can sneak past the rangers and enter the area properly but that doesn’t mean there aren’t alternate ways into the restricted area. I mean, it’s a big forest (a state forest as a matter of fact) and its not like the rangers made a concrete wall or anything…

Cue our romp from the main trails to the edge of the restricted zone. Trees are marked with blaze orange ‘X’s to denote the beginning of the forbidden zone but there aren’t any fences or anything. Steve warned us off going too far into the area (conspicuously not mentioning gracklins at all) but we did linger at the edge. I mean, no one really wants to be exactly where at least ten children were abducted, right? Even though it was sunny and hot it seemed like the restricted area was ten degrees cooler and far more silent…almost oppressively so. Ken and Downie went a little farther into the forest than the rest of us, promising to take EVP and check their EMF meters (both new purchases by Ken for the group). There were a few groupings of beer cans and firepits at the edge and more than a few condom wrappers but once we got about twenty feet in it all disappeared.

I recognize that the rangers cordoned off the area initially due to the disappearances but the longer their presence exists, the less believable it becomes that the cordon is for public safety. I can’t believe that I’m the only one who’s made the connection between disappearances and I’m sure there’s someone in the rangers and county government that has some inkling as to what may be lurking in The Point. I, personally, don’t know whether it’s a witch or a gracklin or what but why chance it, right? I think about it like the Blair Witch Project: sure it’s scary and all, but I’m not planning on traipsing through her woods so why be scared of a normal forest?

Seriously, the first time I saw that movie I laughed it off. The acting was atrocious, and most of the things that were supposed to be scary seemed quaint…up until the end. That goddamnned guy standing in the corner and the children’s handprints on the walls…that made an impression. I watched it with some high school friends at a Halloween party and obviously that doesn’t make a conducive viewing experience, but much later on, maybe a month or two later, I was taking a shortcut through a wooded area around twilight and had to run home I got so scared!

My parents seriously thought something was wrong with me since my fear slowly started turning me into a hermit, until my best friend at the time exasperatingly said this to me: “why are you so scared of the woods now? The Blair Witch is in Blair, not in the park! We aren’t going to go to Burkittsville so she can’t get us!” That seemed to break through my fear…at least until the present.

The Javelin is only a small fraction of the forest, but despite its small size on maps, in person it looks and feels enormous. Standing at the edge of the trail, where the orange markings are, you SHOULD be able to see through to the fields surrounding the trees but instead the dense combination of trunks and foliage makes the entire area dark and foreboding.

Yeah, I’d done the research on The Witch, and, yes, I’ve taken into account everything Miss Angie and Steve have told me; but none of that made actually facing the dark forest any easier! This was the Blair woods in real life and no matter how I tried to think around my fear it kept bubbling up to the surface.

One weird thing we found in our circuitous route was an abandoned campsite. It was nearing twilight and Steve was urging us to go back to the parking lot but Downie and Ken were waving the EMF meters around heedless to the whining of the rest of the group. They were the ones who found the site and shouted for the rest of us to come over. Steve and the other townies stayed put at the edge by a huge hawthorn bush while the rest of CPIT and I wandered to their voices. For the briefest of instances I imagined that we’d get there and find the two guys gutted and hung up like meat in a larder while their voices continued calling – let me tell you it was enough to make me break out in goosebumps – but they were safe and sound when we got there.

We were about a football field in from the edge, not even halfway to the center of the restricted area. In a natural clearing was a weed-grown firepit and two collapsed Coleman tents. Weather and animals had torn the nylon and plastic and the sun had faded them over time but they were clearly tents. A camping percolator lay on its side beside the overgrown sandy circle and there were food wrappers mashed into the weedy grass, it’s white-flecked blue enameled metal rusted with exposure. Two sleeping bags – child-sized I observed with a shudder – were strewn a few steps away from one of the tents in similar condition. Ken and Downie were pale and jittery when we arrived.

“Did you hear them?” Ken asked, pulling one of the earphone cups off his head.

Meg and Terri were huddled close to each other. Even for the time of year it seemed unnaturally cool with the sun still shining above.

“Hear what? We just heard you shouting for us to get over here.” Alice and Jamie stood on either side of me between the tent remains. “What’s up?”

Ken didn’t answer and knelt down to pick something up from the weeds.

“We were recording EVP when both of us heard children’s voices coming from around here,” Downie explained, “we couldn’t hear any words but it got clearer when we got closer to this spot.” He pointed to the firepit. “I swear it was two voices, a boy and a girl, saying something about ‘before a tree’ but they were giggling afterwards – like they were telling a joke!”

Ken stood back up and held something up without speaking. It was a plastic version of Battleship, the clamshell kid-sized versions you can find at roadside stops and restaurants. He held it with his fingertips by the plastic clasp and all the mildewed pieces rolled out in a dark lump. He paled even more if that were possible and just started booking it back to Steve and company.

Filled with jittery adrenaline and the disquiet of twilight falling in a strange forest, Ken’s abrupt reaction made all of us jump with a scream and we followed. Steve and his group saw us running pell-mell in the dark and they started running until our whole group was dashing through the woods. I don’t remember even thinking anything, it was a wholly irrational herd-mentality urge: run and run until you couldn’t run anymore.

We didn’t stop until we reached the gravel of the parking area. We were all sweating and panting and coughing. I don’t know about the rest of them but I was lightheaded from all the adrenaline.

We were laughing when we piled back into the van, that nervous, brittle tittering you can only make when you’re uncomfortable, and we didn’t say anything until we turned onto Main Street. Steve was the first person to say anything.

He just told Ken to turn into the parking lot of MacAddams.

We drank until 2am after the jaunt in the woods. The group were really happy to meet Tall Jim (the only point where the cloud of gloom seemed to lift all night) and he chatted during his break around 11. I think Ken really made an impression on the owner/bartender since he kept serving us long after things got fuzzy and it was clear we were shitfaced.

From what I gathered the owner (Ron) and Tall Jim packed us into the “party bus” MacAddams uses for outdoor parties and trucked us back up to Four Points. I guess one of us had the wherewithal to tell them the cabin number. Jamie was the first one up from what I understand and found us all passed out in the common room of the suite with a note joking that they wouldn’t have our van towed.

While having Meg hugging me like a stuffed animal in her sleep wasn’t the most ideal way to wake up (she’d drooled enough to soak my shirt) we were soon up and sorted enough to tumble over to the Adirondack Grill inside the main hotel for their breakfast buffet of greasy hash browns, puffy sausages, cremated bacon, and Belgian waffles.

It wasn’t until 1pm that we’d had enough food and coffee to feel anything remotely human. At least, I felt human but Terri and Alice were looking more than a little green around the gills. I told them I needed to go back to Miss Angie’s for a shower and change of clothes. I walked back to the B&B, Bigelow meeting me in front of Moka Java in the center of town and trotting softly beside me, only to find Miss Angie gone to the big box store in Birkinsfield. I showered, dressed, took four Advil, drank a liter of water, then called Alice to see how the rest were faring. Seemed like everyone had done the same basic thing and had returned halfway to humanity.

I told her to meet me at the boardwalk and we’d figure out what to do.

The boardwalk hugs the northern scoop of the Bay from the center of town up to Four-Points and has an old Ferris wheel, food stands, and seasonal games. The scent of fried dough is so strong it wafts halfway across town. I swear sometimes I can smell it at the Historical Society!

Anyway, the group were all in good spirits and eating corndogs when Bigelow and I arrived. After a lot of ‘oohing’ and ‘ahhing’ over the cat we had a little hair of the dog and discussed the plans for the day.

Ken, Jamie, and Downie voted to keep to the schedule and head up to Sky Dells. Ken had already called and he couldn’t shift the reservation on the rooms so we either went and pushed things off for a day or didn’t go at all. None of the three wanted to resort to day trips. Meg, Terri, and Alice voted to spend the rest of the day in town, take a cruise around the Bay, and take it easy. Steve’s group and I really didn’t care either way – I mean, we were just hangers on at that point…

Eventually, we all agreed to go up, take the room at the Concorde Lodge, ski the next day and just shorten our time at the sanitarium. So that’s what we did.

Day 2/3: Sky Dells

To get a good idea of what the Sky Dells is like, just think Aspen but in Vermont. Most people around here call it ‘The Dells’ but officially it’s ‘The Sky Dells’ (not sure why it’s one way or the other but I digress). Built into the southern side of Mount Warren, The Sky Dells was built following the abandonment of the Esther Cavitt Sanitarium (more on that later) around 1935-36. Founded by Thomas Jerome, a WW vet who inherited millions from his distant cousin in Cold Spring, Sky Dells filled the gap that the Sanitarium previously held as a vacation resort for the rich and famous. Skiing, sledding, (artificial) hot springs, and other outdoor activities were initially offered year-round and today the town offers four high-class hotels, six skiing lodges, personal cabins (timeshares), and a cable car running up the side of the mountain from Frazier Lake on the shores of the eponymous body of water. Four years ago they installed a toboggan line that, for fifty dollars, lets you can ride back down the side of the mountain. Steve says it’s pretty fun, saying that it’s like a similar ride in Slovenia (although he also admitted that he’d never gone to Europe) where you control the speed of the toboggan.

Steve and Kitty told us their parents used to own a timeshare at ‘The Dells’ and they would go skiing for two weeks every spring until Kitty broke both her ankles when she was twelve falling from a sky-lift. After that she didn’t want anything to do with winter sports and the family sold it. From what I’ve gathered it’s a real upper-class town built solely around tourism.

I think I need to make something quite clear before I continue: Darabont County is primarily based around tourism. Whether it’s hiking, camping, or whitewater rafting in the summer or skiing, snowboarding, or tubing in the winter; the County has you covered. Four-Points runs a lucrative leaf-peeping tour in the autumn and Precipice Bay does Lake Champlain ferries, diving, basically anything to do with water in the spring and summer but it’s the winter that really brings in the crowds. If you want skiing there’s The Dells and SugarLine in Golden Boughs, cross-country skiing around Frazier Lake, an entire ice skating complex nestled among the trees of Attatuck, and plenty of options for lodgings across the county.

It takes about two hours on Route 89 to reach Frazier Lake from The Bay then a 20 minute ride up the gondolas to The Dells. It was around 6pm when we got to the Concorde, a massive log-cabin-esque monstrosity built along the side of the mountain. We got to the rooms and divvied up the keys. Ken had reserved six rooms on the fourth floor and we split up into pairs (except for Ken, he got his own room). Alice and Downie were together (none of us really wanted to listen to them have sex all night long), Meg and Terri were in another, Kitty, Alex and Cecily in another, and Steve was staying with Jimmy. I ended up rooming with Jamie.

We met up for dinner down in the Silverlode Saloon then moved over to the Timberline Bar for drinks. We were all still pretty wiped from the previous binge so we all headed back to the rooms early around 11pm.

The next day was pretty standard: we skied and tubed and generally had fun but there was one event that really threw me personally for a loop and it just so happened to occur at the end of our skiing adventure. It wasn’t until I asked Miss Angie a couple of days later that it really made sense.

We were taking the lift to one of the blue square runs and had been waiting for a while before getting on so we were already a little annoyed. We’d figured that hitting the slopes early would mean less of a crowd – but nope! Crowds all the way. I was sitting with Kitty as the lift took us up when I spotted something at the top of a rise on my left (I was seated on the left of the lift). It looked like a male hiker waving. I prodded Kitty and we waved back when a sudden gust of wind blew snow right off the top of the rise and the figure was gone. We thought at the time he’d fallen backwards down the hill because he clearly hadn’t gone forwards – we would have seen him – but it wasn’t like the rise was super high or anything so even if he did fall backwards he probably wasn’t hurt. We put it out of our minds and enjoyed the run. We decided to try a black diamond next and it just so happened to be on the other side of a disused double black diamond that was beside the blue square run. As we went up I decided to see if there was any sign of the guy.

It was Kitty that saw him first and slapped me with her gloves. There he was, standing at the top of the same rise again, waving. We waved back again and sure enough as soon as we did a gust of wind seemingly scattered his form/shape away like smoke. We were gob smacked and didn’t even do the run, just stayed on the lift until it returned to the base of the mountain.

Now from what Miss Angie told me and the bits and pieces I’ve been able to collect from the newspaper morgue Sky Dells is not immune to fatal accidents or acts of nature. In 1998, a partial avalanche on one of the double black diamond runs killed three skiers and hospitalized six more. Just last year two snowboarders went off a cliff on the same double black diamond (which coincidentally was the run between the blue and black where we saw the hiker), only one of whom survived. Back in 1966, a group of teenage hikers from the county decided to cross over the Tall Men from Sky Dells to Lark Song. Unfortunately for them their trek happened to take place during one of the worst winters the area ever had. Only four of the fifteen hikers were found after nearly ten days in the snow, and only two survived. According to The Precipice Bay Beacon and Hollows Gazette the group had run afoul of an avalanche which scattered them. The four found hikers, unable to find the rest of their group and missing key supplies, headed back down the mountains. All four were in varying degrees of hypothermia and gangrene when the search teams found them and two expired before they could properly get off the mountain.

On the backs of these stories comes Miss Angie’s window-dressing. According to local legend the other eleven hikers still wander the mountain looking for their missing friends. They wave and greet you but when they recognize you aren’t one of the missing members of their group they disappear. That’s the story Miss Angie claims is ‘as true as gravity’. Those looking for something spookier (as if frozen ghosts waving from mountaintops wasn’t spooky enough) can turn to one of the many bastardizations Miss Angie is aware of published in an occult speculation fanzine sometime in the 90’s which posits that seeing the hiking ghosts at night invites them to take you kicking and screaming into the snow. Seeing as the tale of the Wendigo is really popular in the area, it comes as no surprise that the fast ‘spiriting’ away of solitary people by the Wendigo became entwined with this story of frozen specters. Those looking for the spirited away by the Wendigo story can look to the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books (I can’t remember which volume the Wendigo story appears in though…) but at least all versions of the hiker ghosts are thankfully free from cannibalism.

Oh…and the bodies of the eleven lost hikers were never found, BTW…

After my ghostly encounter we all had lunch at the Silverlode and planned for our next point of interest: The Esther Cavitt Sanitarium!

We ate a great lunch at the Silverlode (steak and potatoes were on Ken) then sat out on the lodge balcony while the guys smoked Cuban cigars our esteemed financier brought for the occasion. I could tell Steve was having a lot of fun being part of the group. The girls and I looked for souvenirs and bought a case of bottled water to bring up with us. We were taking a rented SUV to the sanitarium since the roads had stopped being roads sometime in the 60s.

The plan was to drive over (it was about 30 minutes from Sky Dells’ main strip through the trees), poke around a bit, then come back in time for a late dinner. The sanitarium was supposedly no longer in use, there was no security service keeping watch, and no one offered tours or anything. It was widely considered public property so there was the latent threat of drug addicts and squatters hidden in the shadows. Jamie, Cecily, Kitty, and Alex elected to stay at the lodge since the car couldn’t hold all of us so I was the one stuck with the rest. In no time we packed up and were speeding through the forest.

The drive through the forest was down an overgrown dirt path haphazardly cut through the trees. A couple of dilapidated yellow arrow signs, each riddled with buckshot, lazily directed us down a couple of forks until we got to a huge clearing and the imposing building appeared.

Once beautiful grounds were weed-choked and barren, old topiaries were monstrosities riddled with creeping vines reminding me of the dog-Thing from John Carpenter’s movie, and the roof of the closest wing had collapsed over time. It was hardly an auspicious beginning…

Esther Cavitt Sanitarium, Frazier Lake/Sky Dells

The Esther Cavitt Sanitarium leans against the Southern side of the Tall Men a few miles parallel to Sky Dells. It’s a somewhat ramshackle building in the old style with a main building and three wings, two attached on either end of the main and the last free-standing behind built into the mountainside. The main entrance is a stone-and-mortar affair looking more like a Tudor manor house complete with what was once an oval gravel driveway that disappears into the trees leading to Sky Dells and the main road. It sits on a peculiar area of land disputed between Frazier Lake and Sky Dells but since its abandonment in the 60’s that particular argument has faded. No one wants a brooding dead resort in their jurisdiction.

Doing some digging with the help of Mr. Berry and Miss Angie I was able to find out some of the history of the building – both the official and unofficial accounts.

Ground was initially broken in 1893 for the foundation of what would eventually become the Esther Cavitt Sanitarium but at the beginning was christened The Weiland-Guehring Institute for Healthful Living. Construction would not be completed until the Spring of 1895. David Weiland, a fairly well-known pulmonologist out of New York, had partnered with a psychiatrist out of Vienna named Friedrich Guehring to build a tuberculosis resort in the crisp mountain air of Vermont. This was during the height of the tuberculosis epidemic, where doctors believed that fresh, cool, crisp air helped to ‘cure’ the disease. Having seen and been recognized for his work on soldiers with tuberculosis during The Civil War, Weiland determined a link between infantry soldiers who inhaled cannon smoke and the advanced symptoms of the disease – falling neatly in line with the medical beliefs of the time. The Precipice Bay Lighthouse declared: “Famed Physician opens Institute to eradicate the scourge of Consumption!”

The Weiland-Guehring Institute was a sanatorium mainly built to continue Weiland’s treatments but was designed to Guehring’s specifications to test his theories on psychological/spatial comfort. The founders made a clear distinction between ‘sanitarium’ and ‘sanatorium’ that continued throughout the building’s history. The Institute was a sanatorium: a hospital built for the express purpose of medical care. It would eventually become a sanitarium: a pleasure resort with emphasis on healthy living. And yes, before we really get into it, Friedrich Guehring was unfortunately related to THAT Guehring – he of Hitler’s inner circle – but Friedrich’s work was of a far more wholesome and innocuous variety. He believed that open, bright places and positive environments would speed up recovery and that psychological belief could assist the body in fighting disease. The Institute’s wide roofs were flat and lined with white-stone gravel for sunbathing and outdoor activities. Indoor conservatories took up the top floor of the entire building with enormous windows for those patients unable to be outside.

According to local rumors, the Institute had two faces: the clean resort for the rich and famous or rich and consumptive, and the darker labs run by a Frankensteinian madman hell-bent on human experimentation. As always, Miss Angie warns that many bastardizations have spread about Weiland and the Institute, but the main stories fall into 3 distinct categories:

1) Weiland was a sexual deviant

2) The Institute was a front for unethical government experimentation

3) Weiland performed unnecessary surgery for his own amusement

And really anything in-between has been gossiped around the county. Weiland was accused of ‘unfounded advances’ by a pharmaceutical heiress (buried at the bottom of page seven of the Lighthouse dated August 10, 1898) but the heiress apparently retracted her accusation two days later. There was a disturbing editorial published in the third 1899 issue of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal by Weiland asserting that extensive surgery was the only true way to cure TB and that apparatus were being developed (presumably by him) to replace excised lung tissue. It ended with the radical statement that replacing the lungs of those afflicted was the only sure way to cure the condition. The letter was widely lambasted in the next few issues of the journal.

In February of 1901, Weiland was detained by police in connection with an amputation he’d performed on Timothy Spranger, a guest at the Institute who had fallen during a hike and been knocked unconscious. When he awoke he found that Weiland had amputated both his legs below the knee due to compound fractures and blood-loss. Spranger believed that there was no way his fall could possibly have shattered his legs enough to require amputation and loudly claimed that Weiland had flashbacks to the Civil War and amputated unnecessarily. Aside from the police note stating that Weiland was taken for questioning that’s where the story disappears. Miss Angie claims that Guehring paid off Spranger to shut down the suit.

She might be right because Weiland effectively falls off the map after that. Guehring continued the Institute, the rich and famous still stayed, and it was profitable enough to pay for a road from Frazier Lake up the mountain to the Institute, but Weiland wasn’t in the public eye. He was still listed as chief medical officer in ads and leaflets but he doesn’t reappear in the papers until 1919 and the Bleak Hill Asylum riot (more on this later). The main instigator of the riot, Ferber Cuttle, was a known lunatic and had been at the asylum for about a week before the riot that resulted in forty-seven inmate deaths, the deaths of eight guards, and enough injuries that the asylum was temporarily shut down. The warden of Bleak Hill took it upon himself to ask Guehring’s opinion on Ferber’s condition.

Needless to say nothing after that went well…

Weiland declared that Ferber’s insanity “caused by the vagaries of natural malady synthesized into a single ifrit of madness can be dispelled with modern scientific technology and knowledge”. Considering the chaos Ferber caused in only six short days at Bleak Hill, he was quickly and permanently transferred to the Institute under Weiland’s care; a fact that I’m sure made the Bleak Hill board happy to wash their hands of such a caustic individual. Neither patient nor physician would be mentioned again until 1922 when authorities responded to a fire at the Institute.

It must be noted that from 1919-1922 business at the Institute took the mother of all nose-dives. Miss Angie says that it was Guehring who set the fire to recoup some of the losses but he couldn’t know how bad the fire would get. Thankfully, that nose-dive meant that there were only twelve guests at the time of the fire but only two were alive when the fire began.

When the fire was finally put out the full horror of the situation was finally revealed.

Ferber and Weiland were found in a secret room in the Institute’s extensive basement (which was coincidentally completely missing from the blueprints) burned to cinders. Ferber was lashed to a steel bedframe and Weiland curled into a fetal position underneath. Another room was where searchers found ten of the final guests, also burned but clearly having undergone a variety of…creative…surgical procedures. The Lighthouse and Hollows Gazette both were thin on details but Miss Angie claims that each victim was, as she’d heard it, “hollowed” out – missing intestines, lungs, other organs, bones, and limbs. The victims’ families sued Weiland’s estate and went after Guehring but nothing stuck to the Austrian immigrant who quickly fled back to Europe just in time to die at the beginning of WWII.

The building fell to disrepair and no one wanted anything to do with such a ‘cursed’ spot until a group of entrepreneurial gentlemen purchased the land for 3% of its worth and decided it was the perfect place to build a resort.

The Esther Cavitt Sanitarium opened in 1928 to no fanfare and even less media coverage. Rebuilt to maintain the basic structures, the redesign included lush topiary greens, four tennis courts, an outdoor pool, and polo field. It was advertised only to the rich and famous for ‘healthy respite from the bustle of day-to-day life in the city’. There was a wellspring of these types of places in the 20s and 30s – vacation resorts ostensibly built for convalescence but really retreats for the rich to eat and play and…well, get up to carnal fun. The Sanitarium was named after one of the victims of Weiland’s madness – presumably to ‘honor’ the memory of what happened but it all really was in poor taste.

It’s important to note that while the rest of the world was deep in the throes of The Great Depression, such plebian concerns remained below the 1 % of that time. The millionaires and robber barons and captains of industry continued their lavish lifestyles undisturbed by the economic turmoil of the rest of society – remind you of anything? – and places like Esther Cavitt allowed them to do so outside the public eye. I guess even back then the rich and powerful remembered the guillotine…

The sanitarium was open from the spring of 1928 to the fall of 1934. Not much information about it is in the archives but, as always, Miss Angie had some stories to tell.

Like I said, the big movers and shakers of the time used places like the sanitarium for their games out of the public eye. Places like Esther Cavitt guaranteed absolute secrecy and discretion so playboys and perverted old millionaires used them for orgies, mistresses, etc. Miss Angie could only give me one story that had anything verifiable from the newspaper morgue:

On Wednesday, July 9, 1933, the Darabont County Sheriff’s Department responded to a call from the Esther Cavitt Sanitarium reporting a dead woman. The woman was a known prostitute from New Stickney and Birkinsfield named Sarah Gasbarro, aged 27. She was found in an empty room in an unused wing of the resort, naked, covered in blood and semen. I was able to pull the coroner’s report and it states the cause of death was sepsis and blood loss due to a perforated bowel. She had been exposed to the elements during and/or following her death and there was some argument upon discovery as to whether her body was frozen from cold or rigor mortis. No one at the sanitarium had seen her and informed the Sheriff’s Department that she was found in a wing of the resort that was not in use and thus was not patrolled by the security staff. As even summer nights can get cold that high up in the mountains it was ruled that she broke into the room after an altercation at a different location and expired without medical care. Nothing else was in the coroner’s report aside from cause of death and minimal examination results but one of the key points was an estimate that she had been dead for at least 48 hours.

Now I hope you’ve come to the same conclusion: Sarah Gasbarro was hired to entertain a guest of the resort, obviously something went wrong and when it was clear she was on her way out the staff shuffled her into the unused wing. They waited until she was dead, waited some more, then called the Sheriff. The sanitarium staff obviously did their job well since there was a one line death notice buried in the middle of the obituaries of the Frazier Lake Crier and everyone went on with their lives.

Miss Angie warned me that a lot of stories were full of window-dressing about satanic cults and orgies but that it was utter hogwash. She also said that Sarah’s death had been bastardized over the decades with such salacious details as her stomach was filled with semen, her genitalia were mutilated in the manner of Jack the Ripper, or the cause of her bowel perforation was due to “being buggered with a knife” (she specifically used air quotes for that last bit). For Miss Angie, Sarah’s death was a tragedy – caused by rough play by one of the sanitarium guests – but there wasn’t anything satanic or supernatural about it. The rich and famous always have some dark secret in their closets, she said, it just so happened that Sarah was too big for the closet.

Soon after the sanitarium closed its doors fully. FDR’s rationing and war preparations made it impossible for the resort to stay afloat no matter how many fat-cats were willing to spend thousands to stay. And so the building sat vacant and Sky Dells was born to fill the void for filthy rich entertainment.

Now both Steve and Miss Angie say that there were stories – hearsay and the like – that the government had a secret lab at the sanitarium in the 50s and 60s. These stories fed the tales of UFOs and bigfoot in the area; but I wasn’t able to find anything verifiable, no witnesses, no photographs. So officially, the sanitarium closed in 1934 and has laid silent and unused up to the present day.

Given all this history, you’d expect that the place would be overrun with ghosts and paranormal occurrences but I’ve got to burst your bubble: we didn’t see anything. The place was eerie, don’t get me wrong, but we didn’t see or hear ANYTHING supernatural. We took tons of EVP but for obvious reasons we don’t know if we have anything yet. But I can tell you that the place felt wrong with a capital ‘W’.

You know how people say that someplace just doesn’t feel correct? That a perfectly innocuous place gives them the heebie-jeebies? I’m not going to rekindle the debate about infrasound that both science and Mythbusters have come to loggerheads about, but with such an old building who knows what kind of equipment could still be turning deep in the bowels of the place’s basement? All I can tell you is that it was dimly but fully lit and, while cold, it wasn’t freezing or bitter; there wasn’t anything scary or threatening about the building in any actual physical way but something about it was…haunting.

Maybe I haven’t has as much experience in URBEX as the boys, or I just haven’t spent enough time in abandoned spaces, but seeing a place that I’d read about being clean and luxurious rotted into a piss-stained hovel was just depressing. There wasn’t a single surface that wasn’t covered in a thick layer of soot, urine, feces, vomit or some combination thereof…marble floors were cracked from fires, the rococo interiors were ripped up or smashed or burned, and I don’t think there was a single intact window across the entire place. Sound also didn’t act normally, or rather how you thought it should, nothing carried in the air – whether due to the mountains of trash strewn about or the way curtains and clothes and dirty sleepingbags were stuffed against every available opening to the outside – and there weren’t any echoes. I think that was what really got to me; footsteps didn’t carry and for the enormous atrium full of empty space there weren’t any echoes.

There were no doors that we could see anywhere. We came in the entryway under the stone ‘portcullis’ and were immediately assaulted by the stink of rot and mildew. A pile of miscellaneous garbage and broken furniture blocked the two stairways leading up forcing us down a wide hall covered in graffiti to the main ‘ward’. A huge mass of burned stuff – it was impossible to identify the individual items in the charred pile – dominated the large room and the concrete walls were covered in a thick patina of smoke and spray paint. Broken bottles, needles, and various drug paraphernalia were strewn in the corners and soiled camping equipment lay in haphazard heaps around the bonfire. Thankfully, there weren’t any indications that the users of any of the equipment were around.

From the main hall we decided to separate and went up the two clear stairways up to the upper floor. Ken, Alice, Downie, and I took the stairs to the right and Steve, Jimmy, Terri, and Meg took the left. The stench of urine and feces was overpowering in the stairwell and we quickly covered our mouths and noses with our clothes. It seemed like the residents of the building used the stairs going down to the basement as a communal toilet…it was about as disgusting as you can imagine. With the path down literally blocked with shit, we went up.

The second floor was a wide corridor lined with doors leading across the building to the opposite staircase. Once again, every door was missing (I’m assuming they were taken down and used in the bonfire) so it was clear as we moved across that most were offices. Ken was using the EMF monitor while Downie filmed and Alice and I used voice recorders. It was slow going and more than a little tedious. It seemed obvious that whatever dark things happened at Esther Cavitt hadn’t created a lasting effect. Sure, the building itself was creepy but in the same way a disused and unlit underground walkway was creepy – it was dark, graffitied within an inch of its life, and littered in trash with piss and shit liberally covering the walls. But it was all surface and nothing underneath.

To put it into perspective: the claustrophobic, permeating darkness I’d felt in The Point was entirely missing from the sanitarium halls. Sunlight filtered dimly into the building from all the broken windows and the occasional breeze brought gusts of sweet-smelling air through the empty rooms unlike the choking darkness of the forest. Everything we were doing seemed so perfunctory – I think even Ken felt it…there just wasn’t anything scary about the old building. Uncanny, yes; unsettling, most definitely; but nothing paranormal was going on…

The stairs going up to the roof were blocked on one end and missing on the other so we returned to the main ward. While we waited for the other four members of our group to return, Downie and Ken poked around the nurse’s station. It wasn’t that long of a wait.

It seemed like the basement access on the left staircase was clear and free from bodily excretions – at least enough for them to get down – but there was a(nother) mountain of furniture blocking the underground hall. They did EVP recordings and EMF sweeps but, just like us, there wasn’t even a blip. Out of idle curiosity we decided to all take a look and soon enough it became clear the barrier was insurmountable. Plywood fragments, chairs, metal desks, seemingly everything the constructors could get their hands on and move without equipment was crammed from one side of the corridor to the other and from floor to ceiling. It was actually impressive but also somewhat worrying…I mean, if the squatters took down every door to burn for warmth why would they waste any wooden furniture on such an edifice?

Since the way further in was blocked and none of us wanted to wade through the toilet in the opposite stairwell we put it up as a botched job and headed back to the car.

I think the fact we were running behind schedule adversely affected our experience at the sanitarium. Don’t get me wrong some seriously messed-up stuff happened there (both on and off the books so to speak) but we just weren’t feeling it. Whatever happened didn’t seem to leave anything behind. Maybe the lingering dread in The Point means it really was something supernatural that ‘disappeared’ the children? And the reason nothing feels wrong at Esther Cavitt is just because the cause wasn’t supernatural? Not that I’m giving any credence to the stories of The Witch but crazy people doing crazy things doesn’t have to have a supernatural reason – that’s just people.

Yeah, I think the fact we only had a few hours to get there, poke around, and get back before dark seriously impeded our experience. There isn’t any power there and we weren’t going to drive the van with all the equipment up along with generators if we weren’t going to spend significant time investigating. Unfortunately, we were still paying for our drunken first night together but despite that I have high hopes for our next stop: Hole Bar in Cold Spring, our first overnight ghost hunt!

Credit: Jenni Kinoshita

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