Rutland's Abandoned Prison Camp: Ruins, Graffiti, and Maybe A Ghost or Two?

Back in March, Tony and I took a road trip to Rutland, Massachusetts to visit an abandoned prison camp located in Rutland State Park. Rutland is located west of Worcester, and we had never been there before. It's a very beautiful part of the state and I recommend visiting. 

One small caveat, though. I don't recommend visiting when there's been a huge ice storm, like we did! A big nor'easter had hit the state the day before our trip, and while it brought only rain to Boston, Rutland had been hit with ice, which we didn't realize until after we were beyond Worcester. All the trees in Rutland were covered with glittering ice, making them very sparkly and captivating, but the two mile walk from the Rutland State Park parking lot to the prison camp was treacherously slippery. It took us a lot longer than we anticipated to walk to the camp. I have learned my lesson to check the local weather forecast before heading on a road trip! 

Solitary confinement cells. 

According to the signs in the park, the prison was conceived in 1898 as a "temporary industrial camp for prisoners... to rehabilitate them for their return to society while reclaiming wasteland and abandoned property..." Four years later, a Rutland farm from the 1700s was repurposed and used as a kitchen, dining area, and housing for the camp. The inmates also built additional structures, and an abandoned schoolhouse was incorporated into the prison as well. 

In 1905, a tuberculosis outbreak necessitated the construction of a hospital, which remained in use throughout the prison's history. The park's signage notes the following: "While most of the prisoners of the camp were minor offenders, some patient prisoners in later years were 'lifers' and murderers, so the hospital was a secure facility." The camp also had 150 acres of farmland which were used to raise livestock (including prize winning horses) and grow enough fruits and vegetables to feed the inmates. They even produced excess to sell locally. The fruits and vegetables were stored in an enormous underground root cellar, which still exists. 

The entrance to the root cellar.

Inside the root cellar.

Sometimes in old movies, prisoners are shown breaking big rocks into little rocks. There is some truth to that, at least at the Rutland prison, which had a rock crushing plant that made concrete, gravel, and sand for road repairs. It sounds a little grim. The solitary confinement cells, the ruins of which are still standing, are also very small and grim. They're covered with colorful graffiti and don't have any bars on them now, but it was easy to imagine how dark and confining they would have been in the prison's heyday. We didn't visit the nearby cemetery of unmarked prisoner graves, but I think that sounds grim as well. 

The prison camp was closed in 1934 because the land it stood on was part of the watershed of the newly created Quabbin Reservoir. There certainly is a lot of fresh water in Rutland State Park, including a giant beaver pond that we walked past on the way to the prison's ruins. We didn't see a beaver, but we did see some of their lodges. 

Beaver pond with a beaver lodge. 

Just in case you don't know where you're going...

I couldn't easily find any spooky legends associated with the prison camp. The blog Haunted New England mentions a legend that the ghost of the warden's wife still haunts the prison, but they couldn't find many other details. And in the comments on Abandoned Wonders, I found the following comment from 2019:

This place is incredibly haunted. Within the last 10 years, a group opened something in the tunnel area and called a non-human entity into the camp. Be advised! It followed me home and stuck around for about 3 months. Not fun.

Those were the only legends I could find about the camp. Overall, I found the prison camp interesting but not really spooky. We were the only people there for most of our visit, which was great, but also be aware that the area is isolated. As always, travel with a friend if you're wandering out in the woods, particularly to the ruins of an abandoned prison. 

A view inside the root cellar.

Bunhgole Liquors: Salem's Haunted Liquor Store

A few weeks ago we went up to Salem on a pre-Halloween excursion. We did a lot of our usual things. We drank cocktails made with pumpkin vodka. We visited witchcraft stores. We bought candy at Ye Olde Pepper Company. We visited a cheesy haunted house where we had to wear 3-D glasses.

You get the idea. We also took photos of Bunghole Liquors on Derby Street. It's a popular photo stop because it has a cool retro sign and "bunghole" sounds like a dirty word. Of course a bunhgole is actually the hole cut into a wooden cask so liquor can flow out, but the owners of Bunhole Liquors still play up the raunchy innuendo of the name. Their website has the motto "We're not #1 butt we're right up there," and you can buy t-shirts with slogans like "I Got It In the Bunghole."

Like many places in Salem, Bunghole Liquors is surrounded by some strange legends and weird history. According to their website the building on Derby Street was originally a funeral home where embalming was performed in the basement. During Prohibition the funeral home operated as a speakeasy. Guests would drink contraband alcohol in the basement surrounded by corpses and embalming equipment. It sounds creepy to me but I guess some people will do anything for a drink! The secret password to get in was "See you in the bunghole."

There are persistent rumors that a network of tunnels once ran between various buildings in Salem, and according to Sam Baltrusis's book Wicked Salem the bootlegging morticians smuggled in their illicit booze using a tunnel that ran from the basement of the funeral home down to the harbor. Is that true or just a rumor? I don't know but you can read more about Salem's tunnels in Christopher Jon Luke Dowgin's 2012 book Salem Secret Underground: The History of the Tunnels in the City.

After Prohibition the owner of funeral home gave up on embalming and went into the liquor business legally. In 1933 Bunghole Liquors became the second liquor store to open in Salem after Prohibition.  The tunnel (if it existed) was sealed up and the embalming equipment was sealed in the walls behind plaster. So let that sink in for a minute. Bunghole Liquors used to be a funeral home. Corpses were embalmed in the basement. The equipment was just shoved into the walls and hidden away. And there may have been a secret tunnel.

That sounds like the setup for a horror film to me, and unsurprisingly some staff at Bunghole Liquors have reported some strange things when working late. According to Baltrusis's Wicked Salem workers at the Bunghole tend to avoid the basement, a location where security cameras have recorded unexplained lights. Several have reported seeing a woman disappear after walking into the store. Perhaps strangest of all are the accounts of an unseen phantom cat that rubs against the legs of people working there. 

It's all kind of spooky, but what do you expect from a store that sells wine, beer and spirits? Get it? Spirits? I know, a bad pun. 

Weird Marblehead, Part One: Ghosts, Tunnels, and H.P. Lovecraft

This weekend my friend Lori and I took a little tour of Marblehead, Massachusetts.

I don't use the word charming too much, but Marblehead is probably one of the most charming towns I have ever been to. Charming old 18th century homes everywhere, charming narrow streets, and of course a charming location on an isolated peninsula.

This might come as a surprise, but Marblehead was much beloved by the famous horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft was obsessed with the 18th century, and raved to all his friends about the town's historic architecture.

Lovecraft showed his love in a strange way - by setting several of his stories in a thinly fictionalized version of Marblehead that he called Kingsport. Probably the most famous of these is "The Festival," which tells how a young man comes to Kingsport to celebrate the winter solstice with distant relatives he has never met before.

Here's how Lovecraft describes the town:

... Kingsport with its ancient vanes and steeples, ridgepoles and chimneypots, wharves and small bridges, willow-trees and graveyards; endless labyrinths of steep, narrow, crooked streets, and dizzy church-crowned central peak that time durst not touch; ceaseless mazes of colonial houses piled and scattered at all angles and levels like a child's disordered blocks...

It all sounds very quaint on the surface but - surprise! - by the story's end the narrator is descending deep into the earth with a horde of semi-human cultists to celebrate ancient unspeakable rites:

... I saw some side passages or burrows leading from unknown recesses of blackness to this shaft of nighted mystery. Soon they became excessively numerous, like impious catacombs of nameless menace; and their pungent odor of decay grew quite unbearable... I shivered that a town should be so aged and maggoty with subterranean evil. 

And that's how H. P. Lovecraft shows his love for a favorite town!

But all kidding aside, I think this story demonstrates the dual fascination people feel about this part of the country. On the one hand it's old, quaint and charming, but on the other hand some creepy things definitely happened here in the past and many people feel like they have left their imprint on the landscape. It's no accident that so many horror stories are set in New England, or that America's three greatest horror writers (Poe, Lovecraft and King) all were born here.

Marblehead these days is a very posh and charming town, but when it was founded it was a rough-and-tumble fishing town full of unchurched sailors. Some old European folklore survived in Marblehead longer than in other parts of New England, and several famous witches (Mammy Redd, Edward Dimond and Moll Pitcher) were also born in the town. And those tunnels Lovecraft wrote about may not just be fiction...

On our Marblehead trip Lori and I decided to first visit Fort Sewall, which was built on a bluff overlooking the ocean in the 1600s. The fort was expanded and renovated in the 1700s, and played a key role in the War of 1812 when its cannons saved the U.S.S. Constitution from being attacked by British warships. The fort is now a public park and on the National Register of Historic Places.

Something we didn't see on the trip were the caves located in the cliff underneath the fort. According to Pam Matthias Peterson's Marblehead: Myths, Legends and Lore there are caves in the cliff which were used in the past as a hiding place for smugglers. These caves would flood at high tide, and the town sealed them up to prevent people from being trapped inside and drowning. That sounds like a good idea to me.

Peterson also writes that according to local legend a vast network of tunnels runs beneath Marblehead, and even connects the caves to the main town. These tunnels were supposedly used by the smugglers to carry on their business undetected by the British. Peterson claims the tunnels are mostly just a legend, but at least one house in town (the King Hooper mansion) does have a sealed-off doorway in its cellar. Perhaps there is a kernel of truth behind the subterranean tunnels in Lovecraft's story after all?

A group of ghost hunters have investigated Fort Sewall several times. Over the course of six years, Nick Smith of Queens, New York has investigated Fort Sewall using high-tech ghost-hunting technology like an electromagnetic field detector and a microphone that can pick up sounds inaudible to the human ear.

Smith said he has twice captured a voice at the site yelling, “Help!” And another time, when Smith was alone at the fort, he said he recorded a voice asking a question, “as though a person were standing behind him.”

“There’s definitely something going on here,” Smith said as he setup equipment for the night’s investigation. “We just haven’t collected enough data to prove what that something is.”

From this November 2013 WCVB article.  

Smith wasn't sure what's causing the haunting. The fort has a long history, but no particular tragedy is connected to it.

It does have a dungeon, though, so there was undoubtedly a lot of misery associated with it. The dungeon and the other rooms are sealed off with iron bars, but we were able to see inside. They look like a good place for ghosts to hang out.

If you want to watch Nick Smith and some colleagues investigate the fort you can find a video on YouTube. The beginning does feature the voice saying "Help me", which is pretty spooky.

Next week I'll post more about Marblehead, including its most famous ghost. Stay tuned!

More Weird New Haven: Grove Street Cemetery

Here's my second post about some strange and wonderful things I saw a few weeks ago in charming and historic New Haven, Connecticut.

In addition to visiting Midnight Mary's grave at the Evergreen Cemetery, I took a guided tour of the Grove Street Cemetery, which abuts the Yale campus. Grove Street Cemetery is a beautiful neo-classical style burying ground, which means many of the monuments are inspired by the art of ancient Greece and Rome. You won't find many Victorian angels here, but you will find some unusual monuments, like this Roman tumulus (mound) style vault and Grecian sphinx.

New Haven's first settlers buried their dead under and around Center Church on New Haven Green. This practice continued for 160 years until a yellow fever outbreak led the city's leaders to create a newer, more modern burying ground in 1796. The markers from the old burying ground were moved to Grove Street, but not apparently the bodies. Every now and then a corpse pops up from under the Green, as happened recently when a large tree fell in a storm, revealing a skeleton entangled in its roots.

One of the original settlers' graves relocated to Grove Street Cemetery.

New Haven was a prominent mercantile city and has one of America's best universities, so Grove Street is the resting place for many famous people. On our tour we saw the graves of Noah Webster, Eli Whitney and Glenn Miller, to name just a few.

Our tour guide did not tell us any ghost stories, but did address a couple urban legends that surround the cemetery. First, she emphatically denied that any secret tunnels connect the cemetery to the nearby Yale Medical School. Apparently there is a popular legend that in the 19th century enterprising medical students dug tunnels into the cemetery so they could steal cadavers for their experiments. Interestingly, two miles of steam tunnels do lie underneath the Yale campus, and go very close to the Grove Street Cemetery. One of the tunnels is rumored to lead to a basement filled with brains in formaldehyde-filled jars. Again, this is just a rumor, and the steam tunnels are locked and dangerous as they are indeed filled with steam. Don't go trespassing! You will be covered in burns as you are dragged off to jail, which wouldn't be good.

Back to our tour guide. Second, she said she was not able to comment on whether any of Yale's secret student societies conduct rituals in Grove Street Cemetery. She did say, however, that at times she has seen students wearing robes doing something in the graveyard. She left what they were doing to our imaginations, and I in turn will leave it to yours.

I have a good friend who lived in New Haven for many years. He told me that he had heard rumors that someone was leaving sacrificial offerings at the cemetery's dramatic front gate. What did those offerings consist of? He didn't know. I'm sorry I don't have anything more specific to share with you, but sometimes uncertainty makes these urban legends even more interesting.

The entrance to Grove Street is very, very dramatic, and I can see why aspiring young occultists might want to leave some offerings at the foot of those Egyptian-style pillars with their ominous inscription. The gate was not built for any occult purposes, however. Egyptian revival was the architectural vogue when it was constructed in 1845, and it was a style the builders felt was not offensive to any Christian denominations. The inscription "The Dead Shall Be Raised" probably strikes a lot of modern people as a quote from a horror movie, but is actually from Corinthians in the New Testament.

If you are in New Haven definitely visit Grove Street Cemetery. It's beautiful, peaceful and full of history. And if peace and beauty aren't your thing, you can ponder some of those rumors and urban legends instead.