Though not quite the perilous expedition I was somewhat expecting, Adventure 2 of 2007 has lived up to expectation in the way of good friends and good times. I had a fine time during my very brief stay upstate before Dave came to pick me up for festivities. Since my parents were away I agreed to babysit their dogs, four in all. And naturally my nieces wanted to sleep over to their house with me, so they were added into the whole babysitting mix. The following day I was outta there. We were all convening in Ithaca. After the reunion, we geared up and proceeded to our first destination. The abandoned military base. Getting in was much easier than any of us anticipated. We basically drove up a somewhat secluded road, parked the car behind an abandoned county truck, climbed the fence and we were in. The area was quite vast. But immediately ahead of us was an old run down building, I guess a building where weapons or what not were melted down. The place was pretty cool, two levels with a large antique control room and tubs under of the floor filled with about 5 feet of water. There was a tower attached to the building which I climbed to gain a better perspective of the place. There wasn’t really much going on, I could see the prison a bit away and an abandoned line of railcars down the dirt road. We continued down that road and inspected the cars quickly, as there wasn’t much interesting about them, then a few igloo-like storage units that were locked up tight and impenetrable.
The paranormal attachment to the place was reports of ghost deer. Indeed the lands kept an amazing population of deer, more deer than I have EVER seen. Mixed in among the normal deer were a few white deer here and there. Ghost deer: debunked. Though I can honestly say I have never seen a pure white deer before, I would have much rather caught a glimpse of a ghost deer. At some point we decided to return to the car to get some food and alcohol in us before we continued on. As we neared the gate we caught a peek at a white truck approaching. We responded by hiding quickly behind the tall grass and waiting for the truck to leave. But as we were exiting, a man was waiting at the gate. Since our car was on the other side, there was really no avoiding him. He was nice enough to inform us that we were trespassing on a government installation. He was actually pretty annoyed by it and the cell phone is his hand suggested that he was about to or had already called the police. Yeah, he was a dick, and while Dave was apologizing to him and trying to come up with a reason why we were there. I walked up and told him that we were there because we heard about white deer and we were hoping to see them. When he said we could just go up the road to see them, I told him we had been there already and hadn’t seen any. He didn’t know what to saw to this and we kind of just stared at each other for a moment. We apologized for parking the car in his property (now I’m thinking he was lying about that) and got out of there.
We decided it wasn’t really worth going back as we planned since there wasn’t anything too interested to go back to. Instead we went to a bar and played darts and drank and talked. It was a very long game of darts due to both the crappy board and broken darts. It came down to Clancy and me, but in the end I took the victory. From there we went back to Curran’s, picked up his girlfriend got some more drinks and headed to the cemetery, as shown below.
At some point we made it onto a college campus, snuck into a fraternity house, used their pool table, stole a book each, and one skull and left through a window, Clancy carrying all items in a stolen garbage bucket. To be honest I was so completely wasted, I don’t know how I managed to remember it.
It was about this time that we basically became nocturnal beings, staying up until anywhere between 4am to 9am and sleeping during the majority of the day. The following destination was a place called Split Rock Quarry. Long ago it boasted a very successful limestone mining operation.
But in 1918 a fire broke out. The flames (and toxic fumes) were so intense it pushed firefighters back for over an hour. As it continued to spread from building to building, the fire hoses lost pressure. But the firefighters and workers continued in their efforts, believing the pressure would soon be restored. Unfortunately it wasn’t and soon the munitions building caught and 1-3 tons of TNT made an explosion that rocked the area so strongly that people thought it was an earthquake. 50 people were killed. A mass burial was conducted for the several limbs and unidentifiables in one big grave.Well it took us forever to find this fucking thing. We walked trails for miles and no sign. We tried to extract information from locals at a dive bar. We looked for hints online. Finally it was a group of teenage kids who pointed us in the right direction. Figures I guess. I gotta say, one of the more fun things to do on this trip was fucking with people. Having said that as we were approaching the great stone crusher, he hear voices....human voices. We all duck down and Curran and I proceed in stealth mode. We can hear them more distinctly now, two guys and a girl, early 20's maybe. Now we are quite a ways away from them and higher elevation- wise. So I pick up a stone and throw it in their direction. They hear it and the girl SCREAMS something horrible. And one of the guys says, “I swear on my mother’s grave, I heard something over there ” As they make their way down the trail and back to the road we continue throwing rocks to make noises and JUST as they are about out of range, I make a blood-curdling scream from the depths of my fucking soul. I can only imagine they booked it the fuck out of there. Now that they were gone it was time to inspect the ruins. It was actually quite impressive, this stone crusher thing looked like half of a Mayan pyramid from the side. We scaled the rock on the back side of it to the top. It’s kind of hard to describe what it looked like, but there was plenty of opportunity for a good 100 foot fall. We climbed back down and approached the stone crusher from its foot. On each side were man-made tunnels. We entered them and occasionally stood still, closing our eyes and trying to imagine the events that took place there, trying to open ourselves up to any energies. Though it was at first kind of creepy being in this tunnel with weird writings on the walls, I wasn’t sensing anything, none of us were experiencing anything and after one time of accidentally scaring people when I shifted after the lights were out, I decided I had to do something. So I waited until we turned out the lights again and everyone was silent, and then yelled or made a noise and scared the fuck out of Clancy. It was HIGH LARRY ASS Before we left were tried to invoke spirits by other means as well, i.e. reading an account of the disaster, singing a song from that period, I even yelled a recorded quote the foreman yelled to the men right before the explosion. We got nothing and so we moved on.
We went straight from that location to another, the Oriskany Battlefield. The sightings reported here were more of a residual kind. We didn’t reach this site until about 4am. Since it was on the roadside, we entered the woods in a section we thought might lead us more discreetly to the battlefield. Though we ultimately had to turn around and walk down the road, there were still a few good moments, i.e. entering through an opening in the forest that resembled the mouth of a very demonic looking face (per the shapes of branches and tree) and an eery sound...that turned out to be a toad. In fact most of the alarming sounds during this trip were made by toads. There was nothing at all creepy about the battlefield and if there -was- anything there, it wasn’t interested in making itself known. And so we moved on. Yeah, at 6 in the morning we made for our next destination.
Old Forge - Big Moose Lake - Adirondack Park. It was here where Grace Brown was killed by her fiancé Chester Gilette in the early 1900's, drowned in the river. There murder has inspired many literary and film works, the most famous being, “An American Tragedy.” It is said that Brown’s spirit resides there still.
We drove around for a while looking for the lake and stopped by a place to have the most amazing donut I have ever eaten. We reached our campsite around 8am and passed out by 9. Long story short, a few teenagers pointed us to the right place, but because the area was all residential and even the kids didn’t find the site all that exciting, he instead decided to go back to our campsite and enjoy the night with alcohol, s’mores and very long (and at times very disturbing) games of “marry, fuck, kill.”
The next day was July 4th. We went back to Ithaca, watched “Transformers,” and participated in more drinking, more grave yards, personal fireworks, and billiards. At one point we were just walking around and came across a group of girls singing into a phone. They asked us over and wanted us to help them sing “American” songs into their friend’s voicemail. I guess she was Venezuelan and just about to gain American citizenship. Somehow we persuaded to sing “Hey jude” which of course is NOT American, then other songs followed and more people joined in, it was like people just kept gravitating to the crazy drunk singing group on the sidewalk and lending their own voice to it. Figuring that was probably the highlight of the evening we just went back to Curran’s apartment and BS’ed and watched videos online. I’m happy to say I got everyone quoting either “Salad Fingers” or “Spoilsbury Toast Boy.”
Clancy was now gone and the next day there was great deliberation on whether to travel east or west, but we eventually settled on east. Destination: Pinebush, well known UFO hotspot. We were specifically looking for magnetic caves and our intent was to sleep in them for a night. Of course finding these things is much harder than we had considered. We had a couple of hints and so we drove up a nearby mountain. Since we weren’t supposed to be there at night, we had to yet again be sneaky. [As Dave and Curran got ready, I began to approach a deer that was feeding on some grass. It was a very surreal moment, in that the deer did not run away. I was probably no more than 10 feet away from her before she become nervous and slowly ambled off.] The complication to the day was the rain. It had been raining all day, it was still raining. The trail was at many times flooded over, forcing us to find a way around it, that was only a little more dry. When there was stone under the water, they often appeared to be on the surface and therefore I stepped in deep puddles twice. The mines were a ways off and after a little more than two miles of hiking, and only being halfway there, we decided it wasn’t worth it and headed back. Really we didn’t even know if these were the right caves. We drank and passed out in our seats of the car in a Hannaford parking lot. The next morning, at the behest of a local, we went to a barber who was supposed to have all sorts of knowledge about UFO stuff. Well he didn’t but he gave us a number to someone that did. Of course there was no answer. We then tried the library. Still nothing. The only thing for certain was that this town had a UFO club and they met every first Wednesday of the month. So we traveled in search of the next site.
Through incredible chance we found the next location, which was an abandoned mine called Tilly Foster Mines where several 13 people were killed in a collapse, set a little ways in the forest of a dirt road near Brewster, NY. We had decided to split up while we scouting for the opening and I just happened to have found it. Actually to be perfectly honest I noticed the dynamite shed while taking a leak and that lead me to the mine.
It common sense that a mine is going to be colder than the temperature outside of it, but the difference was something incredible. The cold, moist air of this mine poured out of its opening and rolled straight down the hill. And the change in temperature was extreme to a surprising degree. The mine goes down about 600-700 feet, unfortunately it is completely flooded and we couldn’t travel beyond the iron front doors. At one point we were considering renting a canoe and proceeding. I am now glad that we did not, as none of us considered the almost certain possibility that the tunnels slanted down and we would have been completely fucked. The tunnels did have some amazing acoustics however and it was a pleasure to hear such natural reverberation. Afterwards we tried to find other caves, but it was nearly an impossible task so we gave up. After that we went to visit Ryan in Rhinebeck.
Since we had decided to just go upstate and I would take the train back to the city today (Sunday) we opted to check out one last place.
An abandoned dilapidated asylum near my area called Homestead Asylum. The site offered a few real risks along with the paranormal activity, as I’m sure you can imagine. Though most windows and doors were boarded up and a fence lined the parameter, it was easy enough to enter. The place was HUGE with multiple floors, varying degrees of disrepair and took quite some time to thoroughly inspect. We walked through old shower rooms, an auditorium with a stage, patients’ rooms, insanely (no pun intended) long hallways, a kitchen. The highlight though was the basement. We all had a particular feeling in a certain area of the basement (and by now I know Dave and I are not easily spooked, and Curran doesn’t seem to be either) and as we were addressing whatever spirits reside there, Dave snapped a photo in the direction of Curran and me. I have no idea what to think of those orbs. Then as we were looking at the picture, I felt a tap or something on my head, perhaps from the ceiling, but I am not certain. We weren’t able to capture anything else, but before we left we went back down to the basement. We decided to sing a children’s song for the hell of it. With no more success we spoke out saying that we were leaving now and that if it was going to make itself known, now was the time. And I shit you not, just as I say this there is a noise at the end of the room..... It turns out, the children’s infirmary was directly above this part of the basement. If you look closely at the roof top chapel pic, in between Curran and me there is a whole through the ground that went straight to the floor of the lower level.
And so concludes Adventure 2 of 2007.
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