Upstate Ghosts

SHF_FA_UpstateGhosts // 01_initial

HAVE NOT YET CORRECTED OR REVISED THIS as of April 26, 2021

This event took place in upstate New York one drizzly weekend when I was staying in the Hudson Valley alone. I had bought a couple of old books at a used-book store in the middle of nowhere. But, of course, everything up there is in the middle nowhere. The region is soaked in history, including a lot of spiritualism and intellectual movements of that nature, but unless you know where to look for traces of that history, it’s just a lot of country roads connecting a lot of dull, little towns. Was looking at my purchase over lunch when I saw that the clerk had stuffed a blue paper flyer between the pages of one of the books. It advertised a lecture on Transactional Analysis. Interesting bit of kitsch, I thought. I wondered what sort of people would turn out for a self-help technique that had its minute of interest 40 years before. The flyer had a hand-drawn map printted on it. I followed the map to a large old brick compound way out in the countryside. The grounds and structures were well maintained, but the building looked more than a century old, and unused. My guess was that it had been a sanitarium or asylum at one time. It had that look.

It wasn’t clear where I should park, so I just stopped the car and went walking. I found a door with one of the blue flyers taped to the inside, and went in. People were already seated in a big auditorium, all dressed in vintage clothing. Bell bottoms, peace buckles, love beads, granny blouses, crocheted shawls. I hadn’t gotten the memo that it was 70s day. The event was obviously a costume affair. I was embarrassed and kept to myself, and people ignored me, which told me I was crashing a private event of some kind. But the lecture was about to start, and who was going to throw me out? So I stayed.

The funny thing about the lecture is that it was all very earnest. No sense of camp or historical perspective or anything. The audience played along perfectly. These people were really into their 70s reenactment. The only two people who seemed in on the joke were me and some guy in a crewcut I saw watching the lecture from the sidelines, snickering and rubbing his hands.

When the lecture was winding down, I ducked out to avoid being thrown out. It had started drizzling again, so I ran to my car. It was dark now, and there were no streetlights on that old campus. I drove all around the grounds, looking for an exit. I must have visited every nook and cranny, every possible place for parking a car, at least twice before I found the way back out to the country highway. And in all that driving around, I never saw one other car.

My curiosity was piqued, so I drove back in, retracing my original path. I easily found the spot where I had parked my car the first time. I went back to the door I had entered by . There was no blue flier. And the door was locked with a loop of heavy chain.

The next day I asked around. What was that old institution or compound just west of such-and-such town on Highway so-and-so? I got slightly different answers, as you always do when asking strangers for information, but what I pieced together was that the compound had been a mental hospital until World War II, when it had a brief life as a munitions factory. After that, it stood unused and locked up for a couple of decades. Then something terrible happened. The big auditorium was rented out for “some kind of cult going on,” and as everyone was mingling or chanting or worshipping afterwards, a bomb went off, killing everybody in the place. The perpetrator had never been found, but was regarded by some, I got the clear impression, as a sort of local hero who went just a little too far., The entire compound had been torn down shortly after. The estate had reverted to farmland.

I knew myself the locals had to be talking about a different compound. I didn’t have time to drive back out to the spot to prove to myself how ridiculous I was being. But my curiosity wouldn’t let it go. When I got home, I took the flyer out of the old book and studied it under better light. It looked like it could have been printed a week ago. But one thin triangular sliver of the paper’s edge, perhaps a part that had stuck out of the book’s pages, was not the same clean blue as the rest.

This one exposed edge of paper, thin as a knife-slit, was brown.