I was super happy that during this trip to Maine I remembered soemthing on my bucket list and we actually made it. Not only that it seemed catered to exactly what we were looking for – books, and antiques.
I have passed this place so many times but I didn’t recognize it with new siding this time around! It’s starting to look a lot less like a refurbished industrial chicken coop which is what it is. The area was known for being a large producer of chicken eggs for several decades but most have gone out of business since then which has left a smattering of these huge coops just gathering dust and decaying. It’s really refreshing to see someone use it for something else!
And let me tell you this place was huuuuuuuge. The whole bottom was all antiques of every kind and the top was completely dedicated to books and other media. Just thousands upon thousands of them. You could absolutely get lost up there.
Since we were in Bangor anyway poking around the Central Maine Antique Exchange I thought it’d be fun to go three miles down the road to see the Paul Bunyan statue that stands proudly outside the Bangor Civic Center in Bass Park. He’s a 31-foot-tall local icon that has been greeting tourists and looky-loos since 1959. Why? Because Maine believes he was born out here. They even have his birth certificate on display in the city hall. This fact is not undisputed though as there’s been an ongoing quarrel with Akeley Minnesota who also claims to be the birthplace of Paul Bunyan.
Now I didn’t throw myself too deep down this rabbit hole. I just think the controversy is funny and it’s a bleeding shame the artist who designed him, Normand Martin, was only paid a paltry $137 for his contribution. A further $20,000 was raised to actually manufacture this beast of a statue which has been a great place to take selfies for anyone in need of a chuckle.
Also you’ll note he’s holding an ax in one hand and a peavy in the other. I learned what a peavy was after stumbling on its inventor’s grave last year at the Mount Hope Cemetery. I apologize the photos are so bad but we showed up when the sun was DIRECTLY behind him and well…. that doesn’t make for good photography. SIGH.
That all being said this is a beloved monument to a quirky American tall tale and it’s just all-around good fun for people of all ages.
After Fort Knox we both felt like the day wasn’t over yet so we set out to find some antique stores. The first one we stopped at was the Central Maine Antique Exchange. We had half an hour before it closed so our visit was abrupt but not bad. This place was sizable but not enormous – a good collection with the usual mix of haunted dolls, inexplicable buckets of doll parts, and of course a light smattering of offensively racist things – I think the winner of that went to a rubber doll named “Chief Wahoo.” It wasn’t all bad though – there was also a HUGE bucket labelled “peanut butter chips” and a lot of nice artwork on the walls. I don’t know if I would really go out of my way to see this place again buuuut I would stop in if you just happen to be in Bangor.
Fort Knox is never disappointing. It’s a HUGE complex with something for everyone. Not to be confused with the other more famous Fort Knox, this one doesn’t have any gold however it is named after the same guy so that’s something. It was built to protect the entrance to the river and was manned for two wars but never saw battle. And so it stands fulfilling a new purpose – scaring the bejesus out of small children generation after generation which is more than I can say for most museums!
And what is it that is so scary about this place? Well… they do say it’s haunted (though I have never seen any evidence of this on my own visits) but more importantly there are huge sections of the fort that are completely dark – no lighting except from slit windows – what feels like miles of corridors in near complete darkness. And there are also rooms and nooks off to the side which don’t see the light from the windows and are like black voids beckoning you in. It’s suggested you take a flashlight but where’s the fun in that?!
I don’t really recall there being that many dark areas on my last visit but I think I might have just missed them thinking there was nothing there. Another fun change was the fact a lot more of it was renovated so now the barracks were fairly well established with wooden floors and sparse furniture. But my favorite bit may have been the cannon kiln at the very beginning which I got right up to and looked directly into. It was basically a kiln to heat up cannon balls so they could be shot at passing ships and start them on fire. Nasty but interesting. I’d seen it before but never really poked at it up close – this would be my companion’s influence as he is far more interested in military history than I typically am and was reading all the plaques.
I had fun taking random snaps in the hopes of maybe catching an odd orb or two. No such luck! It’s still a GREAT place to practice photography if you’re learning about lighting! This is one of those destinations I suggest to everyone is who is going to be in the area. It really is a treasure.
This week we took our adventures to Maine where I had previously promised to share a few old favorites. One of these was another visit to Fort Knox but I neglected to mention this also would include a bonus ticket to go up to the observatory at the top of the bridge overlooking Fort Knox. It’s only a few dollars more to the purchase of a Fort Knox ticket and it never disappoints. But first I had to drive by the entrance and find myself parked at a roadside overlook of the bridge. I hadn’t taken the time to check this part of it out and it was really quite interesting! It had plaques with the history of the bridge and its predecessor as well as a few photos and a segment of bridge complete with wires which if you could walk up to from the observatory’s parking lot below. Also accessible from this point is a little access road which you can walk on to get under the bridge for an even more unique view.
Apparently, the original bridge replaced a ferry in the 1920’s and was a toll bridge. It was replaced with the current bridge in 2006 which now houses the tallest bridge observatory in the world and the only one in the US. Even better is that most of the journey upwards to see this fantastic view is by elevator. There’s a handful of stairs to get to the last level but that’s it. No gasping for air or clinging to the walls from vertigo as some of my other adventures have been! I was however surprised there was quite a line that day. It was a mix of locals and tourists, adults and children. I was happy to re-do this adventure with an actual professional camera this time and not the tiny cheap-o pre-cell phone digital camera I had at the time. There was even a boat heading up the river leaving quite a wake behind. This proved to be “a happy bonus” for the both of us. Looking directly down at the Prius parked below though… that was probably not the brightest idea but I was able to maneuver my cell phone in a way to catch the moment. Now I have photos of the Prius from every side except its underbelly!
Did you know there are numerous airplane crash sites in the woods you can still hike to all over New England? I have wanted to visit one for a long time now but most of them are pretty intense hikes into the mountains which I knew I couldn’t physically do… but the B-52 crash site in Greenville is practically right off the parking lot so it was the optimum amount of difficulty for me!
And the story surrounding it is more exciting than an Indiana Jones adventure. On January 24, 1963 a B-52C Stratofortress flew out of the Westover Airforce Base in Massachusetts. It was a training mission for six crew members and three observers to learn how to fly at low altitudes over rugged terrain to avoid RADAR detection in the Cold War effort. All was going well until the turbulence became violent enough to rip off the vertical air stabilizer which sent the plane careening into Elephant Mountain. The pilot gave the order for everyone to eject but it’d only be ten seconds between this and the plane hitting the ground. Almost everyone on board died on impact but the pilot and navigator managed to eject in time but there was a big problem here too – the pilot’s parachute didn’t deploy after ejection and he landed without it’s aid the five feet of snow below. Remarkably he only suffered a broken ankle and is the only one in US history to survive an ejection without a deployed parachute. The navigator survived with only minor injury but this was only the beginning of a miserable situation because they were six miles beyond civilization in the thick and untamed wilderness. If that wasn’t bad enough the temperature was at -15 degrees that night with a wind kicking up at 40 knots. With the added wind-chill factor this would have felt like -51F or -46C respectively. They somehow survived the night and were rescued in the morning when they could be reached.
Currently the wreckage is still six miles beyond the borders of Greenville up a series of logging roads. Having learned my lesson from my last logging road adventure I left the Prius behind and took the RAV4. This was the right idea! Several parts of the road were nearly washed out from recent rains and it got rough at points but unlike the abandoned trains the journey was relatively short and very well marked. There were signs pointing to the B52 memorial site all along the route and afterwards there were signs to guide us back to Greenville which was great because the GPS is useless on logging roads and shouldn’t be relied on in such a situation.
We weren’t the only ones there that day as several families with an inordinate amount of children were bounding out of the woods. They were respectful though, everyone was. I was shocked at the sheer carnage. You’d think that after so many decades in the wilderness that there wouldn’t be much left but actually there were pieces of metal and rubber everywhere, scattered over a disturbing distance, some pieces were still in trees. We could identify some of the wreckage but most of it was just lumps of shrapnel at this point. And that’s where the deeply unsettling thought comes to mind that airplanes are basically just tin cans we’ve convinced to stay in the air for a while.
I found the memorial to be as interesting as it was sobering and would definitely recommend it to anyone with an interest in these things. It’s near Moosehead Lake and there are a bountiful number of other things you can do in the area – hiking, camping, kayaking, and that sort of thing.
I must admit the Mount Hope Cemetery has been on my bucket list since I was told about it a few years ago. It’s a very large cemetery (possibly the largest I’ve been to with 300 acres and over 5,500 stones!) But besides the sheer amount of stones it’s also beautiful. As far as I know it’s the only garden cemetery in Maine, the second installed in the United States, and is situated amongst the hills of what must have been a swamp at one point which is now a series of well manicured mini ponds.
The cemetery functions also as a park and there’s tons of parking and a number of people out taking walks – perhaps in the steps of a young Stephen King who was said to wander here as a college student looking for inspiration to name his characters off the stones. (And I thought I was the only one to do this!) The monuments speak to great wealth and were at times pretty extravagant. We were on a search for a few famous inhabitants here – first the stone of a certain Mr. Peavey who invented a logging tool in his name that saved countless lives on Maine’s rivers. The second was Hannibal Hamelin who was vice president under Abraham Lincoln. (And who also has a “death couch” at the local library which I have yet to poke at.) Other people of note were gangster Al Brady, comedian Richard Golden, and actor Ralph Sipperly. The only one of these we found was Hamelin who was situated at the very front of the cemetery near the road and was easy to spot.
We both really enjoyed an afternoon amble through the cemetery. We weren’t there long at all when I snapped a photo of a lot of plots that were for The Home for Aged Women. In it a bright orb showed up. I have taken a lot of photos in all sorts of graveyards and cemeteries, this is the first time this has shown up so maybe we weren’t alone!
Indeed it wasn’t long before we found several Civil War memorials – which I must say is a bit odd for New England. And they were strange! A castle and a bronze statue of a faceless grim reaper dragging someone off to the great beyond. I was intrigued. There was also a memorial for the fallen of the Korean War which had a disturbing little plaque that noted half the fatalities of that war were in prison camps.
We went pretty far and enjoyed a great deal of the sights when my travel companion noticed something odd on one of the stones. It was a large bird of some kind. I thought this probably was an owl – which are fond of cemeteries as they are the perfect hunting ground for mice – but actually it was a hawk. A huge, fat, wet hawk. Probably perched here in the sun to dry off. It let us get alarmingly close without reacting. These photos were taken with full zoom but we were still only a few feet away. Just far enough to feel like we were safe from having our faces ripped off if it decided to turn. Very odd. But sweet in a way. Perhaps it was paying respects to a long forgotten life. We continued on after a few minutes, leaving the bird there to keep chilling.
It was a wet day with grey skies and slippery grass. It was probably this that resulted in the end of our little jaunt when my travel companion went flying down some stone steps landing with exceptional violence on his back. He was lucky to have been able to walk out of there. We decided to leave after this in search of first aid supplies for all the cuts. That being said – besides this little incident the trip to the cemetery was well enjoyed by both of us and maybe someday we’ll return to find those other stones. And the nearby death couch…
In Part Two of last week’s Maine adventure I learned about my family history. I was told my great grandmother had spent a great deal of time (more than three years) in a sanitorium where she was being quarantined as a tuberculosis patient. It was called the Central Maine Sanitorium. It was a trying time for the family that clearly had a negative impact but beyond that I knew very little about this particular event… until by happenstance I was talking to a random person on FaceBook who mentioned an abandoned sanitorium in Fairfield Maine. Could it be the very same?
My great grandmother standing in the Central Maine Sanitorium
I did some digging. There was an epidemic of tuberculosis in Maine that resulted in a great deal of people being thrown out into the streets because their family did not want to catch this disease. This resulted in several tent cities being formed, one of which was in Fairfield Maine. At some point the problem became too big for a mere tent city and the state stepped in and built two large facilities for tuberculosis patients. The one built in Hebron was called the Western Maine Sanitorium and this was where patients who were expected to recover went. The other one built over the tent city in Fairfield was called the Central Maine Sanitorium and patients that were sent here were of only the most severe cases, basically expected to die. I guess that explains why she was there for over three years and could not receive visitors in all that time.
This photo was found in my family albums we *think* it’s of the sanitorium. If it’s not feel free to comment and tell me what it really is.
Basically what had started as a vague curiosity during a random conversation with a stranger turned into something a little more meaningful. I had to go but urban exploration isn’t really what I specialize in… though I do love it, it can be dangerous, and so I felt better dragging someone along. And so this became the one most important destination that week as I dragged an equally curious hostage behind me.
Initially I had a hard time finding this place as I once again got the wrong address and wasn’t even on the right road but once that was amended it was an easy drive down a sleepy street. It didn’t look like anyone cared about this place anymore although someone had put a For Sale sign up. I do not know if it was for this property or the neighboring acres though…
In any event a small parking lot was still there and even though two buildings that were still on the site were boarded up someone had unceremoniously de-boarded them. The structure was in perfectly fine condition for poking. There wasn’t any rotting floorboards or anything like that.
We initially started in the first floor but it was all boarded up and so dark we couldn’t see a thing. Our cell phone flashlights barely penetrated the darkness. It was… unusually dark. However light came in through all the windows upstairs and the place seemed alive. Graffiti decorated almost all the walls. A few pieces of furniture and equipment remained along with a sign requesting to keep the door closed. An elevator languished in in a pit but otherwise the structure seemed pretty intact.
There’d been whispers this place was haunted but the only odd feeling I got was when I entered what I think was the nurses’ area. Here I felt dutiful, fulfilled, like whoever was still here was still doing good work for the people. It was interesting. I wouldn’t expect to get that feeling in what essentially was a hospice. Still, it was pleasant. I suspect most of the spirits here had long enough to come to terms with their own deaths before finding their way elsewhere. I must admit though that I was a little heartsick to find a room painted in pastels… was it a nursery? A nursey in a ward devoted to consumption? Surely, babies can not generally recover from such a thing.
I took a bunch of photos with my cell phone having forgotten my camera. It’d already been a long day before we arrived. In any event this place is a photographer’s dream – so many weird angles, lighting, and decay. Just watching the paint fleck off the wall was amazing. I could see whole photo shoots done here – maybe even little horror movies.
Certainly the local teens knew about this place. I was entertained by their graffiti which distressed my travel companion. He lamented it was frustrated with too many tags dissing each other by name and using pretty profane language. C bombs and N bombs danced with lesser slurs of slut, bitch, and whore, you know, the usual sprinkling of misogyny. I couldn’t help but laugh. That’s small town life for ya… when you live somewhere that everyone knows you the only thing of value you tend to have at that age is your reputation. That’s what makes it such a delicious target for others with a chip on their shoulder. That explains the need for such fiercely negative language. It has to be the worst, although these little delinquents miss the fact that two white teenagers slinging the N bomb at each other isn’t edgy, it’s utterly meaningless. As it should be!
The graffiti wasn’t all bad though. Some had some artistic merit or humor to it. There was a very Beetlejuice-like “exit” painted on a brick wall in one of the closets. A cute plague doctor did his rounds nearby. Another room amped up the horror by scrawling “grandma’s house” on the peeling wallpaper while a little ways away another piece of art cheerfully stated, “I am a cat!”
Outside I walked around the building a little bit and came to a second much smaller building that I thought at first was a garage for ambulances or something like that. However in walking in I came across a somewhat unnerving sight – a single chair sat overlooking the door, behind it was a large furnace and what appeared to be a cast iron crematorium with space for four cadavers. You’d think I would be a little creeped out by this, especially since by this time I found myself alone, but it was such a beautiful day and I didn’t feel anything lingering HOWEVER my camera seemed to disagree. This one photo I took came out with a mysterious fog over it for no reason whatsoever.
Onto the galleries! Because I took SO MANY PICTURES!
Up first are my Black and Whites…
Abandoned Sanitoriums always look better in black and white.
When I was driving around trying to find the abandoned sanitorium I happened to pass this enormous compound of… treasures. I know, it might look like a junk yard, but really it was an antiques mall with all kinds of… shrapnel-looking things all over their expansive yard. Can you believe my travel companion has never been antiquing? Worse he’d never been antiquing in Maine where such a hobby is…. somewhere between dumpster diving and showing up on Antiques Roadshow with an unknown Picasso. I joke but really, it’s an adventure.
And so after we came back from our urban exploration I couldn’t resist driving in. There was a big sign offering RV parking. Think about that. An antique store in the middle of nowhere has so many RV’s driving in it created it’s own parking lot for it. This is exactly what I mean about not knowing what we’re about to walk into.
It took me a moment to realize I’d been here before! In fact it was one of the very first stops for my Catching Marbles after basing it solely out of New England. Back then I was having a grand old time pointing out all the bizarre racist shit that was everywhere – Aunt Jemima jars, pick-a-ninny dolls, minstrel related what-the-fuckery — I mean it was EVERYWHERE. And in the spirit of being all inclusive it wasn’t just black people getting the short end of the stick. There was also a number of offensive items relating to indigenous peoples and Asians soooo… I guess there’s that.
This time around I am actually happy to report the vast majority of those items were missing from the shop. Sign of the changing times? Maybe. Or perhaps I was just here on a good day. Who knows.
This place is EXPANSIVE. It’s in a number of old barns that span many floors and go off in all sorts of directions in a delightful Byzantine maze of weird relics. I let my travel companion loose to find something that interested him – which he soon found in the form of a whole booth of Victrolas and wax cylinder recordings. As fascinating as that was I preoccupied locating all the haunted dolls – of which there is always a ton.
This place went on for what seemed to be miles and we were each having a lot of fun just poking at random things. I found some vinyl records – paid a mighty sum of 60 cents for one that was on sale. Age of Aquarius. I mean come on… everyone needs a copy of that song, no?
My travel companion lamented he’d like to find a straight razor. I asked why he hadn’t found one previously, as this sounded to me to be a perfectly common request, and I guess the answer was normally people don’t spend their Sundays going to flea markets and antique malls… Who knew! Sure enough, two cases down from this conversation he spied a straight razor complete with a box and several replacement blades reading “1906.” And the whole display case was 50% off so he walked out of there $10 poorer but happy as a Cheshire cat.
We actually lost track of time and were escorted out of the store at closing (whoops! Apologies!) It is a store that merits a lot of wandering. And wondering. Still don’t know what’s going through this chap’s mind. He looks confused.
Obviously I will give you all what you came here for – the gallery of haunted dolls!
Life these days can be overwhelming between trying to keep your head above the water financially and dealing with the plague going around… it’s becoming increasingly difficult to take a break and get back in touch with what’s really important. And so here I am once again inspiring someone else to solve an old mystery and mark off something on their bucket list – you know take an adventure and learn something, live.
It had started off as a mild curiosity a week ago. Basically we were talking about a big gap in my travel companion’s family tree that seems to just end with his great-great-great-great-great grandfather who fought in the Civil War. Somehow it was known that he was buried in Springfield Maine. I had to go up to Maine anyway so I figured why not take a little detour to satiate curiosity?
And so we gathered some charcoal and a large sketch pad for a rubbing, woke up early, and headed out to the tiny village of Springfield. It would be a two hour drive and as usual I did not have the exact address of the cemetery because it wasn’t around any houses and cemeteries don’t have their own address. Initially I even got the road wrong. I drove out there and was greeted not with the village I was expecting but instead a vast expanse of dirt road that led us absolutely nowhere.
We decided to redirect towards the town office thinking that perhaps they would have some old records or something of interest. We ended up in the center of town which had a few of the usual buildings but no town office was in sight. We decided to stop at the post office and ask for directions. The post office was TINY. There appeared to be one parking space, taken, and the inside waiting area for a queue could only comfortably fit two people. The clerk there looked at us like we’d just landed from Mars, which I am sure we looked like with both of us sporting unnaturally colored hair. She said he town office was across the road behind the little café. Basically we could hit it with a rock if we tried.
I drove over and found it. It was a refurbished hunting cabin, no parking lot, no sign at the road, and yes, hiding behind another tiny building that was apparently a café. There was a sign out front that said there was only to be one person in there at a time which could be because of Corona or equally because it was only big enough for one person to be inside in the first place. I waited outside for a few minutes. Basically, the women in there directed us to the town’s unofficial genealogist – a woman working across the street at the Smith’s general store. Smith’s aye? I am supposed to be related to the Smiths in these parts… somehow…
Suddenly it was like being in an episode of Northern Exposure. There was nothing about the developing scene that wasn’t terrifically cliché. The general store was again, tiny, with just two gas pumps outside that looked like they were installed in the 1950’s when road trips were the height of entertainment. Inside we found a solitary woman working who turned out to be the person we were looking for. She lit right up when we started asking about her work. She’d been archiving the local cemeteries since 1990 and had already written up as many family trees as she could using information from these cemeteries. She instantly recognized the graves we were asking about, likely due to their odd first names: Liberty and Christopher Columbus. She directed us to where the cemetery was as well as where those particular graves were. She revealed that Christopher Columbus was Samuel’s father which filled in a blank for at least one generation more. She had more information in a locally created book of Spauldings and promised to send a copy. This was wild.
So after this we continued down the road where over the hill we came across Bog Road which contained the South Springfield Cemetery. It was a small cemetery, with maybe 150 stones or so, if that. I parked aside the road the best I could.
There was indeed a Spaulding family plot just to the left-hand corner. There we found a series of crumbling stones under a big oak tree being eaten away by lichen and moss. Some had fallen over, some were possibly sunken into holes in the ground. Several were in pieces and legibility varied greatly. We’d been warned they were in poor condition so I didn’t know what to expect. After surveying what we could find we started to piece together an interesting story.
We learned that Samuel Spaulding was the son of Christopher Columbus Spaulding and Lydia A Mapes Spaulding. He was one of four brothers, served in the Civil War, and probably lost all three of his brothers to the same war. William T Spaulding was the first to go in 1862 at the tender age of 13 (yes, children served – usually as drummers, fife players, and gophers) followed by John W and Liberty B. John W’s age was lost but Liberty B was 20. None of them appeared to be married and the stones all matched implying they’d been bought at the same time. In the Civil War era this frequently means there was either no bodies under them or possibly the wrong bodies who’d been shipped back. Samuel outlived the war and went on to have a family which would move out of Maine. I was struck by the loss. I’m more into Revolutionary War era stones so it was easy for me to bypass the devastation of the Civil War, even this far North.
We took some time to absorb this new information and take a rubbing of Samuel’s stone which was by far in the best condition. I took a few photos and took note of all the Spencers and Websters out here – two more family names I am supposed to be related to somehow. I wondered if this meant that five generations back our two families could have been related somehow. This whole excursion had been as enlightening as it was curious.
On the way home I got the additional adventure of having one of my tires melt off the Prius and explode as we were going down the highway. Luckily I noticed something was off and was already slowing down and turning into the break down lane when we heard a loud pop followed by a lot of wobbling. Trying to tell AAA where we were was a challenge and took at least 20 minutes as we had no idea and the GPS coordinates my phone gave me didn’t come up the same on the phone operator’s side. Another hour of waiting for a driver – the fear of not being able to be let in the cab due to covid – and finally being dropped off at Lincoln’s only tire store which did not carry appropriately sized tires – and we were starting to get punchy. We left with a tire that was too wide but still worked. The next day we’d tour three more tire stores before finding anything that could work for us. This ate up a great deal of time and tried everyone’s patience. Still, it was better than having more exploding tires!
