Rutland Prison Camp: Ruins in a State Park

Historic photo of Rutland Prison
Camp Cemetery, courtesy of
The Rutland Land Conservancy

Few reportedly haunted locations are as open to the public and readily accessible as Rutland Prison Camp. You can drive right up to most of the sites of interest, and do so legally, assuming it's daytime. The site has long since been abandoned, so visitors must use caution and explore at their own risk, but responsible ghost hunters should have no problem checking everything out without incident. This is on the short list of places I would recommend visiting if you're looking for ghosts, not because I think they're there, but because you won't be bothering anyone.

The ruins of Rutland Prison Camp are located in what is now the Rutland State Park. The park is 300 acres and has lots to do. You can go swimming, have a picnic or even take your boat out when you come to scope out the camp.

Rutland Prison Camp opened in 1903. It had a big country house for the superintendent, prison dorms, solitary confinement cells, a farm for the prisoners to work and a root cellar for storing vegetables. Four years after it opened, a tuberculosis hospital was built to treat prisoners with consumption. The prison was not open for long. It was abandoned in 1934. Not all of it was left to rot, though. Most of it was destroyed, but a few structures remain.

The root cellar is still largely standing. It's in an overgrown hill and barely recognizable, but you can still walk in and check out all the vulgar graffiti covering its walls. Solitary confinement still stands, though it is open to the elements. The small cells give visitors an idea of how claustrophobic confinement would have been. There is also a drainage tunnel, as well as some other crumbling walls and foundations. The tunnel is full of debris and runoff. As far as I can tell, people don't actually go in anymore.

My personal favorite bit of the Rutland Prison Camp grounds is down Charnock Hill Rd. Go to Goose Hill Cemetery and follow the trail beyond it. There, you will find a marker where crosses once marked the graves of 59 inmates buried there. Sadly, there is no Pet Sematary.

There isn't much in the way of spooky ghost stories related to Rutland Prison Camp. The place housed low-level criminals, or at least those who had been convicted of low-level crimes, so there aren't even stories of murderers or executions to give the place a creepy vibe. All I could find was one story about the ex-warden's wife haunting the location where her house used to be. Of course, any records of an ex-warden's wife dying there are elusive.

Check out some photos of when the prison was still standing. Feel free to post your photos and experiences in the comments section.

Plymouth County Hospital: Abandoned Facility for the Terminally Ill

The hospital before it became a ruin
Courtesy of Hanson Historical Society

I grew up in a small town on the South Shore in Massachusetts. Hanson didn't have much going on, but I lived right across the street from the entrance to one of the coolest sites in town–the abandoned Plymouth County Hospital. I learned to roller blade on the cracked pavement behind the abandoned hospital, hiked the bogs that stretched for miles in the woods around it, and even once snuck in through the kitchen door.

As kids, myself, my four siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins (yeah, we were all around the same age) would pedal our bikes up the long drive from the ornate stone wall that marked the entrance all the way up to the parking lot of the hospital. I imagine we made that journey sometimes when the hospital was still open, circumventing the building and heading straight for the trails out back. We must have. I remember walking there with my grandmother who died when I was eight. I was 10 when the hospital closed for good.

Plymouth County Hospital was already in disrepair when it closed. I can't remember a time when it didn't look a bit decrepit with black stains dripping down the concrete from the bottoms of the windows. The pavement is never smooth in my memories, the windows never fully intact. Still, it was gorgeous and ample fodder for my overactive imagination. In fact, were it not for that hospital, I doubt I would have half an interest in ghost stories and horror novels. When you spend your youth looking into the slowly crumbling eyes of an out-of-place building, you start to wish it were haunted, if only so you can scare the neighbor's kids and then brag to your siblings about it.

My own picture taken in 2014
The tile roofs hint at its former self

The taller I got, the sicker County Hospital, as we called it for short, got. By the time I got to high school and was only walking down there to sneak a cigarette, there wasn't a single unblemished windowpane in the place. The doors were rotting. The once beautiful, sunny verandas were falling apart at the frames. I managed to sneak in before it all went to hell, and long before vandals would nearly destroy the structure. Inside, I found that the hospital was well and truly abandoned. When the staff left, they left a lot of stuff behind, which made it all the more interesting to me.

One day toward the end of my time in middle school, I noticed that one of the back doors was partly open. I obeyed my parents, and local laws, until then, but something inside me always wanted to go into the place. I convinced my sister and I believe the neighbor kid (I'll have to ask them) to shimmy through the gap in the door. On the other side, we found an open walk-in cooler. It'd been abandoned too long for it to smell as rancid as it looked. We moved on and found patient beds, kitchen knives, projectors, a chalkboard, papers strewn everywhere, an elevator shaft and scary story fodder to last a lifetime.

What the inside looked like.
I believe this room was destroyed in the fire.

Years later, knowing the place is as close to utter ruin as it can be, I realize Plymouth County Hospital was a wonderfully unusual place. Sure, terrible things happened there. How could they not have? Still, it was so out of place in those woods with its Spanish look and the way it was built to stagger down Bonney Hill. It's a tragedy that it was not saved.

Opening and Purpose

Plymouth County Hospital, which some also refer to as Cranberry Specialty Hospital, a name I personally cannot find evidence of in historic literature, was opened in 1919. Construction began two years earlier, but WWI delayed its progress. According to a contemporary pamphlet, clearing of the land and construction of the basement was completed by "inmates of the County Farm."

The structure is built in Mediterranean Renaissance style with a clear emphasis on Spanish details. Red tiles and smooth concrete with verandas, a columned entryway and a curving corridor visible from the back all came together for a look utterly unusual to the area.

It would have been freezing.
Notice the curved corridor in the background?

The original purpose of the hospital was to provide long-term care for individuals with tuberculosis–a lot of whom were children. It was not a scary asylum, but rather a place where people tried the therapies they thought would work. However, that did sometimes mean bizarre light therapy and small children with tuberculosis outside in the snow wearing nothing but small rompers.

The building was made with plenty of light and ventilation specifically so the patients could get sun and dust would be less of a problem. Still, many would die within the walls of Plymouth County Hospital before a viable treatment for TB became available.

The Beginning of the End

Antibiotics used to treat tuberculosis contributed to a huge decline in cases requiring long-term care. People were getting better and doing it much faster. Entire facilities dedicated to the disease were no longer necessary. Therefore, in the 60s, Plymouth County Hospital began taking on a range of chronically ill and terminal patients. As such, it was still a pretty grim place in terms of patient outcomes.

Closing

By 1992, there was not enough funding to repair Plymouth County Hospital. Another hospital was built in the county to replace it, but that closed too before long. The hospital and the property would belong to the town of Hanson and political issues, bankruptcy and public outcry would fill its history in the decades after it closed.

Sadly, multiple arson fires nearly destroyed Plymouth County Hospital in the early 2000s. Any hope that the old hospital would be restored and used for some public good were destroyed with it. Today, it is fenced off. Trespassing is forbidden. Lead and asbestos pose a significant risk on the property. Still, there are no plans to finish the job and take the husk of Plymouth County Hospital down.

If I had a few million bucks . . .

Haunting

Given that the hospital was the site of so many deaths, it's natural that ghost stories have popped up. To be honest, I don't know any off the top of my head apart from those my family and I made up to scare each other. However, I do know that it is one of the most popular ghost hunter locations on the South Shore, so we're not the only ones to whisper about hospital patients staring out from behind dingy windows. If you have a story about Plymouth County Hospital, please share it below.

Emily's Bridge: A Vermont Haunting

Emily's Bridge
Photo by Mfwills

Emily's Bridge is a covered bridge on the imaginatively named Covered Bridge Rd. in Stowe, Vermont. The bridge's real name is Gold Brook Bridge after the brook it spans. New England has many covered bridges, but Gold Brook Bridge is special because many believe it is haunted by the ghost of a girl named Emily.

Legend

There are a few stories about Emily and how she came to haunt a small covered bridge in Stowe. The first is that the girl planned to meet her lover on the bridge and elope with him, but he never arrived. She subsequently hanged herself on the bridge. A twist on the same tale says her boyfriend hanged himself at the bridge so she followed suit. Another version of the story has Emily jilted at the altar. She realizes what is happening and takes off in a horse and carriage. She and the horses careen off the road and meet their demise beneath the bridge. Yet another version has her dying in a car crash on the way to the wedding. 

In every story, Emily is a young girl in love. She seems to have died in the 1920s, but that isn't entirely clear, given the horse and carriage in some of the stories. Most families still would have traveled that way then, but it doesn't narrow the time period down much. Then there is the fact that some stories have her dying in an automobile. The bridge, now a registered historic place, was built in 1844, so it could not have been earlier than that.

Origins

Most sources trace the earliest accounts of Emily's death to a school paper written in 1968 or thereabouts. A girl named Susan claimed to have used a Ouija board to talk to Emily, who said she was murdered on the bridge. Interestingly, the murder aspect faded away in favor of a dark love story. Apparently, Susan's story existed in local lore before her paper. Even she said she didn't believe it. Another possible source is a woman named Nancy Stead, who says she started the whole thing in the early 70s in an attempt to scare local kids.

Sightings

Several people have claimed to have paranormal experiences on Emily's Bridge, mostly between the hours of 12 a.m. and 3:30 a.m.. Incidents include scratches appearing on cars parked there, the sound of a girl screaming and the sound of someone walking on the bridge when no one is in sight. Some witnesses even say they hear dragging on the tops of their cars. Could it be the sound of ghostly feet swinging from the bridge's rafters?

Complaints

Emily's Bridge has become a popular hangout for local drinkers, according to people who live in the neighborhood. The police get plenty of complaints about loud revelers. However, they mostly only catch tourists peacefully checking out the bridge, hoping for a ghoulish sight. Either way, visitors should be very respectful of the fact that people live within earshot of the bridge. If you want to ghost hunt, do it quietly.

Reality

Unfortunately for anyone who wants to spot a ghost on a covered bridge, Emily's Bridge is likely not haunted at all. There are no official records of a girl dying on, under or around the bridge. There aren't even death records of a girl named Emily that would match up in any way. Some say there is a gravestone marked "Emily" in the Stowe Cemetery, but I couldn't even find a place called Stowe Cemetery. There are a few very small graveyards in town. None of them are documented well on findagrave.com, so I couldn't find much. Please feel free to comment below with any information you have on that front.