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UER Forum > Journal Index > Megan's Cornfield Chronicles > The Adventure at Seven Steeples (Viewed 1711 times)
The Adventure at Seven Steeples
entry by meganb 
7/23/2004 12:16 AM

It was a beautiful sunny afternoon and a little too warm for my tastes. Indiana has horribly sultry summers. It might only be about 80 degrees outside, but with the humidity it can feel like 95 or worse.

We had been out photographing a very prominent cemetery earlier that day when we decided to check out the campus of the fabled "Seven Steeples". We drove in through the east entrance just after noon and decided to cruise the roads and see the sights from a distance. We also wanted to know if anyone was about. I knew that a police force kept their horses on one part of the property and that there was a small medical museum in the old pathology building, but I wasn't too sure what the rest was used for. One sign said "Fleet Maintenance" where there was a parking lot full of police cars. Another sign wasn't too clear, but said "Customer Parking". This turned out to be some sort of city vehicle impound. We drove around and around, looking at what was left of the once fabled "Seven Steeples". Nothing much, really, except for some 1950s and 60s style newer structures.

Then there was what we later found out to be the "Administration Building". It was certainly nothing like the Kirkbrides which once loomed over grounds. It was a three-story brick, with looming dormers up top and a visible basement below.

After lunch we decided to check it out more closely and parked behind the building with little view from the surrounding structures that may or may not be in use. We walked up to it, with eyes glued to a first floor open window, but it was too high to be reached. We peeked into the basement windows and saw what appeared to be fluorescent lights still powered up and shining brightly. This, of course, gave me a rather creepy feeling. I had only explored a few places before with power still running. One was an old oil refinery and the other, the freight tunnels. Neither of those were as close to police property as this place, and this place made me real nervous.

We came around to one of the large metal framed glass doors and my buddy and I looked around like two escaped convicts from a Keystone Cops flick. He cautiously grabbed the handle and gave the door a pull. It was open! My tummy grumbled as we darted back around the side of the building. We were, of course, delighted, yet suspicious. My eyes were gleaming, and if I had had a handle-bar mustache, I would have been twisting it menacingly about then, or perhaps, just rubbing my hands together, belting out a sinister laugh and dreaming of what lie beyond.

My buddy looks at me and smiles eagerly. "Are you ready?", he says. Of course I am not, I think to myself. I always hate this part of exploring, but it's the part that brings on the rush. It's the part where you stand totally exposed wanting to enter, dreading getting caught and dreaming of what incredibly cool things you may see beyond the door. This is the part where my tummy rumbles trying to convince me to stay outside and not cross the boundaries of ordinary society. This is the part where I reply, "wait a second....I haven't got the balls, yet". Then I look down at the ground, empty my mind, look up at my buddy, smile and say, "let's go!"

We criminally look around the area for the last time, speedily round the corner, pop open the door, duck inside and hold the door as it slowly closes in order not to make too much noise. We're in and the worse is over. Focus switches to searching, photographing and finding cool things, but the senses stay on heightened alert. "You could hear a pin drop" becomes reality. Every step, creak or gust of wind becomes magnified one-hundred percent. Exterior sounds, no matter how minute make there way into the building and directly to the explorer's ear.

The next wave of dread comes upon me as we climb the immediate stairway to the 3rd floor. "What if someone is in here?", I think to myself. I just hate the idea of coming across anyone and the "police line" tape on that first floor hall didn't make be feel any the better. We spread out, peeking into the rooms, staying away from the windows, watching our step, snapping our pictures and rushing around.

This floor is full of what appears to be old dorm rooms. Each room has it's own closet with wooden doors and full of wooden drawers and shelves. The ceilings are sloped where the dormer windows are. It looks like no one has even been in these rooms for a long time, yet they are fairly clean.

We walk on through long hallways with florescent lights flickering. We stop and peek into selected rooms and always rush to see what the other finds when the whispered call comes out..."Hey! You gotta see this!"

We finish up on the third floor and make our way down a different stairwell to the second floor. It's more of the same, yet a little darker and a little creepier. There are more police tapes scattered about. Thoughts come to mind of some poor crack smoking bloke dead of an overdose or whacked by the cops. I think of these decent empty rooms and wonder why they have exhausted their use and picture some homeless hooker and her trailer trash "John" doing something filthy and repulsive inside. My mind wonders what goes on or what went on here, many years ago.

We come across a room full of boxes of psychology and social work books. I take a photograph and walk away wondering what interesting things one might have found in those books or boxes. A famous shrink's signature, a personal photograph or child-made bookmark. Now, I'll never know.

Again we hurriedly walk through the halls on heightened alert, peeking in here and there. It looked to me like it was just an employee or nurses' home. Some of the rooms on the lower levels looked like offices, but the ones on the third were definitely private dorms. They were too good to be patients' though.

We make it back down to the ground floor, to a locked room, a janitor's closet and more halls. The locked room I had spied from the other wing and upper floor. From what I could see it looked like an office with large bookcases filled with books. I had grown eager to see this room, but when we finally came upon it and found it closed, I quickly shied away. I was certain that this room was indeed still in use (and in my wild imaginings, probably alarmed).

One floor sort of blended into another, but I distinctly remember one larger room with a table, a few chairs and a chalkboard. I assume that the police were using it for classes or training of some sort. Scrawled in the upper left-hand corner of the chalkboard was the word "redrum". "Ha, ha, very funny", I sarcastically thought to myself. Scoffing at the face of murder seemed a bit disrespectful, but maybe the cops were just big Stephen King fans, or more likely...jerks.

Back on the first floor, my buddy went ahead while I wondered aimlessly through the janitor's closet filled with a billion broken and useless things like light-bulbs and printer cartridges. I got the eager whisper and followed suit. I had seen a white car pass by in the distance outside the door we had entered and was starting to get a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. Maybe that was the Hardee's sandwich I had scarfed down earlier, but something just didn't feel right to me.

As I rounded the corner and proceeded closer I saw stuff that I thought was pretty darn cool. There were terrible prints of bad old art screwed to the walls by their frames. They were the type of pictures that remind you of the jacket art of an old Louis L'amour book and that make me think of the smell of mildewy old camping tents and fishing boats. I would guess that they were very cheap 1950s prints with that washed out and terrible paint-by-numbers type of pallet, (one shade of blue and 7 shades of dirt).

This was the grand entry of the building nearest the front door. It was sort of a lobby with a little clerk booth complete with electrical clock with second hand still moving. Wait!! Still moving?! I felt a bit more panicked and hurried. Across from this area we found the "mother load"...an entire room of cubbies filled with hospital blue-prints! We could have been there for hours, but it was right after my buddy had come into the hallway from another room that I had heard a noise that put me over my heightened-state-of-awareness edge. I didn't run, but I rushed softly towards the stairwell where the door was that we had come in. I'm pretty sure that I whisper-shouted something along the lines of "That's it...I'm out of here!", just before I booked.

I waited at the stairwell for my buddy to arrive motioning him down the hall to speed up. I really wanted out of there bad and nothing he could say was going to make me stay. He kept trying to explain something to me, but my focus was only on stepping outside into that hot and horrible but semi-fresh air. I wanted out and he knew I wasn't taking no for an answer.

Sure, I felt guilty, like the one guy who gets drunk at the party, pukes in the middle of the floor and passes out right next to the mess. What was I to do? My sixth sense had kicked in and the fight-or-flight mode had overwhelmingly decided on the road to flight.

A moment later we were at the glass door, looking suspiciously out and wanting to leave unseen. A second after that, we ducked out and were walking along-side the building towards my buddy's truck. I stopped only to collect the police clipboard we had found in the grass earlier, but never turned to look back.

We had made it! Once again, I had "came, saw and conquered" my own fears, if only for a short while. I had been inside one of the buildings on the campus of the legendary "Seven Steeples" and I had not been caught or injured, but most of all, I did not die of fright... and the feeling that was left was the rush of being more alive than ever.

We climbed into the cab of the truck and slowly drove off deciding to check out the museum on campus. We pulled into the parking lot and low and behold, three squad cars were sitting right across the road from the place where we had just trespassed moments ago. They were out of the vehicles standing about jabbering to each other not seemingly in any hurry to find anything or anyone.

We spent a few hours in the museum and my buddy explained to me that he had been trying to tell me that the startling sound I heard had been a door he had opened. "Fudge!", I thought, and felt a bit guilty, but on the drive out, we found two more squad cars hanging out in an empty parking lot just down hill from the building we had been in.

So, maybe we really do have a sixth sense, eh? Or was it all just coincidence?
~M


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UER Forum > Journal Index > Megan's Cornfield Chronicles > The Adventure at Seven Steeples (Viewed 1711 times)


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