One day back in January 2011 a visiting explorer friend from out of state pointed out what looked like an abandoned house behind a high wall and some trees. It turned out this was not just any old abandoned house. It ended up being one of the most amazing places I've ever explored.
The house was barely visible from the road over a high stone wall, but the several gables that cleared it were obviously paint-peeled and decayed. I pulled it up on Bing birds eye view and was blown away by the vast size of the house, the rambling intricacy of its design, and its fairly obvious state of advanced neglect. The place immediately went to the top of my mental list of places to check out, but given the 2+ feet of snow that was on the ground at the time, I put it on the shelf. It's off a very busy road and in the midst of an upscale subdivided neighborhood of soulless McMansions who lots had been carved away from this grand old estate, so footprints would be bad, and I figured there was a good chance it was even alarmed.
While waiting for the time to be ripe, I located it on Zillow and discovered that the house had been built in the mid-1700s, contained nearly 10,000 square feet, and was valued at almost $2 million, which only furthered my unease. Nonetheless, we waited for an opportune night, parked about a half mile away, and took a long, circuitous route through the woods to avoid the nearby houses. Even though were were in semi-suburbia, the topography was weirdly steep and it was confusing as hell to navigate.
Eventually the woods opened up onto a lawn, and we could suddenly see the dark, hulking mass of the house in front of us over a rise. We approached cautiously, not knowing for certain whether this house was actually empty and abandoned, or perhaps still the residence of an elderly person who couldn't keep up with it. The house was a complicated mass of wings and ells, all looking as if they hadn't seen a caring hand in decades. We peered in a few windows and saw that the house was full of furniture and boxes. Although the state of decay was fairly advanced, no windows seemed to be open, and no panes of glass broken yet. I was still thinking that it was more likely alarmed than not.
1. (This is actually a night shot I took months later)
We crept slowly around the perimeter of the house, cautious as hell. We came to a side that was darkened by several overgrown cypress trees growing up against the house and up well past the roof. "Is that an open window?!" It was... a high casement window, not just ajar, but wide open. Looking inside, we could see that it opened into a small kitchen, and that a bicycle was leaning against the cabinets just inside it. Was this a squatter's place? The bike could easily be boosted through the window.
I wanted to scram and return in the daytime. My friend wanted to go in, immediately. After a few minutes of deliberation we went in, him first. I was still half expecting to encounter some rich old bat with a shotgun, but the place was deathly quiet, even though it was barely after dusk. We quickly verified that the tires on the bike were flat, which was a relief. We were in a small kitchen with wooden cabinets, totally bare but with that intoxicating smell of old neglected building wafting through. Conversing in hushed whispers, we entered the next room, and it became instantly obvious that this was not just some random abandoned house.
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(I didn't take a single photo that night, since I didn't bring a camera, so these are all from the following weekend...)
The wall to our right was covered in ornate curved wood cabinetry, with artifacts on the display shelf... paintings, ceramics, a scale, glassware. A large table in the middle of the room was surrounded by ornately carved wooden chairs. A book on top of the table opened to a 120-year-old photo of a man whose name was associated with this house. As we crept across the room taking in its stunning contents bit by bit, it suddenly dawned on me that there was
not a speck of dust on anything. 3.
At the far end of the room, a massive, obviously 18th century fireplace dominated the center of the room, 10' across and framed in beautiful wood paneling. On top of the ledge of the paneling were more old photographs, a rifle barrel casing, old books, and other antiques. It felt like we were in a museum of colonial artifacts.
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The first floor of the house went on and on... rambling confusingly without a grand design, like wings had been added at various times throughout its history. We would have to walk all the way into a room to find a doorway to further sections hidden behind a cabinet or pile of boxes. A former front entryway was chock full of artwork and clutter.
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The place was a really odd mix of carefully arranged artifacts and rooms full of sloppily strewn about boxes of crap.
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This was the current "front" door, through which we half expected a member of the family that owns it to arrive to check up on the place as we properly explored the place on our return trip in daylight. Our first night in the house, we had found a half-burned milk carton in a fireplace that had expired very recently. Now we were on even higher alert, and didn't want to stay for too long after daybreak.
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Everywhere we turned, there were beautiful antique pieces, shelves of ancient books, racks of glass and ceramic baubles.
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I think the house had three kitchens...
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It seemed like every room had ornate wood paneling, impressive antique furniture, priceless books, and other signs of an extraordinarily neglectful and clueless (and/or extraordinarily wealthy?) family.
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We headed upstairs to explore the labyrinthine network of bedrooms, bathrooms, and closets. Everywhere there was intact furniture, stocked closets, shelves full of stuff, beds still made up, books and letters and photographs everywhere... but all with the distinct feel and smell of being abandoned.
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I totally wanted to gank this book, but for now we didn't want to make our having been in the house evident.
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Cool plumbing fixtures in the shower.
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23. An upstairs hallway cluttered with boxed who knows what.
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25. Most of the house was two stories, but this one part had a third story bedroom full of hippie ephemera.
26. Gay Head is on Martha's Vineyard. That's where the family lives it up while they let their ancestral home rot to abject shit. This magnificent home had been in their family since it was built over 250 years ago.
27. Cluttered bedroom in disarray that reminded me of another abandoned mansion I'd explored in Pennsylvania in multiple ways.
We descended back down the main staircase to explore the first floor further.
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The main thing we hadn't explored yet, but which we knew was beyond insane based on our first furtive night of exploring the place, was the library. The quantity and quality of the books sitting here decaying was truly nauseating. Multi-volume sets from the 1790's fused to the shelves by decay, dozens of volumes of Dickens, Defoe, the Greeks, Shakespeare, all lined up gloriously, all beginning to succumb to the forces of uncontrolled climate. The books alone in this house were worth thousands of dollars, and the wantonness with which they were left to rot was sickening.
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32. This interesting extinguishing device was still mounted to the library wall.
The rest of the first floor only got more ornately decadent as we went along.
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After a couple of happily incident-free (but still nerve-wracking) hours in this place, we were ready to call it a morning and retreat to safety. I was way too overloaded with stimuli to think about it rationally for at least 24 hours. I couldn't believe what I had just seen. This magnificent old mansion was (barely) visible from a busy road and had a wide open window, and hadn't been vandalized or torched? Nobody had done anything stupid to get the place sealed up? In Massachusetts? What parallel universe had we stumbled into, and how? Although there were beginning to be roof leaks, they had plastic tubs sitting under them, and my hope was that the family was still seeking a buyer for this place who could bring it back from the brink that it most definitely teetered on.
Unfortunately this story has a horrible ending, which is that the house has just this past month been demolished. The land is on the market for some developer to convert to more soulless shitboxes. This family should be ashamed of themselves. I hope that their ancestors who built and cared for this beautiful place haunt them for the rest of their miserable, hedonistic lives.
