Читать книгу Ghosthunting Maryland - Michael J. Varhola - Страница 15

CHAPTER 7

St. Mary’s College

ILCHESTER

A flight of sixty-six crumbling steps leads up the hill to the overgrown ruins of St. Mary’s College, a former Roman Catholic seminary.

Ilchester is a small station on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, and is situated on the right bank of the Patapsco River … Ellicott had erected a fine stone house four stories high, intending it as a small hotel for travelers. But few people stopped at Ilchester and his hopes were soon dampened … Ellicott abandoned it … He offered to sell the hotel and farm, but for many years no one could be found to buy it and the entire property was neglected and suffered considerable damage. The hotel remained closed and uninhabited; the stable and farmhouses were rapidly decaying; and the orchard and gardens were falling prey to brushwood and briars. This was the state of things when the place was purchased by the [Redemptorists].

—From a 1905 newspaper article

OVER THE YEARS, many people had high hopes for the spot on the bluffs overlooking the Patapsco River that became known as Ilchester and were drawn to it first for its suitability as a holiday spot and then as a spiritual retreat. It probably would have been inconceivable to any of them that the place would eventually be regarded as one of the most frightening and haunted spots in Howard County or that its most prominent structure would end up becoming known as Hell House.

In 1886, George Ellicott managed to sell the decaying handful of buildings that constituted the village of Ilchester to the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer—a Roman Catholic sect founded to minister to the poor, disenfranchised, and alienated that is more commonly known as the Redemptorists—and the things that had doomed it as a holiday site became assets.

“The qualities that made it unfit for trade made it fit for the purposes [they] had in mind—retirement, study, and prayer,” wrote Paul T. Stroh, a former seminarian at the school, in his book Ilchester Memories.

For a century, the place served the Redemptorist order as a seminary, and at its peak hundreds of people dwelled in the hilltop community. It must have seemed to many of them like a timeless place, with immense stone buildings that would last until the end of time, grottoes devoted to Our Lady of Perpetual Help, and paths passing through wooded clearings and running along cliffs overlooking the river below.

Over the years, the Redemptorist fathers, students, and laity expanded the school into a sprawling complex of dormitories, classrooms, and refectories that included additions to Ellicott’s original inn and tavern, among them a small chapel; a huge, five-story brick building that ultimately had a large chapel attached to it; and numerous other structures like garages, greenhouses, and shrines. They turned the rest of their 110-acre campus into a garden, lining pathways with stone from the hill and cultivating roses in its dark earth.

Despite its isolated location atop the hill, the Redemptorist priests and seminarians were not monastic, and ministered to Catholics in the local area, many of whom were too poor to travel to Baltimore every week for services. They were eventually made their own congregation, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, the aspect of the Virgin Mary venerated by the group (which continues to function in the area, albeit not under the Redemptorists, and is headquartered in a new complex about a mile south on Ilchester Road).

In the second half of the twentieth century, St. Mary’s College struggled to remain viable, and years before it finally had to shut its doors, people had already begun to remark how forlorn and overgrown the place was starting to look. There were only ten seminarians in its last graduating class, and the congregation shut down the school in 1972. And that is when its real troubles began.

Sometime after the Redemptorists left, the state of Maryland acquired approximately seventy-seven acres of the site and added it to adjacent Patapsco Valley State Park, while a developer named Michael Nibaldi acquired the college itself and the remaining thirty-three acres of land. Nibaldi had, in conjunction with a local architect, hoped to convert the college into apartments but was ultimately foiled by the opposition of county boards and area residents.

During this period, the place remained largely vacant, and it was then that local youths began to vandalize the place. At that time the first rumors of the place being haunted began to circulate, the centerpiece of which was a lurid story about a priest who forced seven nuns to hang themselves and then killed himself in a similar manner. According to the tale—which, by the way, can still be elicited from people in the local area to this very day—their tormented ghosts now haunt the grounds of the ruined college, etc., etc. The weakest point in this wretched fabrication, of course, is that the site was a seminary and not a convent and would thus not likely have had any nuns present to be slaughtered, much less seven.

As is quite often the case, of course, it is possible to have a genuinely haunted site for which the actual origins of its haunting are unknown, and this would seem to be the case with St. Mary’s College. Indeed, numerous ghosthunting groups have claimed to have experienced paranormal phenomena at the site over the years. According to material posted on one such organization’s Web site, for example, “People from the area that have been able to go there have seen and heard many spirits while visiting.”

An extended body of urban legend has included tales of Satanic altars and drug labs hidden within the sprawling main building and the tunnels and chambers beneath the complex. If such things were indeed present in the decaying remains of St. Mary’s College, they were, in all likelihood, established by the very people who were going up to the place and wrecking it. Kids would, in any event, challenge each other to see how far they were willing to venture into the place, a foray onto just the second floor of the main building—where all forms of awfulness were rumored to reside—being regarded as a sign of especial bravery by the timorous and unimaginative young bumpkins.

In the early 1980s, the nonprofit Kamakoti & Tirupati Foundation began looking at the site with an eye toward converting it into an International Institute for Religious Studies, a nonsectarian spiritual center that could be used for research, discussion, and retreat. Initially the group rented the site, and between 1986 and 1988—sources vary—it was acquired on its behalf by Sateesh Kumar Singh, who purchased it for about four-hundred thousand dollars through BCS Limited Partnership, a corporation he formed with a number of other people around the country. Funding for the project never really came together, however, and while its organizers struggled to bring their dream to fruition, the property remained largely uninhabited and unmaintained.

In the meantime, the local police could not—or would not bother to—protect the site from the continuing depredations of local teenagers who, not content with merely visiting the place, routinely vandalized and stole from it. Vandals broke windows, ripped phones out of the walls, tore down fences and “No Trespassing” signs, smashed security lights, and even stole copper downspouts.

Nearby neighbors were also victimized as part of these rampages and reported incidents that included having their windows shot out. The almost depraved indifference of the local police to these violent acts was revealed in a contemporary newspaper article.

“Mischief is really the key word here,” said Howard County Police spokeswoman Sherry Llewellyn. “We’re not concerned that there are any serious crimes being committed.” Even when the local authorities caught a kid engaged in such vicious and destructive “mischief,” little or nothing came of it. But, as events would eventually demonstrate, considerably more concern was shown when the victims were not property owners with strange foreign names or hermetic groundskeepers, and when the perpetrators were not the scions of local families.

One person struggled to protect the place during this era, a resident caretaker named Allen Rufus Hudson, who came to be feared and resented by the local youth and vilified by them as “the Hillbilly.” Over the years he lived in the progressively decrepit site, he paid a heavy price for his efforts.

Between 1992 and 1997, the six foot, three inch, 225-pound Hudson was arrested a half dozen times at the site and charged with offenses that included assault, battery, false imprisonment, intent to injure with a deadly weapon, reckless endangerment, failure to confine a dangerous dog, and various weapons possession charges. In 1992, he was jailed for three weeks following an altercation with a couple of police officers, but the net effect in the other cases was that he was not convicted—often because the prosecutor declined to pursue the case or because mitigating circumstances, such as probable cause, were found to be present. During this time, Hudson was also the defendant in a number of civil lawsuits brought by trespassers who either he or his dogs had attacked and had settlements of up to five-thousand dollars brought against him.

When three young men menaced the forty-five-year-old caretaker with baseball bats one night in 1996 and he shot one, wounding him, Howard County police again arrested Hudson, charging him with assault, battery, and assault with attempt to murder. About seven weeks later, the assistant state’s attorney opted to not pursue the case and the charges against him were dropped.

In 1997, a year after Hudson used lethal force to defend himself, arsonists set fire to the main, five-story building and completely destroyed it. A year later on Halloween, a similar blaze claimed part of the original structure built by George Ellicott. Although the local fire authorities declared the acts deliberate, no one was ever charged in connection with them. And because the fire-damaged site had become unstable and was prone to collapse onto the caretaker’s residence, Hudson was forced to move. (In 1998, Hudson was finally convicted of something—of driving a motor vehicle with a revoked license—and sentenced to two years in prison, all but three months of which was ultimately suspended. He was the plaintiff in another case in 2002, but dropped out of public view after that.)