Nightmare in Newtown

By G. E. Shuman

I had a rather strange experience a few Saturdays ago, and I would like to share it with you. I hope that what I share here will be of interest, but I’m not sure of that. I’m pretty sure it will help me, by getting this slightly creepy story off my chest, and onto yours. Isn’t that nice of me?
On that particular Saturday morning, my family and I arrived in Newtown Connecticut, for a basketball tournament our son would be participating in. We drove through several beautiful neighborhoods, toward our destination, and pulled onto the campus where the tourney was to take place. We then began, as usual on one of these ‘basketball weekends’ to slowly drive around in search of the athletic center.
I think it mentally ‘struck’ my wife and me at about the same second, that something was not right about the place we were in the midst of. “Wait a minute,” I remember saying. “Something’s wrong with these buildings.” Lorna said something similar, and I stopped the car momentarily to peer around us a bit. “Look at the paint on the buildings.” I said, either aloud or under my breath. What we were experiencing was the sight of absolutely mammoth, sprawling, once-beautiful, intricate brick structures that were totally abandoned. Most were three stories high; many had bell towers and/or elaborate wooden entryways and columned porticos. What I had, at first, taken for a huge white steeple under renovation, proved to be a huge white steeple in absolute disrepair. In fact, every place on every one of those brick buildings, that was wood, had once been painted white. Now, every window frame, door, and doorway there was peeling badly. Some of the wood was rotting; many, many windows of those fine old structures were broken out. It was the strangest sight I had ever seen; the strangest place I had ever visited. I, momentarily, irrationally, felt that we might have taken a wrong turn into The Twilight Zone.
Our strange distraction was suddenly interrupted a bit as we approached the beautiful athletic building that had been erected, for reasons unknown to us, in this very odd place. Andrew checked in, and we went about our usual ritual of watching and waiting as his team played their first game and then waited for their next.
During an early afternoon pause in the play, Lorna and I decided to take a walk around the massive grounds to continue our observations, and, maybe, get some answers. As we approached one of the buildings I noticed that the bricks of it were actually rounded, weather-worn and pock-marked, as bricks would be that had been tossed around for years by waves on a rocky sea shore. These buildings were old, indeed. We walked, seemingly for a few miles at least, around this long-abandoned, presumed institution of learning. We passed dozens of equally neglected, towering monuments of decay.
As we walked, I noticed that all was not neglected in this ideal location for the next Tim Burton movie, as the expansive lawns around the buildings were very well cared for. Apparently, everyone but some zombie lawn mower man had left this once beautiful place, which was still beautiful in some ways. Flowering trees adorned the manicured lawns, which surrounded stately buildings, still beautiful, as long as you didn’t look too closely. The largest impression, to me, was one of a colossal, well-kept graveyard, only here the grave stones were huge, and made of brick, peeling wood, and broken glass. In my imagination, the lawn mower man awaited the return of those long-dead former occupants of this place; people who had been sucked out, or had evaporated, or, in some other way had been made to leave. At the time, I had no idea how right I might have been. I looked through several broken window panes, half expecting to see piles of dust-covered clothes where live humans had once stood. (I have watched too many science fiction movies.)
As we continued walking, and gazing at those looming structures, I felt a lonely sensation of abandonment and monstrous waste, in the idea of beautiful buildings being left to such ruin. I knew that hundreds of hallways within those many walls must lead to thousands of rooms, unoccupied, and likely unseen by human eyes, perhaps for many decades.
Later that afternoon, with the suspense more than she could stand, Lorna entered one, smaller, renovated building there, and asked the people exactly what this place had once been. She soon rejoined me outside, with the answer. The truth is that this vast, long-abandoned, university-like complex, with its bell towers, columned halls and rolling lawns, was once a huge Connecticut state mental institution.
It has been said that there is a fine line between genius and insanity. As we walked back toward the athletic center, I pondered the notion that institutions of learning may not be what they first appear. I was glad that the walls of this ‘other’ type of campus had no voices. Sorry, but now the ‘creepies’ are on you.