Looking for:

Abandoned places to explore in vermont
Click here to ENTER

Each one of these creepy places are sure to appeal to your sense of curiosity and delight. Be aware that some of these places do not allow trespassing and should only be viewed from abandoned places to explore in vermont distance.

You vermnt been warned. From Rte 30you can quite clearly see the abandoned places to explore in vermont Hyde Manorespecially during fall and winter, when the trees have shed their leaves. Please respect her wishes and do not bother her. She will NOT allow anyone /19821.txt due to abandoned places to explore in vermont safety concerns. As of Februaryapparently most of the Hyde Manor has now collapsed due to nature, the weather and conditions.

Driving along Rte 14 just south of Albany village, you will see a large brick house across from the meandering Black River. As a matter of fact, the house still looks almost exactly like the image above, though many of the outbuildings and barns are long gone.

She accused her son-in-law, William Hayden of poisoning her and her curse doomed generations по этой ссылке the family into oblivion. The property was left abandoned for years and locals often reported stories of ghostly lights and apparitions seen when passing by. Any self respecting Abandoned places to explore in vermont inn has a resident ghost or two. The Green Mountain Inn located in Stowe is no exception.

Bysxplore last few remaining families were driven out by flooding. Not much remains of the town now other than foundations and one standing house.

There are stories of strange and creepy events occurring at Ricker Basinparticularly at abandoned places to explore in vermont and one man brave enough to camp out for the night, endured a bone chilling experience that was extremely frightening.

It is said that the Dutton House of Shelburne Museumcontains a resident who refuses to leave, although he has been dead for many years. One museum employee reports that on her first day on the job, as a tour guide, she went upstairs and noticed an older man with a white shirt and scruffy face hunkering down under the slope of the roof.

Another museum tour guide mentioned that she has heard the sound of a little girl crying. If there is a haunted railroad bridge to be found in Vermont, the best place to find it would be in Hartford. The Montreal Express, a train with passenger cars carrying 78 explorre, derailed go burned.

Tragically, thirty-six people were crushed, drowned or burned alive, including a boy and his father. Tortured souls are said to re-live the gruesome event in perpetuity, a haunting and tragic tale to be по ссылке. Inthe Highgate Manor was purchased by Dr.

Henry Baxter. As was the custom of the day, Dr. Baxter opened his practice abandoned places to explore in vermont his home. It was during this time that the legend of the Highgate Manor started to grow.

Many of Dr. Ina man named Dr. Timothy Clark Smith constructed an elaborate tomb expolre the event that he was accidentally buried while still alive. Supposedly, he died with a fear of catching sleeping sickness, which would give the illusion of death, later to awaken in a cold, dark grave, very much alive.

Thousands abandoned places to explore in vermont people head to the Huntington River Gorge every summer. But many lives have been lost in one popular spot and its frightening death toll has continued to climb over the last half-century. A sign at the falls indicates the tragic fates of 22 visitors since Huntington Gorge expoore beautiful, captivating and potentially deadly for those who are careless. A visit to the gorge is exciting yet discernibly eerie, once you read the sign and contemplate the number of souls that have been lost.

Rumor has it that a local junk dealer, named Henry Sheldon, purchased an Egyptian mummy from a New York antique dealer in He kept the mummy in his own house, along with a large collection of junk and trinkets which eventually became a museum of sorts until he died in Inthe mummy was cremated abandonned the ashes finally interred in a burial plot at the West Cemetery in MiddleburyVT.

Brunswick Springs is located well off the main road in Brunswick, VT. The story of the curse begins abadonedwhen Abenakis lived near the springs and relied on the natural healing powers of the waters.

A struggle ensued plzces in the death of an Abenaki man and a baby. Ever since then, every attempt to build hotels on the property resulted in destruction.

The place is hallowed grounds and is still said to be abansoned active with spirits and activity. If you abandoned places to explore in vermont along Route in Cuttingsville, the eerie site of a ghostly white figure standing outside the door of the Laurel Glen Mausoleum with a wreath and key in one hand and a top hat in the other may momentarily startle you.

Strange and eerie occurrences have been reported around the mausoleum at night. Vermon mansion across the street from the cemetery seems to be the focal point for hauntings. Locals believe that the ghosts of Lpaces and his family still walk within the baandoned they had once enjoyed during life.

We have saved the ot fascinating place for last. Many cemeteries serve to hold monuments of death but Hope Cemetery is equally a place to honor monuments of life. Many of the ornately designed granite monuments are works of art and tell the story of the person and families interred below placss within.

Someone from Vermont not me! Robin Quivers hit it right […]. Every day, thousands of cars pass by on the their way […]. Our Latest Posts. Hyde Manor in ruins. Photos courtesy of Chad Abramovich. All that remains of Ricker Basin, a VT ghost town abandoned to time. Bert Goodell Farm.

Does vermknt ghost inhabit Dutton House? Dutton House Attic where a zbandoned is said to hide. Tortured souls are said to re-live the gruesome event in perpetuity. I of the tragic accident. A viewing window direct to abandoned places to explore in vermont tomb! Courtesy of Chad Abramovich. William Alexander View articles. You might abandonef interested in … Someone from Vermont not me! Search Search. Recent Comments No comments to show.

Search for: Search. Latest Posts. Japanese Olaces Tincture, and more…. June 9, The Dog Team Tavern May 13, Ads explorre Google.

Close Menu.

Abandoned places to explore in vermont –

In early , there was a substantial collapse about feet into the more vulnerable western heading that shut the tunnel down for a few months, caused by both general wear and tear, and water flowing in from above the tunnel that was being trapped in blocked drainage tunnels that were supposed to be being maintained, which created a sinkhole that dropped about a feet of mountain onto the tracks and opened up a cavity in the slope above.

I really outdid myself with that last sentence. It would be a huge shame for it to diminish. Oh, and a literal topographical catastrophe. It was the week of Halloween, and I and a few friends took a jaunt down to the Berkshires to see some oddity and see some foliage, and were listening to the podcast Lore to rev up the creepy vibe. We drove through the neat historic mill turned liberal arts burb of North Adams, a town that the Hoosac Tunnel fundamentally ensured would thrive.

Greylock is a mountain with some cool footnotes hidden up its non-existent sleeve. An asphalted scenic seasonal road curves its way up to the summit, and it always reminds me of an inactive blog post I read years ago about some young guys who decided to literally race the sun.

Sounds fun to me! We linked onto the famous Mohawk Trail in North Adams, which in itself was an adventure! The Mohawk Trail basically invented and then literally paved the way for the idea of the American road trip, long before iconoclasts like Route It got its start in when the state dished out money to improve the road around the dawn of the automobile craze.

Early strategizing automobile clubs started to peddle the road as a tourist attraction to bring some cash into western Massachusetts, and it worked so well that it planted the seeds for Americans seeking out particular roads to drive for pleasure. The commonwealth acquired 5, acres of mountain slopes and created the Mohawk Trail State Forest in the s, and during the Great Depression, the CCC came to the area and spruced it up by building roads, primitive campgrounds, and cabins up along miles of serpentine hill climbs.

The tallest tree in all of New England — a foot white pine named Jake Swamp — as well as about acres of extremely rare old-growth forest with some trees over years old — are somewhere within the state forest. The name, too, is kind of a mystery.

Standing at the foot of its wickedness was awe-inspiring and intimidating. Cold, sour air belched from the murk and cryptic sounds echoed and cursed from within. Icy groundwater salivated from the ceiling and pooled along the tracks. Pieces of century-and-a-half-year-old brickwork occasionally crashed down with lethal strikes. On a white-hot summer day back in , I explored about half the length of the tunnel with a good college buddy of mine. I remember measuring that trip as such a big deal for me, because it was my first oddity expedition outside of Vermont, around the time when I was really struggling to find my identity and my beat out in the universe, and just beginning to try my prowess at blogging.

Leaving the Berkshire heat, the clammy darkness swallowed us and gave us a lot to stumble on. Endlessly falling water formed rivulets along both sides of the tracks, clogged with silt, gravel, brick shards, and sporadic live electrical cables.

We were about five minutes into the tunnel and the wife of one of the bikers had some kind of a happening. Not only were there apparently hoards of them in the tunnel, but according to her, they wanted us out. I was far more concerned about running into a freight train than a ghost, and the fact that, even if I press myself up against the grimy tunnel walls, I barely have a few inches of space between me and the whizzing side of the locomotive to prevent me from being smashed.

They pass through at random hours, spew potentially lethal amounts of diesel fuel, and the racket is enough to potentially cause some hearing damage, if not complete deafness. Water was everywhere, seeping out of the ceiling and raining down our necks and soaking our boots.

Bricks crashed down to the earth erratically. We were far enough in the tunnel where the daylight coming in from the east portal could no longer be seen — it was just a sullen lacuna, and the silence was so intense, my tinnitus buzzed through the strange isolation like crazy.

It was gritty, dirty, and cold. Within the ghastly illumination of a lone crimson tunnel light affixed to the natural rock wall, I saw a startling silhouette of what appeared to be a man. Motionless, we stood in place, and I stared at this figure, trying to understand what I was seeing.

But that was when I noticed, that no matter how long we were watching it, and despite the fact that the strange man looked like it was practically power walking in our direction with determination, it strangely never seemed to gain any ground — it just kept on walking but never making any progress.

Then, we saw another light and another figure. This new sight, however, was definitely making progress in coming our way. It was a train. My friend and I booked it and clumsily sprinted back towards the safety of the east portal as fast as we could, as we stumbled and slipped over slippery tracks and adjacent inundated burms.

We made it out just in time as a lengthy locomotive came barreling out behind us — grimmy, wet, and desperately trying to chase a little breath. Maybe we should have listened to biker wife lady?

In the fall of , me and some other friends decided to take a jaunt down to the Berkshires to revisit the tunnel, and to get a little relief from the stresses of the pandemic, and we had a lot of fun. It was around the close of the evening by the time we had arrived, and the tunnel was crowded with obnoxious social media influencers and TikTokers, but it was engaging to see it again — you never really tire with a site like this one. Unbeknownst to us, we actually wound up visiting on the same day of the central shaft catastrophe.

The last time I was down that way, it was a bit after the collapse. This was a real fun explore, and even more fun to research and unpack everything I was gleaning about this place. The most fascinating thing about a place like the Hoosac Tunnel, is that it dutifully keeps spawning new tales, tall or true, and most likely will for posterity. Or perhaps you wanna make me hip to another Berkshire oddity or abandonment? Email me please! Joe puts a lot of thought into his entries and is a great storyteller!

I remember first passing this ugly hulking blight as a young kid on a trip to Connecticut, and never forgot it. It took me until the past few years to really investigate it, though, because I assumed it was just going to be a boring empty building enclosing rows of old stadium seats. But damn, I really under-estimated the interest factor here. This place is so incongruous and inconspicuous in contemporary Vermont, that many people are pretty surprised to find it actually ever existed at all.

And though it was never a huge success, it was a standout place for this compartment of American culture and ran for most of the latter half of the 20th century. In the spring of , a horse racing track started up in the hardscrabble town of Pownal — where three fascinating mountain ranges, the Green Mountains, Taconics, and Berkshire Hills, collide.

But it was also a very practical decision. Pownal is the extreme southwestern corner of Vermont — bordered to the west by New York State, and Massachusetts and their weird Berkshire Hills to the south. The town definitely has a different kind of vibe to it than the rest of Vermont. Originally, the area was inhabited by Mahicans, whose savage fate may have been foretold by prophetic rocks on a Pownal mountainside.

What might be the oldest home in Vermont is in Pownal village — The Mooar-Wright House — which was constructed around The obscure account was originally and fortunately recorded by lawyer and historian T. Brownell, and has managed to survive into the 21st century, though still pretty obscure. Human beings are the real monsters. The first choice was she could climb a tree and wait for a group of men to chop it down. This surefire method stemmed from an old belief that water was sacred , and would undoubtedly sort these provoking preternatural things out.

The widow Krieger chose the latter, thinking it was the safer choice, and sank like a stone. That was apparently good enough for those Pownal-ites who gathered for the show. Unlike neighboring Bay State witch hunters, though, these Vermonters seemed to be a bit more philanthropic, and a group of men suddenly panicked and scrambled down the riverbank to fetch her.

Actually, Yankee witch based superstitions, though weakened, remained alive into the 19th century! Perhaps Pownal just needed to install a few witch windows? In October of , Thomas Paddock, a well-respected farmer with an amicable character, suddenly found his property under a maelstrom from poltergeist-like activity.

Stones — varying in size from pebbles to a pound boulder! The stones were found to be hot when handled, even on chilly nights, and a few of them reportedly defied gravity, and rolled uphill , or even up and over the peak of the roof after landing, almost as if they were propelled.

He even offered a reward of one dollar for anyone who could solve these shenanigans, but shortly after, the cache of tourists and newsmen cleared out when the odd activity finally stopped. Nobody was any wiser at what exactly happened at the Paddock farm, not even today though cursory blame was attempted on a hired farm boy named Jerry, who coincidentally was in the vicinity of the falling rocks more often than not… Interestingly enough, the farm just happened to be near-ish the Krieger Rocks part of town….

I know some people that hit a jackpot with their metal detectors around it. Who knows what else can still be found within the southern Green Mountains?

But until she died at 87 in , she was the best-known clairvoyant in Vermont and created a pretty venerable reputation to back up her accumulated character. According to witnesses, her answers would manifest themselves in a cryptic language within the folds of a lacy white handkerchief she would fondle during her sessions. The track opened in May of at a cost of six million dollars in a former cornfield along the Hoosic River. But it kept on keeping on, despite quite a few subsequent telltale ownership changes , and oddly became kind of significant for east coast horse racing, ironically because of the efforts made just to keep the place buoyant.

It was one of the earliest to do gimmicky nighttime races, and the first to do Sunday matches anywhere east of the Mississippi during the days of yore when the rest of the country still adhered to the blue laws. It created a sort of niche fanbase and wound up employing a lot of locals, which was a boon in a region with an economy that was becoming pretty hard-up. Twelve years later, horses were dropped from the itinerary, and Greyhound racing was the only thing occupying the oval which I guess is the bottom echelon of these kinds of places, according to some nostalgia sites I browsed until , when the track closed for good — in part to animal rights activists, waning income, and the state making the activity illegal.

A resurrection was attempted around the turn of the millennium but ultimately failed. The site has so much potential — especially being off the most traveled road in Vermont.

Lollapalooza held their festivities on the expansive grounds in , and a few antique car shows also took advantage of the space between and , which fits right in seeing as the iconic Hemmings Motor News is located up the road in Bennington in a rad, restored Sunoco station.

Williams College, a few miles south of the old track, even did a study about the property in and suggested everything from affordable housing, light manufacturing, or bringing back some agriculture. One of the biggest curiosities about this property to me was the name of its access road.

Could there have been an old family plot from an old farm that was erased? Are there still corpses trapped underneath the sea of weedy asphalt that encircles the grandstands, or maybe underneath the earth of the old track?

Many of the glum-looking crumbling cinderblock stables were razed for a solar farm, which is awesome, but the gigantic grandstands building still stood at the times of my visits, and was a spooky but really fascinating time capsule of the late sixties and early seventies, with its cold cement blocks and hideous fake vinyl wooden wall paneling — an architectural design element I hate. One unifying theme to the property was the use of a particular dark green — thematic of its location in the Green Mountains, which was used on everything from the exterior paint job to the color of its graphic design marketing.

The appeal, though, was a little curious. Everything about the place felt cheap and kinda sleazy. The building was an unassuming labyrinth of smelly and squalid offices and catacombs of dark and drippy maintenance and miscellany areas all filled with relics, gross puddles of goopy chemicals on the floors, and wandering birds. The roof had long failed, and nature has been metamorphosing the structure in gross ways for over a decade.

One of the coolest things I found was the former track photographers suite, which was still filled with heaps of developed and undeveloped film of the old races. The basement had such a foul odor that, eventually, we had to dip back outside for some fresh air revitalization. Upstairs, the former venue, snack bars, and grandstands are all cavernous spaces that have been trashed, smashed to smithereens, graffitied, succumbing to water and decay, and turning into terrariums, as moss and young plants have begun to take habitat on the floors and the rooftop.

A whole colony of what was probably hundreds of pigeons had taken up residence on and within the cavities of the defective roof and constantly circled the large, mid-century structure. It was a creepy explore, with lots of eerie sounds that croaked and carried through the wide spaces and dark crevices.

The smell of rancid decay permeated everywhere. The real reason I chose to make multiple explores here was simply because of the fact that it exists, and my sense of wonder seduces me to explore as much of Vermont as possible — especially the abandoned stuff. And admittedly, a few visits had me appreciating it in a totally different light and discovered that it was a treasure trove of an explore and architecturally evocative of its time.

The amount of destruction in the past few years was astonishing — I noticed a humongous difference between my visit in July of and March , and towards the last months of its life, the bad road tar of the old parking lot and access road almost always had multiple cars — many with out of state plates, parked around. The people that come here are quite a circus show of other amiable explorers, curiosity seekers, locals, and shady characters — it seems like many out of staters or area hooligans are using the old track as a law-free zone.

A few people we ran into definitely made us uncomfortable. I had this post sitting in my WordPress drafts for a while. The fire fueled a local outcry of folks who are fed up with all the fools turned sightseers. This is one of the many reasons why I never give out locations. There was so much more that I wanted to see, that now I never will. I think that the Green Mountain Racetrack was uniquely special.

Because of its smooth accessibility, its literal open-door policy intrigued all kinds of souls who decided to let their curiosities lead them here. I was scanning loads of posts on Instagram and was a bit startled to see just how many people not only have snooped around here, but were genuinely fond of this place in their own ways, and had fun making multiple trips here to satisfy the natural human urge of investigation.

Abandoned places inspire that kind of magic that encourages us to forget about the chains of society and our inhibitions. When the news hit that this place burned down, people started commiserating. This was a continued lesson for me not to take places for granted. Everything is finite.

Photos from my last sojourn here. It was a sultry early summer day as mists slid of new green slopes vibrant against gloomy ashen skies and uncomfortable humidity that drenched us in sweat. The entire place reeked of something sodden and foul. It had started to rain, and the roof, which had long failed, was letting fetid water in which dripped down and baptized us and made the upper carpets like stepping on a wet sponge.

She involuntarily cringed at the sensation and shot me a glare. Maybe I should invest in one of these…. Or are you a Vermonter in general? Also — if you appreciate me and this blog, perhaps consider making a donation at my PayPal below? The pandemic has hit my finances and my mental health pretty hard, so any amount is humbly appreciated.

We got a late start, and we had a little over a 2 hour drive down towards the southern part of the state before dusk, but we decided we were going to go for it anyway — and set off to locate the deformed remains of a terrible tragedy on Terrible Mountain, an aptly named geographical growth on the Weston-Andover town line.

Vermonters have always been fighting with their topography. Sometimes, our mountains were a huge annoyance to our forerunners which would earn them on-the-level toponyms telling you what was what. Over years ago, unaware surveyors put the mountain right in the middle of the town of Andover and it made getting from one end of town to the other a huge trouble. So much so that the west part of town split and formed its own town, becoming Weston by It crashed into the southwestern side of Terrible Mountain in a terrific fireball and killed all of them on impact.

Adjacent locals still recall seeing and feeling the collision and trekking up through 5 feet of snow to the conflagration. Sometime in the intervening years, someone created a small black cross from 2 plastic bands and nailed it to a birch tree as a somber memorial. The hardest part was a close toss up between the hike and finding the place to begin the hike. And for a while, we thought without any access at all.

I managed to settle on the road I thought would get us to our entry into the woods, and the higher we drove, the better the views became. I was enthusiastically enjoying wide-ranging vistas of the Green Mountain National Forest and north to Okemo Mountain that was beginning to silhouette underneath the shimmer of a summer sunset. We figured that was a good of a place as any to leave the car, and prepared for our blind adventure into the wild.

I already have Lyme Disease, and man oh man is it inconvenient. Not wanting to get double Lyme, I broke out the tick spray and diffused it liberally all over my body. We were definitely breaking a sweat, stumbling over seasonally dry rills and through thick brush and fallen trees that just kept getting more perpendicular. If you were going north on rt 30 you must have passed Hyde manor which is north of bomoseen in sudbury. Great idea Kaitlin.

I love this idea, I live in NH where I sometimes come across long forgotten buildings. I often wonder who walked away from them and why, did they love them and care for them once upon a time? These are some great, albeit sad, pictures. Albans city limits. I loved going in there as a kid. Great gifts and maple products. It closed many years ago. And now that heavy snow we had a couple years ago collapsed the roof. So sad…. This is such a cool idea to postulate the fact, through photos, that this era actually did exist once.

Actually, it probably will appear on one of these abandoned properties sites soon as I saw someone there just a few weeks ago taking pictures of Hyde Manor in Sudbury, VT. It is on the left east side of Rt 30 and it is truly amazing that it is still standing, or seemingly so from the front.

Descendant of the Hyde Family lives in warm months in one of the two remaining Hyde cottages just to the north of this once splendid building. Many pictures of this building in its hey day were displayed at the Bicentennial Event for the Sudbury Meeting House, held in July These were donated by this descendant for purposes of display. The current owner of this building lives next door, to the south of it, believe it or not!

I have a thing for railroads in particular, which fits in nicely to that theme… I thought you might find my post today interesting! Thanks for your own explorations and the stories you uncover around them. Thanks for the peek. Keep it up yourself…. Great list of structures. Sherman Cahal has some great photos from all over the Midwest also: abandonedonline. In between two very dilapidated barns in front of the Shelburne, VT teddy bear factory there is an abandoned white farmhouse.

My dad and I checked it out today, but I want to know more about it. I also think you should see it. Hello, I am a young Vermont photographer and am planning on creating a horror film.

I am looking for a good abandoned building to film in, as my base for the film. It will take place at night. Do you have any suggestions for me? I am looking for it to be safe to go in and legal to go in. Please contact me soon. Hello, I am also a Vermont photographer looking for an old, expansive, abandoned location to do a photo project.

Safe and legal entry is also a concern of mine. I was just wondering if you found a good place to do your film. Please let me know! Then I would just wander. What remains today, and is there any truth to the legends and ghost stories surrounding this long abandoned Vermont community? The radar base is one of the most popular abandoned places in Vermont.

It was an active part of the Cold War and was built because of its strategic location for spying on Soviet Union. It has always been an intriguing location, sought by many. Unfortunately, the location which is now a privately owned property, has been vandalized and destroyed by people with little to no respect for such places. The base became operational in and was renamed the Lyndonville AFS in The site and its operations were closed by the Air Force in , leaving many of the buildings standing but decaying into disrepair over the years.

Read the full article about the abandoned radar station here. The base was constructed by the Air Force in the s, but was abandoned in Over the decades the buildings at the base deteriorated due to weather and human carelessness. The base is known for a fascinating history, including airmen claiming to see a UFO just hours before a New Hampshire couple, Betty and Barney Hill, reported being abducted by aliens.

Many years ago, upon locating the site of Elgin Spring, Hiram Allen realized that he had found a lucrative business opportunity during the antebellum era, a time period when the therapeutic healing procedure known as spring hotels was popular. He built an attention-grabbing Greek Revival-inspired addition to his cottage-style farmhouse and turned his home into a boarding house, located in the top of lengthy, steep pasture lands, with a breathtaking view of the rough Adirondacks fading away in the distance.

Unfortunately for favored tourists, the waters of the springs were fed to tour groups because of their supposed healing properties, and were claimed to disinfect. As the dangers of asbestos became clear, mining slowed and finally ceased in The buildings, mines, and tons of mining waste now scar the landscape. The mine is abandoned and for good reason. Asbestos spreads microscopic fibers when disturbed that enter your lungs and cannot be removed. These fibers cause lung cancer and a host of other painful breathing issues.

Today over 30 million tons of asbestos tailings litter the property. Seasoned explorers should wear proper asbestos-rated masks and abatement clothing and be versed in mine exploration. We do not recommend you visit this location. Lyndonville Airforce Station was part of a network of radar defense stations used by the Air Defense Command during the Cold War in The purpose of the radar was to detect airborne threats including missiles armed with nuclear warheads.

The site was also used to help guide interceptor aircraft and track aerial objects entering U. S airspace. In the spring of , the Air Force ordered the site to close. Today the site is abandoned with all of the radar towers still standing. This site is worth a trip to, especially if you love Cold War history.

Take the back roads, follow train tracks, and find some places for yourself. There are plenty of places I kept off this list so get out there and explore. Vendor List Privacy Policy.

Abandoned Places In Vermont 1. Diamond Run Mall Place A few minutes into our walk and the already fallow landscape began to change, and I began to notice mounds of discarded anything covered in moss and fallen leaves that had been dumped underneath the dead canopy.

A walk through the Vermont woods can often be revealing. And in my opinion — our ruins are often one of the coolest things about the human race. We create amazing structures and accomplishments or inhabit these laborious lifestyles and let the aftereffects rot without much of a thought, leaving people like me to eagerly trace their occurrences that blur the line between litter and urban archeology.

And out of any time of the year, you can be most appreciative of our habit to ruin than the fall, when visibility is best. Back then, the most efficient and convenient way to get rid of anything you deemed as garbage, was to make the disposal quick and uncomplicated. This was often accomplished by dumping those items on a far corner of the farm, or let gravity take it down a river bank. Over time, these items accumulated, festering in the woods long after the farm went defunct, or their traces bleeding into our waterways or soil.

How times have changed. But as is the trend, the movement also shakes things up, especially farmers who find it expensive and laborious to abide by new regulations, or the costs of implementing new laws or infrastructure by a government that many are losing faith in.

A lot less of Vermont is farmed now days, and much of the land has returned to forest, but these rusted and forgotten vestiges of the past still remain, now moldering in the silence of the wilderness. This particular junkyard had an eyebrow-raising amount of stuff brought there. Old tractors, snowmobiles, knob televisions, a Ford truck, religious paraphernalia, antique glass bottles, creepy childrens toys decaying in the weather, a small mound of old appliances, and so much more in depths farther down than I felt good about digging to reach.

Barns are vital storage spaces, workshops and in some cases, awesomely bizarre museums. Traditionally, a Vermont farmer would put more money and effort into keeping up the barn than anything else they owned. So much, that many of them would let their houses fall into ruin if they had to make that hard choice of where to divvy up their cash. That even goes as far as the demolition process if the construction gets too far gone. According to my friend and tour guide, the old barn was close to years old, filled with accumulations of its years.

We pulled over in some tall grass and began to tromp our way through the threshold. Simply put — red paint is cheap. But the why behind that answer actually has to do with dying stars. Pretty much; red paint is made from Iron. Iron is created when a star eventually collapses. The ground is loaded with iron, or, an iron-oxide compound called red ochre that makes a good pigment.

The ground is loaded with red ochre because when stars die, they explode, and physics decrees they generate a bunch of iron as the result, which is pretty cool. The dusty whitewashed interior of the barn was pretty cool as well. In typical Vermont tradition, the old farmhands never threw anything away, so the spaces were stuffed with antique furniture, busted farm equipment, and some unexpecteds like a collection of bowling pins. Maybe these guys used their barn as a makeshift bowling alley to pass the doldrums?

Walking around through hay that stuck to my boots, I realized the barn was a little worse for wear than I had thought. While I was writing up this post, I remembered another old barn I had checked out many years ago, and decided to dig up the old photos.

I want to say these were taken by an insecure me with my Nikon point and shoot, around the spring of Man, young Chad had so much to learn. During that spring, I needed to get out of the house to clear my head, and one of the best ways for me to do that was to go shunpiking — one of my favorite activities still.

I found myself on some swampy backroads up in Franklin County. With the windows down and the wet Spring perfume coming through, I found myself passing by an abandoned farm, and next door, a rundown ranch house where the owning family still dwelled.

They agreed to let me skulk around their abandoned farm, but their elderly teenage son thought I was a weirdo for being interested in their place. According to him, the town actually condemned their old farmhouse when it began to violate building codes as it aged. The best feature of the property was a tumbledown dairy barn covered in gray decay. The ramshackle structure was worth the potential threat of tetanus. The interior was filled with the debris of century old farm equipment, hidden doors and other relics.

Like a beautiful antique sleigh. I even found a century plus old book underneath some floorboards in an abandoned barn, which raised a few questions. Why was this book concealed under the floor?

What else was below my boots? As a graphic design major, I really appreciated the headlining typography. The place was built in the s as a hotel, and also functioned as a bar, vaudeville theater and silent movie house and an odd fellows hall, before being converted into shoddy apartments.

To all of my fans and supporters, I am truly grateful and humbled by all of the support and donations throughout the years that have kept Obscure Vermont up and running.

As you all know I spend countless hours researching, writing, and traveling to produce and sustain this blog. Obscure Vermont is funded entirely on generous donations that you the wonderful viewers and supporters have made.

Expenses range from internet fees to host the blog, to investing in research materials, to traveling expenses. Also, donations help keep me current with my photography gear, computer, and computer software so that I can deliver the best quality possible. Seriously, even the small cost equivalent to a gas station cup of coffee would help greatly! If you value, appreciate, and enjoy reading about my adventures please consider making a donation to my new Gofundme account or Paypal.

Any donation would not only be greatly appreciated and help keep this blog going, it would also keep me doing what I love. Thank you! Take the tiny farm town of Leicester, whose most famous denizen can be seen lumbering over the small oval-shaped lawn of Pioneer Auto Sales, right along the side of Route 7 either before or after you approach the tiny village center — which is pretty much an intersection with a few houses and a newly reopened gas station that now has a growler filling station.

But how did something like Queen Connie end up in aesthetic conscious Vermont? Actually, the answer is pretty straight forward — according to what I was told anyways. The owner of the car dealership had commissioned local artist T. Neil to do some concrete work around his pool at home.

Neil surprised him by suggesting a hyperbolized gorilla — his only reason was because he wanted to see it holding up a car. I was heading down to explore parts of southern Vermont with a friend.

My summer turned into a lot of stress and setbacks, and I felt like my life was becoming as standard as my white apartment walls. Passing through my favorite town of Wallingford always cures a frown on my face, and as we got farther south and the trees began to turn gold in the hills around Mount Tabor and Dorset, I enthusiastically recalled a defunct marble quarry I hiked to last summer. Route 7 turns into a limited access highway through most of Bennington County, until it reverts back to full access in Bennington and brings you right into its historic downtown district, the center of town being where it intersects with state route 9.

I took a quick jaunt up the hill to the Old Bennington neighborhood to take a few photos of one of my favorite buildings in Vermont, The Walloomsac Inn , then ventured up route 9 eastwards into the mountains. Route 9, also known as The Molly Stark Trail or The Molly Stark Byway as the state issued scenic byway signs tell you — is one of my favorite drives in Vermont, and the same sentiment could probably be said for quite a few other people.

To be honest, lots of things on this road vie for your attention. The huge area holds ghost towns, a slew of trails and forest roads, man-made feats of engineering, and plenty of mysteries. Just ask the Geocaching community. We passed through forested Woodford, the highest town in elevation in Vermont at around 2, feet, then descended into Wilmington.

Which is where I unintentionally found some local curio. A green iron truss bridge first caught my eye, because it was obviously abandoned, as indicated by all the trees growing through it. The underwhelming replacement was a simple concrete and steel span that bridged the river inches away. I was at a loss here. A local parody or some kind of irony? A name of an obscure back road Wilmington neighborhood?

I was curious if there was a mystery or story here, so I sent an email to the Wilmington Historical Society.

In their reply, Julie Moore explained that Medburyville was a village in Wilmington, but was erased when the Harriman Reservoir was constructed for the purpose of flood control. There was a mill, several houses and a railroad line that ran through the area at one point. Today there is only a small aluminum sign that raises more questions than answers.

The post office also moved around between Readsboro and Whittingham — depending on wherever construction was happening.

I still see Surge Tank sometimes on obscure place name lists. Like Medburyville, Surge Tank is long gone, and without a sign to commemorate it. Back on the road, the forests occasionally break up a little and you got a positioning glimpse that you were right in the middle of the green mountain chain. One of the ramshackle old lodging cabins from a deceased ski resort, which I was about to hike to, sits on the edge of a drop off below the overlook, and might be one of the most photographed site among the sights.

But I was able to get a shot through a dusty old window along the side and gaze curiously at a few items of older furniture left inside. I really ache for having access to land like I did when I was younger, where I could go 4 wheeling and hiking and just let out the things storming in my mind. So my predilection was that I could sit on that porch all day or night and gaze off into the distance in my own reverie, listening to Gregory Alan Isakov albums.

The cluster of tourist buildings that sort of delineate the maximum height of land between Bennington and Brattleboro were all once a part of Hogback Mountain, a defunct ski area cut out of the slopes of Mount Olga which has mostly been recovered by nature. I decided to walk down from the overlook and have a look around at the property. Good thing I wore jeans — the land was wild with tangled undergrowth, and most likely, ticks. A few old buildings, the rusted bones of an old lift line and a squint-to-make-out overgrown ski trail could still be traced.

Vermont is the land of skiing and snowboarding and our pioneering ski hills ranged from extremely plain rope tow affairs to more detailed mom and pop establishments. Davis, I got a startling impression of how many ski areas we once had just in the lower part of Vermont, and how many of them have been, well, lost. Hogback Mountain itself seemed to be something special. It has a lot of history, so much I had to condense it a bit for the sake of keeping people reading this blog post.

The truth seemed to be that Hogback was envisioned by a community of people who loved skiing, and the consequences were real. It featured a Constam T-Bar which could move skiers an hour and was the highest capacity lift in the country at the time.

The Vermont winters of today are a bit more disparate. I observed some older trail maps, and discovered that Hogback had a unique layout. Over the years, the laid back ski hill caught enough popularity from a top notch ski school, excellent snowfall and a gorgeous mountain where skiers would admire spruce trees crusted in snow.

In the 50s, it started to expand, and would continue that momentum through the 70s. More trails were cut down the slopes and made easier accessible by a Pomalift and the addition of 4 more Doppelmayr T-bars.

There was also a Quonset Hut brought to the property that served as a ski-in snack hut. Seriously, this place was a big deal. A lot of the history or accounts I read about the mountain was that plenty of southern Vermont kids learned to ski here. It also helped develop a local interest in ski races and became home to the Southern Vermont Racing Team.

If a nearby community, like Brattleboro, had an outing club, they probably went to Hogback. The mountain developed a pretty enthusiastically devoted fanbase. The ski school changed instructors a few times over the decades, each new presence contributing to it in their own way. But towards the s, snowfall began to change to a lack of snowfall. Not being able to compete or stay consistent, most of them became fading ghosts. Abandoned ski hills are interesting real estate.

What do you do with them? Some have subsumed away in the caprices of nature and others re-opened or became private operations. The purchased acreage was then transferred over to the town of Marlboro, and the cool Hogback Mountain Conservation Area was the result.

Some of the old ski trails are still maintained and pruned, so hikers, snowshoers and cross-country skiers can still enjoy them. Though, for me anyways, I found that finding those trails was a bit of a challenge. To my delight and surprise combination, if you bushwhack through some waist-high tangle weeds and growth, you can still find some of the old ski trails, which were still hikable!

Using the linear rusted cables of the former chairlift as wayfinding points, I decided a short early autumn hike was a good idea. The trail oddly cleared out the farther up I climbed, until both the trail and the lift sort of ended in a blissful and fragrant silence.

To all of my fans and supporters, I am truly grateful and humbled by all of the support and donations through out the years that have kept Obscure Vermont up and running. In the 19th century, natural springs were discovered in a hollow near town that had high levels of sulfur, magnesium, and iron in them — which were thought to have medicinal properties if mixed just right — that exact recipe changing quite a bit over the intervening mineral springs craze period, depending on what serial publication you subscribed to.

Some even professed that these waters were the equivalent to the fountain of youth. The village capitalized on that, and its efforts were successfully rifled. That arrangement accounts for the number of bathhouses and hotels that were once packed in the ravine the community sits in.

I liked all the patches of forest in between some pleasantly up-kept old houses, it gave the area lots of character.

I had traveled a few hours out of Vermont to explore one of the remaining ruins, a forsaken property ensnared by sickly looking pines that were once intended to landscape, now left to their own devices and slowly intend on consuming the unattended street the large structure molders on.

From what I was able to dig up, it was built around as a sister hotel to a much more opulent establishment behind it, now also in ruins. But, this was intended more as a long stay property. Guests here would rent rooms by the week or month. When you checked in, you were given two sets of keys.

One for your room, and another to a kitchen unit across the hall. It seems most floors, apart from the fourth floor had them. It seems that the business kind of limped along towards its later years, in a weird fluctuating state of wondering if it was alive or dead, just barely making it into the 21st century before closing in Having a bummer of an experience a few years ago at another abandoned hotel in this town when I was chased away by a very disgruntled woman who power walked out her front door with four dogs on a leash and howled at us a reminder of how we were trespassing, I was really hoping for a good experience this time around.

Meeting up with a good compadre from my college days, whose meetups always seems to happen inside a smelly abandoned building of some sort, we set off for an adventure. It started off awkward, which turned my nerves up a bit loud. But after getting off the main drag, things got pretty quiet, and though it was already a hot and sultry evening, there was a slight breeze that brought the perfume of wildflowers.

Getting in proved to be a bit more challenging than anticipated. But then again, I did say I wanted an adventure…. After climbing up a wobbly and very evidently out of code fire escape while doing some acrobatic maneuvers that might have vaguely impressed a free climber, we found ourselves stepping carefully over the threshold into a completely different atmosphere.

The silent interior immediately began to smother us with its festering rot, exhaust from its past and advancing water damage. The floors ebbed and groaned beneath our feet as our boots sank into the stretched, threadbare carpets. We actually spent a good 5 minutes or so debating whether we actually wanted to enter or not, because the floors were so deceptively sketchy.

This was not the kind of place you wanted to find yourself injured and incapacitated inside of. Once we got away from the northern section of the building, conditions were surprisingly disparate. Rooms were strange time capsules, in decent states of preservation. It was fun scrutinizing over mid-century furniture, beds, rotary phones and even nob television sets that could still be observed, and better yet, mildly free of vandalism.

Clothes, blankets, bars of soap, and other miscellany had been left behind. I read that patrons would do that at the springs, I guess. Me and my friend both exclaimed that our good moods grew cold and were replaced by a feeling of depression.

The narrow hallways, cramped rooms and perpetual shadow that fell on the building built a rather grim atmosphere that looked so gone and hollow, only reinforced by its ugly outdated decor that seemed to bring a big broken heart of an existence.

I even saw striking pictures online of a clean front desk with house plants still sitting on its countertop — it made the hotel look like it was simply closed for the weekend as opposed to years.

But when I tromped around, it seems that this place too eventually fell victim to the less respectable aspects of human nature.

Entire stretches of authentic tin ceiling, a feature of old buildings which I really love, had been pulled down. Decor like light fixtures, an ugly yet obligatorily photographable landmark piano and the front desk had been clobbered.

Some features, like an original old fashioned elevator with grate doors and a brawny yet ornate safe was still more or less in great condition and tucked away in the dark innards of the hotel. Though we were only amateur archaeologists, we had noticed there were several signs that had been taped to walls around the hotel, all handwritten by the same person.

I have no idea what sort of place this was in its heyday, but finding all these signs made me assume that in its last days, it seemed like a drab, down on your luck sort of experience. Every level up the grand staircase was a bit more to bear. The fourth floor was nauseating. It was 92 degrees outside, but upstairs the mercury was boiling towards , and the air was stale and fetid, making our breaths labored and my eyes water.

Plenty of them were swarming around us as we attempted to explore the upper corridors.

7 Amazing Abandoned Spots In Vermont – GoXplr.7 Amazing Abandoned Spots In Vermont – GoXplr

 
The town sharing a name with its positional county had over 1, bodies, a half dozen villages and 2 post offices in , but by , had a headcount of just The fire fueled a local outcry of folks who are fed up with all the fools turned sightseers. One must-see structure on the hospital grounds is the stone Retreat Tower which was built in by patients. It worked. Everything about the place felt cheap and kinda sleazy. If you are looking for more scary and abandoned places in Vermont, take a look at this article HERE of 17 scary places that will haunt your dreams.