Post by ptahmb on Nov 19, 2010 13:59:08 GMT -8
The stage:
Winter 1991/92 in Sylvania, Ohio, at Toledo Memorial Park and Mausoleum.
This cemetery is about a mile west of Toledo, on the Michigan border. The mausoleum itself is a modest 500 feet across, and is easily missed as it rests in the rear of a huge cemetery. Behind the mausoleum, however, was the entrance to what the local youth called "the catacombs". - tunnels and cellars that stretched for miles. They were to be part of an enormous mausoleum housing over 4300 bodies, but the project was halted during the Depression. It's unclear when construction started or for how long.
When I was first taken to explore the catacombs I was 16. Five of us made the journey into the cemetery, well after hours. We parked on nearby Glasgow Rd., cut through the woods, crossed the pond (balancing on a log), trekked through the field, and arrived at the chain link fence surrounding the catacombs. Beyond the fence was a great pit, with one wall composed of hallow crypts. Further trespassing required scaling the fence and climbing down broken chunks of concrete where stairs once were. I remember grabbing tree branches for support, as the boulders were covered with snow and ice. The floor of the pit, about 10 feet deep, saw crypts to the south, a cement wall with tiny windows to the east, the fence and broken steps, now the only exit, to the north, and the tunnel entrance to the west.
The first room was pretty big, with gray pillars and a high ceiling. It reeked of wet dirt, moldy concrete, and the walls bled rust with occasional graffiti. By the time you entered the second room, there was no more outside light. The dirt floors grew closer to the ceiling in some areas, like at some point somebody was trying to fill them in, and we had to crouch to walk through. Ice formed like stalactites (as well as some actual stalactites) seeping through the cracks. One corridor, the one I remember most often traveling, was a dead end, but along the way were several small rooms. One such room was only accessible only through a two foot window in the cement wall. We wondered if that room was to be a crematorium. The other corridor I remember was always flooded, and we could see down to the end of the hall where it curved sharply to the right / north. Although the brown, opaque water was likely very shallow, we never dared try to wade it. We had plans to go down there with an inflatable raft some day. We didn't.
Up on the surface near the pit, but still within the fenced area, was an entrance into a separate set of rooms. This entrance was about a 3 foot opening you had to crawl into, then hop down another four or five feet to the dirt floor below. The tiny window looked out above the pit (in the afore-mentioned wall to the east).
I went into the catacombs a total of five times that winter, almost getting caught the fifth time. On several of these ventures I brought along my trusty Kodak disc camera (remember - 1991), whose flash occasionally illuminated the halls better than our flashlights could. I took over thirty pictures of rooms, halls, crypts, us being idiots, and a few of the pictures came back with a white mist present in the shot. One outside, which appears to be nothing - then one that looks like a skull at pointblank range, and two more in two different areas with similar shapes, having the same contour/edges, as if the same figure is traveling along side us.
...or maybe it was just our breath. Or the wind.
The EVP:
9/16/92 - The pictures and a new interest in EVP prompted us to return later that fall, armed with a camcorder and a microcassette recorder. It was during open hours, right after school (senior year). We did not enter the catacombs, but recorded in the Mausoleum and outside the fence looking over the pit. We didn't know what to expect, who we were talking to, and had no real reason to believe there was something there other than, hey - it's a cemetery. The hollowed crypts probably never housed any bodies, nor did the halls of the catacombs have any crypts in them. But we stood there by the fence and tried anyway for two minutes, with the audio recorder and the camcorder shooting the crypts. We started and stopped together. Near the minute and a half mark, the camcorder started zooming in and out, trying to autofocus on the crypts. Around this same point on the microcassette, underneath the horrible static, and occasional plane or motorcycle in the distant background, seems to be little girl saying "mama". We all heard it back at my house analyzing our results. It was the only result aside from the camcorder freaking out, and weird because it happened at the same time. We went back the next day and got nothing.
Last week, after 19 years, I found the microcassette and made a digital copy. That night I'm pretty sure I heard it. The next morning I could not. There is so much static that the only way to detect anything is w/ complete isolation - like headphones or earbuds clasped by hands to cut out all noise - and then, maybe, maybe... So I know that I can sometimes hear something there that doesn't seem to belong there, but I cannot say it's a disembodied voice anymore. Whatever is there is so embedded into the noise floor that I haven't been able to use noise reduction to isolate it. Last night I also heard some more women laughing that we hadn't heard before. But when I went back to that same section later, nothing.
In the years immediately following, I had heard that the catacombs were gone, and I had to see it for myself. I went back in 1994 or 1995, and it was as if they were never even there. Just a grass lawn where a giant pit and crypts once were. The Google Maps/Earth image today shows nothing but grass between the mausoleum and the field. After decades of providing a haven for young Ohioan and Michigander exploration, intrigue, debauchery, somebody finally realized the liability of accessible, leaking, collapsible concrete tunnels. Ho hum.
Attachment: One of our "apparition" images (the one my wife finds most convincing). There are a few more, one of which has the same shape/outline as this one, but the picture was taken in a different area. I also have many more pictures of the crypts and tunnels.
Winter 1991/92 in Sylvania, Ohio, at Toledo Memorial Park and Mausoleum.
This cemetery is about a mile west of Toledo, on the Michigan border. The mausoleum itself is a modest 500 feet across, and is easily missed as it rests in the rear of a huge cemetery. Behind the mausoleum, however, was the entrance to what the local youth called "the catacombs". - tunnels and cellars that stretched for miles. They were to be part of an enormous mausoleum housing over 4300 bodies, but the project was halted during the Depression. It's unclear when construction started or for how long.
When I was first taken to explore the catacombs I was 16. Five of us made the journey into the cemetery, well after hours. We parked on nearby Glasgow Rd., cut through the woods, crossed the pond (balancing on a log), trekked through the field, and arrived at the chain link fence surrounding the catacombs. Beyond the fence was a great pit, with one wall composed of hallow crypts. Further trespassing required scaling the fence and climbing down broken chunks of concrete where stairs once were. I remember grabbing tree branches for support, as the boulders were covered with snow and ice. The floor of the pit, about 10 feet deep, saw crypts to the south, a cement wall with tiny windows to the east, the fence and broken steps, now the only exit, to the north, and the tunnel entrance to the west.
The first room was pretty big, with gray pillars and a high ceiling. It reeked of wet dirt, moldy concrete, and the walls bled rust with occasional graffiti. By the time you entered the second room, there was no more outside light. The dirt floors grew closer to the ceiling in some areas, like at some point somebody was trying to fill them in, and we had to crouch to walk through. Ice formed like stalactites (as well as some actual stalactites) seeping through the cracks. One corridor, the one I remember most often traveling, was a dead end, but along the way were several small rooms. One such room was only accessible only through a two foot window in the cement wall. We wondered if that room was to be a crematorium. The other corridor I remember was always flooded, and we could see down to the end of the hall where it curved sharply to the right / north. Although the brown, opaque water was likely very shallow, we never dared try to wade it. We had plans to go down there with an inflatable raft some day. We didn't.
Up on the surface near the pit, but still within the fenced area, was an entrance into a separate set of rooms. This entrance was about a 3 foot opening you had to crawl into, then hop down another four or five feet to the dirt floor below. The tiny window looked out above the pit (in the afore-mentioned wall to the east).
I went into the catacombs a total of five times that winter, almost getting caught the fifth time. On several of these ventures I brought along my trusty Kodak disc camera (remember - 1991), whose flash occasionally illuminated the halls better than our flashlights could. I took over thirty pictures of rooms, halls, crypts, us being idiots, and a few of the pictures came back with a white mist present in the shot. One outside, which appears to be nothing - then one that looks like a skull at pointblank range, and two more in two different areas with similar shapes, having the same contour/edges, as if the same figure is traveling along side us.
...or maybe it was just our breath. Or the wind.
The EVP:
9/16/92 - The pictures and a new interest in EVP prompted us to return later that fall, armed with a camcorder and a microcassette recorder. It was during open hours, right after school (senior year). We did not enter the catacombs, but recorded in the Mausoleum and outside the fence looking over the pit. We didn't know what to expect, who we were talking to, and had no real reason to believe there was something there other than, hey - it's a cemetery. The hollowed crypts probably never housed any bodies, nor did the halls of the catacombs have any crypts in them. But we stood there by the fence and tried anyway for two minutes, with the audio recorder and the camcorder shooting the crypts. We started and stopped together. Near the minute and a half mark, the camcorder started zooming in and out, trying to autofocus on the crypts. Around this same point on the microcassette, underneath the horrible static, and occasional plane or motorcycle in the distant background, seems to be little girl saying "mama". We all heard it back at my house analyzing our results. It was the only result aside from the camcorder freaking out, and weird because it happened at the same time. We went back the next day and got nothing.
Last week, after 19 years, I found the microcassette and made a digital copy. That night I'm pretty sure I heard it. The next morning I could not. There is so much static that the only way to detect anything is w/ complete isolation - like headphones or earbuds clasped by hands to cut out all noise - and then, maybe, maybe... So I know that I can sometimes hear something there that doesn't seem to belong there, but I cannot say it's a disembodied voice anymore. Whatever is there is so embedded into the noise floor that I haven't been able to use noise reduction to isolate it. Last night I also heard some more women laughing that we hadn't heard before. But when I went back to that same section later, nothing.
In the years immediately following, I had heard that the catacombs were gone, and I had to see it for myself. I went back in 1994 or 1995, and it was as if they were never even there. Just a grass lawn where a giant pit and crypts once were. The Google Maps/Earth image today shows nothing but grass between the mausoleum and the field. After decades of providing a haven for young Ohioan and Michigander exploration, intrigue, debauchery, somebody finally realized the liability of accessible, leaking, collapsible concrete tunnels. Ho hum.
Attachment: One of our "apparition" images (the one my wife finds most convincing). There are a few more, one of which has the same shape/outline as this one, but the picture was taken in a different area. I also have many more pictures of the crypts and tunnels.