It was about two months prior, I was out at dinner at a place in Warwick called the shanty, I was having dinner with my girlfriend and she wanted to buy the drinks in celebration of me putting out the first episode of this podcast. She told the waiter to put the drinks on her tab and why, so he asked about the podcast and I gave him an impromptu elevator pitch.
Turns out he was also an avid hiker and it just so happened that on of his favorite trails features an abandoned summer camp. It was in Exeter at arcadia management area and featured several bunkhouses in various states of decay, old chimneys, foundations and even a rusty water tower.
Research
It didn’t take long to figure out what trail it was and find a map, but it did take some time to find a day to hike it. The hiking app had it listed as a six mile out and back promising to take up to three hours. Finally last Saturday, through a series of unfortunate events, consisting of an eye injury, two flights of cider, some ghost stories and a hangover, I found myself with a free afternoon to finally find this rhode Island relic.
The last hurdle before heading out was conforming to public land laws and recreation during hunting season. You see, in this the smallest of states, they require all who enjoy the outdoors to don 200-500 square inches of blaze orange in the name of safety. I haven’t hunted in a few years and have no idea what box holds all my old gear.
Be Prepared
In a last ditch effort to stay lawful I stopped at the local Walmart hoping to pick up a cheap blaze orange ball cap. But surprisingly there was no blaze orange in the sporting section. But what I did find was this nice bright orange t-shirt for six bucks, with a jack-o-lantern face on it. So for this adventure, I was going for a lawful evil character alignment.
This past weekend I did as much Halloween themed stuff as I could. It started out Friday night with scary stories and cider tasting at the tapped apple cidery in downtown Westerly. The event was put on by seaside shadows haunted history tours. They operate out of Westerly RI and Mystic CT. They do guided tours in both downtown areas, moonlight graveyard tours, haunted pub crawls and different seasonal events.
The spooky stories and cider tastings was a two hour event with a four cider flight and four paired truffles to experience. Here’s the fun part, at least for me. I was supposed to be accompanied to this event. Due to what I can only assume was a swashbuckling accident, my girlfriend had hurt one of her eyes and couldn’t make it that night. And since none of my nearby friends share my love for the macabre, I ended up going solo. Of course, being the holder of not one, but two tickets, to this event, I made sure to also be the recipient of two flights of cider.
Seaside Shadows Storytelling
Sierra little was the storyteller for the evening, and she did a fantastic job. She not only knew the two hours of stories by heart but she seemed to relish in the tingles her words evoked in the listener. In the breaks between stories, where the crowds whispers rolled louder into a crescendo of personal ghost stories and laughter, Sierra was able to pull them all quickly back into an attentive hush. I also hadn’t realized there was a limit to how many chocolate truffles I could eat while still feeling good about myself, but it’s six, not that any of you asked, but it’s six.
As the group of older ladies in the corner tried to conjure up a spirit using Sierras divining rods, I decided to conjure up my own spirit, I headed to the bar to swap my eight empty glasses for one full one. This was probably the turning point for me. The point at which that early morning hike had to be cancelled, and after lots of water and ibuprofen became an afternoon hike. But that was also the moment it switched from being I trail I’ve done a dozen times, to a trail with an abandoned surprise.
So, I do things wrong all the time, and this was no exception. The parking lot the app sent me to was on frosty hollow rd in Exeter off of ten rod road. Ten Rod rd is actually the road that the grave of Mercy Brown in on, one of the supposed Exeter Vampires. And only a couple miles further along same road, you can also find the grave of Sarah Tillinghast, another supposed vampire. This begs the question of why does Exeter have so many vampires.
So the parking lot on frosty hollow rd. is right at a small pond and there is a trail head for shelter directly from the lot. About a half mile down this trail I decided to check the map and realized I was heading in the wrong direction. In order to start in the correct direction you have to go to the road, go across the car bridge and turn left along breakheart brook. You end up following the white blazes to stay on shelter trail. The trail doesn’t stay on the brook for very long, I passed by a camp with a lean too type shelter, walking basically down the access road until turning left and spent a considerable amount of the trail far removed from anything resembling civilization.
The trail takes a long loop around before cutting directly through the center of a large field. On the other end of the field is a gate to a dirt lot and you find yourself walking down a dirt road called Plain rd. once across flat river the trail bears off to the right. Eventually it hits a fair incline, the top of which is where I came upon the first decaying structure on the left side of the trail. It could have been one of the bunkhouses but it was hard to tell. Only two of the walls were barely standing with only small pieces of the roof still attached.
Rotting Shelters
Across the trail a little further down I could see more bunkhouses. These went off in a staggered line into the woods. The first one was a barely recognizable pile of rotted wood, then the three after that were mostly still standing. One still had the walls mostly intact but the floor was gone, and what was once a small roof over the entry way had collapsed. The wood of these structures looked sturdy, all made of six by six or larger timbers. But one touch and I could feel how time and weather had made them extremely brittle.
I found a post claiming this camp had been abandoned in the 1960’s, and I think these last standing bunkhouses don’t have many years left in them. After walking by these bunkhouses and back to the trail I thought that would have been the last of it. But I kept going and came into a clearing where there was a large concrete foundation, an impromptu fire pit made of rocks, and a standing chimney with a fireplace. This was probably the office and the mess. As I walked towards the chimney I saw another building behind it. This was the most well kept wooden building id seen so far. As I walked up to it I noticed the floor dropped down, it was cement with a short set of stairs and a piece of machinery with a wheel attached. This was probably the pump house.
The Camp
This theory was all but confirmed when I walked outside and looked in the direction of a pipe leaving the structure and saw it pointed at a rusty water tower standing about fifty feet away. There was a lot of other small things that I saw as I explored the area but I’m not going to try to explain all of them. And unlike most of the other trails Ive talked about, this one doesn’t have any ghost stories that I know of. I mean, I’m pretty sure some kid, at some point, brought out a oiju board while at this camp, and Im sure there were a lot of ghost stories told around camp fires here. But nothing that I know of. I did come across three historic cemeteries while driving around after hiking. Oh, and that’s the other thing I wanted to talk about. I hiked about three miles to get to this camp, but on the way back I decided to take a more direct route and I found that there’s actually easy access to the summer camp. Once back at the jeep I drove further down frosty hollow until it truned left and became plain rd. after crossing the flat river bridge you eventually find a red gate on the right side of the road, and that gated road leads directly to the center of the summer camp. It means you can walk about ten minutes to access the camp if you just want to explore that area. Which I might eventually do, from some of the old maps Ive seen, that abandoned camp is much bigger than what I found.
