I went to the shrine back in the late nineties and it seemed like a very interesting place. We stopped the car but didn’t get out owing to rumors that the owner was missing a hinge and didn’t like trespassers. It was very hard to see anything through the trees, but the buildings seemed to glow in the moonlight. It was a very calm and peaceful summer night and the place seemed rather beautiful albeit completely bizarre.
I’ve never heard the story about the daughters or the “memorial” until now. The rumor that drove me out to see it was that the park was actually his house and he lived beneath it in an old farm cellar. Obviously a place as mysterious as this can only spawn horror narratives, but all these rumors are too “blairwitch” to be true. More likely the guy is a creative loner with a big imagination and some form of mental illness.
This shrine is not entirely unusual either; you can find all kinds of eccentric structures like “the shrine” across the US. Here are some of my favorites.
Forevertron - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Watts Towers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Samuel P. Dinsmoor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Raw Vision
A lot of these guys are/were introverts who didn’t get along with their neighbors and that only added to their myth as “insane.” I hope these examples can provide a little more context to “the shrine”
Speaking of mental illness, I did visit the “Nevada Asylum” around the same time (all part of a tour de haunted story county). Since I’ve seen plenty of movies with haunted abandoned mental institutions I was already precondition to be scared. I arrive in the middle of the day in blazing sunshine, but it was still perturbing to pray open a door and step into a dim musty hallway.
The place had a strange feel to it. Perhaps, all the Lovecraft, and Stephen King I’d read was flooding up from my subconscious, but I could feel the weight of history bearing down on me. Every step I took, I thought of the patients who had put their foot in the exact same place. There were still chairs and beds in the rooms and I sat down by a big window in what appeared to be the old cafeteria. For whatever reason it felt like there were people sitting there with me, not necessarily ghosts, but rather the memories of former inhabitants. It was like the place had closed down and everyone had forgotten about the hundreds of people who had spent some or even all of their lives in this building. It just seemed like their memories had nowhere to go and were entombed in the walls. It was a very sad place and gave me the willies.
They bulldozed the building a few years ago. I think it was because people would go out there and party. When I was there it looked like the place was visited rather frequently, lots of beer cans, cigarette buts, and other trash. I couldn’t image going there at night. I might do it for $1,000, but anything below s this number I would at least stop and think about. Creepy.
