1214 Soiled Doves.

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That story is based on a real thing. Apparently it wasn’t uncommon in cow towns for similar things to be constructed. In Garden City there are remains of the old tunnels but you can’t go through them anymore. Like much of its cultural history Garden has allowed them to be filled in, closed off, or generally destroyed. I worked in the main street area at one time, and was able to fiddle around in some of the historical sites. They are not well kept, unfortunately. I often found evidence of homeless people spending the nights in the darkest corners of the old hotels.

Even on the sunniest of days the old Brown Hotel is dark as night in most places. It was constructed between other structures and is weirdly tall and narrow. A steep double flight of stairs leads to an old reception desk. It’s the only lit part of the building now, and only because the most of the old skylight remains. It’s made of thick slabs of glass that sometimes fall from the ceiling and shatter. People would scavenge it whenever that happened, and rarely fill the hole.
Any place you go from that central point is dark, save for a few rooms that still have windows. Even then the light spears in, but doesn’t fill the area. It looks like the darkness is almost pushing back against it. It’s unquestionably creepy. Everything is a dull brown and coated in thick dust. The dark corners where once were rooms to rent are now storage for local businesses. Heaps of random junk are piled where no one can see them. Cobwebs hang everywhere, and there is able evidence of mice and bugs. It’s pretty bleak.
I’m very glad I had a chance to snoop around the old place because that sort of building is only going to get more rare, and less easy to access as the years roll by. Eventually it’ll be boarded up for good and the only evidence that it had any kind of storied history will be the sad, faded, yellow sign explaining what the Brown Hotel used to be.
It’s a shame I didn’t have access to the place at the start of the ghost hunting craze. It would have been a lot of fun to stand in the dark with my friends and talk to an empty building. in spite of how creepy it was to be in it didn’t have that feeling of being haunted that you get in some old places. If ever there were spirits lingering it felt like maybe it was too sad even for them to hang around.

18 Comments

I thought I heard that some northern colleges had tunnels so everyone didn’t had to walk across campus during blizzards.

I live in an old town with one such college. It had several tunnels leading to and from the various buildings on campus. The majority of them are closed off to the public but they still exist.

I had a chance to take a look around in one in one of the buildings named (I kid you not) Darke Hall. Had a ton of weird things going on with it too. Wrought iron banisters leading straight into solid concrete, doors that opened to solid brick walls, hallways that led nowhere. Supposedly haunted too. Really, one of the adjacent buildings burnt to the ground so they had to close off sections that were considered “unsafe”. More was closed or filled as years went by, very neat though for what I got to see.

That sounds majorly cool. I go to a northern college which has tunnels, but they’re more modern ones, less awesome. They aren’t really all that useful either. Most of the buildings don’t connect and using them adds like ten minutes travel time and don’t really keep you that much out of the cold anyway. I never bother with them.

Yeah. I went to a college in the northern arse-end of NY and the tunnels existed – according to student lore, anyway. We never got to see or use them because they were closed off as unsafe. “Unsafe” includes people apparently ambushing and raping other students in them during low-traffic times. Much easier to trap people in a tunnel.

theres always plans to get the windsor hotel repaired and up and running again. they recently got a grant to repair the roof but had to re bid it becuse of some paperwork error. I always liked the tours of the rooms and the old time fire escape chains.

I wouldn’t doubt towns had those kinds of tunnels. Tunnels being used for nearly everything including sneaking off to brothels doesn’t come off as a surprise but I find it interesting to hear about.

I remember reading a thing about the excavation of an ancient religious building (Abbey? Monastrey?). Seems the Monks and the Nuns were kept segregated, but there was a tunnel linking their two communities. There was a lot of nudge-nudge-wink-wink speculation until someone figured out it was a sewer. :D

My town is old, by American standards — 310+ years — but there are very few older ‘public’ buildings. The town hall burned to the ground in the in the early 1970s (rumor has it was arson) so it was still fairly new when I bought my first house in 1978 — they didn’t even have much in the way of older documents concerning my property. I think the old Library was probably in the Town Hall; the current Library seems to be the same vintage. The oldest houses in town are either occupied private homes or historical buildings that only date back to around the Revolution. We never had a Hotel as such; there were two inns on the Town Green, but one is an apartment house now, and the other is a single family home. The Historical Society runs a number of older buildings, but again, they are Revolutionary War era. We don’t have any creepy old mansions or spooky hotels. Darn…

I’ve always been interested in places that might be “haunted”, but I’ve never had a single situation I couldn’t explain. I’ve been working in the same library since high school; the place is attached to an old house built in the 1800’s. The official word is that it’s haunted, but I’ve been in every corner of that place by myself (and sometimes in the dark) and haven’t experienced a thing. On the other hand, folks that I trust have heard doors open and close and one of ’em even saw some pile of table legs rise up slightly and slam down. I mean, if that person was lying, it’s seriously outside of her nature.

I’ve been working there so long that I doubt anything could happen that I couldn’t explain anyway, so who knows. It’s an old house, and sound travels easily. You can hear just about any transaction down at the front desk in the main library, so I can imagine people might think those noises are unexplainable, but I’ve managed to pinpoint just about every noise that might sound odd.

Maybe I’m just lookin’ too hard.

That system has been around for a while. The library of Celsus in Ephesus was directly across the street from a brothel, and an underground tunnel connected the two.

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