It Takes a Village - Letchworth Village, NY

With the proliferation of ghost hunting and other less-than-objective reality television shows available throughout the last decade or so, I always default to imagining that the regionally accessible list of every "well known" locale for such haunts has long since been exhausted. Sometimes, all that it takes to break this facade and minor hubris is a well-timed and sudden "discovery" late one Friday night, spent otherwise doing nothing. You have the cluster of medical facilities on the fringe of the larger metropolitan areas nearby (Philadelphia and New York) and the tried and true smaller facilities in my home state of New Jersey and you can tell yourself that there are only so many times you can visit and take the same photographs of familiar broken cinder blocks and causeways.

Even outside of the realm of abandoned institutional properties, recycling these visits purely for capturing some sort of media becomes redundant. Surely, always worth a day out, but always yielding diminishing returns when it comes to the photographic proof. There was a running joke when we lived in Piscataway that we had "done Watchung to death," resorting to its hiking trails and abandoned village when we could not muster the cleverness to discover someplace new. The fact that we can access these places often enough that they become familiar is a hidden blessing itself, in a way, but that does not take away from the undeniable fact and feeling of mystery that you feel wandering these places for the first time -- and that inkling of a new experience, one that was apparently not that far away, found me in bed around two am on a Friday night / Saturday morning.