A Hermit's Chamber

Like many couples do, Tina and I like to divvy the driving up between us, especially when taking our weekend jaunts throughout New Hampshire. Not just to share the workload, but so that each of us have an opportunity to be on the lookout for cool stuff. We'll pull over for just about anything goofy or interesting, such as this three-wheeled car, this community that's very proud of an apple tree, or even this neighborly dispute that left us chuckling and wanting to know more. So when my wife squawked for me to stop the car as we rounded the bend of some back road recently I knew she'd spotted something good, and had anybody been following too closely behind us we would have soon found ourselves swapping insurances. I backed up the Jeep until seeing for myself what had gotten her so excited.

Not too far into the woods was this chamber, and my initial thought was that we were looking at an opened and abandoned crypt.

Anyone who has spent time in New Hampshire is familiar with the countless small cemeteries that line our roads and are hidden within our woods. Many are family plots with only a handful of markers, and it's not uncommon to see one that has a crypt build into the hillside. Marked by a break in the stone wall and with its half-size doorway that is what this looked like from a distance, and although I'm personally not keen on seeing a 200 year old decomposing corpse, we walked over to take a look.

As a disappointment to one of us there were no corpses inside, but that doesn't mean it was empty. What we found was evidence that someone had probably spent a lot of time in there - and possibly even lived in it - starting with this ratty old sleeping bag that barely looked warm enough for our months of July and August. The bamboo fixture on top is the base of papasan chair, which all things considered could actually have been quite cozy in here.

And these boards might even have served as a jailhouse cot for the owner of the sleeping bag.

I'm making a couple assumptions in the course of writing this. First, that this isn't the remains of some old basement and that it was in fact a crypt. Although my head leans toward the basement theory my heart is sticking with it being a crypt, for Tina's sake if nothing else. My second assumption is that someone was actually living in here and not just camping out for a night or using the place to dump some garbage. It's a possibility, but certain toiletries outside - the likes of which you'd be thankful I didn't take pictures of - make me think someone did spend a fair amount of time in here.

If that is true, then wherever this person is today I hope they're in a much better place now than they were back then.