Clinton's Abandoned Train Tunnel

Much like Pennsylvania's Abandoned Highway is a pilgrimage for cyclists to visit at least once in their lifetime, so is walking the abandoned train tunnel in Clinton Massachusetts for anyone with a taste for the creepy. This is such a popular spot to explore, you can even find it pinned as a destination on Google Maps with - as of the day I'm writing this - 72 user reviews and a 4.6 star rating.

To reach the tunnel, park at the Wachusett Dam on Boylston Street and walk north two-tenths of a mile, at which point the entrance will be across the road and a short ways into the woods. Make sure to spend a few minutes admiring the dam, though. It's quite impressive.

Between the graffiti and the darkness, those first few steps into the tunnel can be daunting. We had both flashlights and companions for our trip, and both are recommended. The little dude with the black hat is our son Logan, and the fact that he had joined us tells you this adventure took place in the days before Fortnite was created. We were also joined by our adventure friends from WeRmudfun, who you can see approximately one and a quarter of in this picture.

Inside the tunnel we stopped to take pictures of everything interesting, especially graffiti. Much of it was the kind that would make young boys snicker, but you don't usually find a canvas this big without a few well done pieces.

About halfway through, the tunnel's surface transitions from smooth cement to jagged rocks, almost as if mid-construction the budget was slashed but workers still had to finish. Someday I will get a camera with a flash so I can properly show you details such as this.

These rocky walls provided some challenging areas for the children, to see just how high up they could climb.

In total you'll walk underground somewhere near one thousand feet. Once out the far end things get pretty muddy, and if like me you're tempted to continue walking until you reach a small overpass along the trail, save your sneakers. The excitement is all in the tunnel.

If you're an explorer and you live in New England, you were already aware of the abandoned train tunnel in Clinton Massachusetts. But if you're an explorer and you live in New England, and you weren't aware of the Clinton tunnel, then you still have a little bit more exploring to do.

Ruins At Franklin Park

Anyone can be an explorer, and anyone can go on an adventure. It doesn't have to involve things like bushwhacking to the top of some mountain in search of airplane wreckage, roaming through underground WWII bunkers, or even going eyeball to eyeball with porcupines deep within a mineshaft. Exploring can be as easy as spending a day wandering one of New England's most historic and unique parks.

If you enjoy ruins, trails, history, or all of the above, then Franklin Park of Boston deserves a place right at the top of your to-do list. Several different areas make up this park, and while each alone would have made the hour and a half drive from our house worthwhile, in this case you get them all together in one giant playground.


Overlook shelter Ruins
A short walk down one of the park's well-maintained trails will bring you to the Overlook Shelter Ruins, an area that once served as a site for sporting events. The field where games took place was overlooked by a building with a viewing area for spectators. In the 1940s this building burned to the ground, and what's left of the area today are several sets of stairs, a couple seemingly random walls, and one very picturesque tunnel.

99 Steps
There are plenty of trails to explore at Franklin Park, but make sure to look for one that contains something called the 99 Steps. This trail is just what it sounds like - you'll climb for a bit, walk flat surface for a bit, climb for a bit more, and continue this way until you've accumulated a total of 99 steps. Although I lost count halfway through, I exhaled at the top and announced that yup, that was indeed 99.

As you're climbing be on the looking for these old signs, and remember Tina, no "harangues".

Ellicott Arch
Franklin Park is bisected by a road called Circuit Drive, and although you can simply walk across this road at any point, don't be fooled. Instead you want to follow a trail that leads to Ellicott Arch. This beautiful tunnel brings you underneath Circuit Drive, and its many sealed doors will have you wondering what sort of treasures are hiding behind them.

Schoolmaster Hill Ruins
Although I was familiar with the name Ralph Waldo Emerson prior to this trip, until visiting this next spot I could only have guessed at what he was famous for. High school is just too far in the past for me. But as this plaque will tell you, Emerson was among other things a poet, and lived for a period of time on this very spot.

In later years his residence was turned into a clubhouse for the golf course it overlooked, but in the 1930s it was destroyed by fire, leaving behind pillars and stairs that are now referred to as the Ruins of Schoolmaster Hill.

As much as I'd like to pretend these ruins were something we had to trek miles through the woods to find, they are actually right in the center of the park, next to the road. Panning the picture just a little will show you that on the day we went, this was home-base for volunteers of a 5k that was taking place.

Abandoned Bear Cages
This final area was so cool I considered making it a post of its own. The Franklin Park Zoo opened in 1912 and remains active to this day, however in the 1950s it underwent an extensive rehab, and not all exhibits made the cut. Left outside the new and improved zoo were these bear cages, which now sit rotting and abandoned on the north side of the park.

We didn't know the purpose of several round cages that stand within the exhibits, but they looked just about the perfect size for someone to hang out in.

I was able to crouch down and sneak my camera into the bear tunnels, and although bars prevented me from accessing them I was able to see the network of corridors bears once roamed through.

To find the location of each of these spots, visit our Adventure Map and zoom in just south of Boston until you pinpoint Franklin Park. All of them are within a miles walk from each other and marked by a blue star, and with this information, the only thing left for your own adventure is a full tank of gas and a sunny afternoon.

Shaker Remains & The Lollipop Cemetery

Being part of a religious group that lives communally and apart from society, that would not interest me in the least. But exploring the remains of this community 100 years after they existed, that is something that'll get me out of bed early on any given weekend.

The Shaker village of Harvard Massachusetts was the second Shaker community in America, formed by a group of four families that split from the Protestant Church in 1769. Their active members peaked at around 150 during the mid 1800s, and they spread across 1,000 acres of what is now the Holy Hill Conservation Area in Harvard, where today a public trail system crosses over much of the land they once occupied.

Location of Trailhead

At the trailhead is a map describing who the Shakers were and pointing out their notable spots within the preserve. Much of this will be left to your imagination, however, as many of those spots are now woods or open fields. But a few remnants survive. Among the most impressive is the remains of their old stone barn. You cannot go up to it - it sits on the property of a private residence - but you are still able to enjoy it from the road.

You might wonder why they would make a barn out of stone, but there were instances when stone was cheaper or more convenient to access than wood, and this seems to have been one of them. Other than being built of stone though, this was just another barn.

Source: Wikipedia

Depending on which direction you arrived from, you might have already seen the Shaker cemetery, which holds the remains of nearly 300 members of their group. If you did see it you'll understand why it's playfully referred to today as the lollipop cemetery.

My favorite remnant is their spring house, and if like I was you're unfamiliar with what a spring house is, these structures were once built over natural springs as a protection of the water source. This little hut stands over the water spring that was once shared by all members of the Shaker community.

Although not located in the conservation area, you can find this spring house by walking a trail at the end of nearby Green Hill Road, then keeping an eye out in the woods.

In addition to their religious beliefs and communal living, the Shakers differed from society in other ways, a couple of which could be considered ahead of their time. When we speak of the shakers we're speaking of the 1800s, but women within the community were treated as equal to men, and in fact the entire Shaker sect was led by a woman, Mother Ann Lee. Shakers were also pacifists, and as a group that was excused from the civil war were considered some of America's first conscientious objectors.

But they also had a few ideas that were real head-scratchers. For instance, the shakers practiced celibacy, and if there's one foolproof way to ensure the death of your group someday, just stop reproducing. The only way they could grow or even maintain their numbers was by adopting children or recruiting adults. Not surprisingly, their population dwindled to a point where several of their buildings had to be sold for the survival of remaining members, and by the early 1900s their final piece of property was gone.

But although nothing remains of the Shaker village today, enough remnants are still out there to make for an enjoyable afternoon of exploring.

Belchertown's School For The Feeble Minded

Retardation, or "feeble-mindedness" was caused primarily by defective heredity and inbreeding ... Society therefore, had to be protected from such people. The Belchertown State School for the Feeble Minded was the result. Solidly built "14 miles from anywhere" in isolation, the men and women were segregated to prevent any sexual contact. 

- The Tragedy of Belchertown, Springfield Republican, in describing the philosophy that Belchertown's School for the Feeble Minded was founded under in 1922.

"The Tragedy of Belchertown" - Springfield Republican, 3/15/1970

Looking back over the last 100 years of Massachusetts' history, it's hard to find a more disturbing story than of those who resided in Belchertown's School For The Feeble Minded. The name alone will tell you this is the product of a different generation, and though established as a way to care for people unable to survive independently, for many of the residents who lived and died at this facility theirs is a story of neglect, dehumanization, and treatment in a way that many constituted downright torture.

As were many of the state hospitals from this era, Belchertown was not just a single building but dozens, constructed as a campus style facility where both patients and staff resided. It operated until 1992 when a series of lawsuits, in addition to society's change in how it viewed disabled people, finally led to its closure. Some of these buildings have since been demolished, but many remain, serving as both a reminder of our past and a modern day ghost town for urban explorers.

"State Breaks The Law Every Day" - Springfield Republican, 3/16/1970

In the Springfield Republican's six-part series "The Tragedy of Belchertown", many of the horrific conditions in which patients were kept were brought to light. It was said that some legislatures who toured the buildings became physically sick from the stench and could not continue, a stench due in part by patients being forced to sit in their own filth. Not only did many of the buildings average just one shower per 50 residents, some were punished for infractions by being locked into small rooms without a toilet.

"The Tragedy Of Belchertown" - Springfield Republican, 3/15/1970

This was a complex built for 1,000 patients, but by 1967 there were over 1,600 patients housed at Belchertown. The Springfield Republican described conditions in which during the night only two attendants oversaw every 100 residents, and sometimes it was only 1. Worse yet, the buildings contained no sprinkler systems, beds were crammed together side by side, and fire escapes remained locked.

"State Breaks The Law Every Day" - Springfield Republican, 3/16/70

As outrage built over how officials could let conditions get so bad, the former Director of Federal Programs at Belchertown explained it by saying that superintendents were "rewarded" for not spending all their budgeted funds.













Prior to several of the buildings being torn down last year, I spent an afternoon wandering among them, wondering at their history while at the same time seeing what 30 years of uncontrolled nature can do to modern structures.

Although many of the buildings were boarded up tight, you're not going to have this big of a playground without teenagers prying a few of them open, and those were the holes I looked for.

Of the handful I entered, it's hard to imagine if they'll even remain standing long enough for the city to come tear them down. What you're looking at below is not some sort of outdoor patio, but the third story of a building whose roof has collapsed and vegetation has taken over. I did not enter the room, this picture was taken from the relative safety of a cement stairway.

Rather than taking a thirty foot plunge, I exited this deathtrap and explored some of the smaller buildings where management lived. Not only were these much safer, but the remains of appliances and furniture added to their creepiness.

A 2015 fire destroyed one of these staff building, and considering there hadn't been working utilities out here for over 20 years, yeah it was considered suspicious.

Plans have been approved to develop these 900 acres into housing units, and with that vision in mind more of the buildings were taken down last year. It may not be long before this land is stripped of every last reminder of the institute and put into use once again. Not only will this remove one giant headache the town has to watch over, it will put the black eye society gave itself by its treatment of these people farther into our past.

Interesting Graves of New England

The Witch's Grave
In a Maine graveyard that dates back to the 1600's, one grave stands apart from the rest. Mary Nasson's final resting place includes not only the usual headstone, but a stone slab that covers the entire length of her grave. In an example of the different types of problems people once dealt with, her husband placed it there to keep roaming cattle from disturbing the plot. Mundane explanations like that don't make for very good legends, though, and at some point it became said that the stone was put there to prevent Mary's evil spirit from rising from the grave. Everyone loves a good ghost story, and so over the years this has come to be known as the Witch's Grave.

Located in the Old Burying Yard in York, Maine

Died From Swallowing A Pea
If I were to consider the last time my son ate a vegetable, we'd be talking not in terms of days or weeks, but of years. I'll admit I'm not a fan of certain vegetables myself - why anyone would ever pick up a brussel sprout and stick it in their own mouth is beyond me - but he won't even go near the normal stuff like green beans or corn. We've told him he's not going to die from eating vegetables, but that argument will be harder to make if he ever sees the grave of Mary McHard, a poor woman who in 1780 died at her own table by "swallowing a pea".

Located in the Old Hill Cemetery in Newburyport, Massachusetts

Grave With A Grudge
After being excommunicated from their church for trying to build their own, separate church, Caroline and Dr Calvin Cutter's lives were reduced to a poverty that led to Caroline's death in 1838. At least, that is Dr Cutter's side of things. In a lengthy accusation where he called out several church members by name, he laid out his story for the whole world to see on his wife's grave, which is now referred to as the Grave With A Grudge.

Located in the Elm Street Cemetery in Milford, New Hampshire

Grave of a Mayflower Pilgrim
If you've ever wandered Salem Massachusetts and taken a break from witch trials lore, you might have come across this next stone. Captain Richard More, who died in 1692 at the age of 84, was a passenger on the Mayflower along with a brother and two sisters. The four siblings ranged in ages from 4 and 8 years old when they made this famous voyage, and they did it without their parents. Why anyone would send such young children to the new world remained a mystery until 1959, when a descendant of the family found 300 year old documents indicating that the children's father, Samuel More, was convinced his kids were the result of his wife's long-term affair, and he solved the problem by shipping them off as indentured servants. Sadly, three of the children died soon after arriving in America.

Located in The Burying Point Cemetery in Salem, Massachusetts

Killed With An Axe
I've often considered myself the black sheep of our family, but after seeing the grave of Gilman Spaulding I'm thinking I've been too hard on myself.  In 1842 Spaulding was "kill'd with an axe by an insane brother". Next time my siblings are in town I'm taking them to Spaulding's grave as a reminder of just how lucky they were to have me as a brother.

Located in New Ipswich, NH

Other graves we like:

Nathaniel Thurston's 7 Wives

Captain Jones' Leg

Persecuted for Wearing the Beard

God Aimed the Tree That Crushed Him Dead