655 - Hell House
Today I visited the Hell House.
It all started in Baltimore when I was in dire need of a sunset location. I’d just left Loch Raven (the original plan,) because it was the worst reservoir I’ve ever seen. I can’t explore these monotonous lakes, folks. I can’t do it.
Now sunset was in an hour, and I had no plan. I started driving south, quickly panning Google Maps for anything that looked even remotely interesting.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw a lonesome pin near Ellicott City, and I clicked on it.
The pin was saved under my “Want to Go” category, and had a note that simply said “Abandoned altar. Super fucking cool trust me”.
One thing you should know about me is that I spend a lot of time paroozing the internet for locations to shoot. Any time I see something notable, I save it as a pin in my maps for future reference. This was one of those locations.
The catch was that there was no Google Maps description associated with it. Just coordinates. Which meant I had no context for what this actually was.
Welp. It’s my only hope. Let’s trust the past and see if it pays off.
I rolled up to the pin thinking I’d see whatever it was right from the street, but the pin was in the middle of the forest. Great. Just great. Now I had to find a way to this pin.
It was starting to get darker out by the minute, as the trees were tall and the sun was rapidly approaching the horizon behind the forest. But I was able to find a small pull-off where I could park for a minute to see what all the fuss was about.
I followed a dirt trail in the general direction of the pin for about 15 minutes, until I landed upon this stone relic:
Kinda creepy, I’m not gonna lie.
I walked through the barrier and I ended up at the remains of some old altar from a long-ass time ago:
If you zoom out a bit, you can see what it was housed in:
“Among the Trunks”
Taken with Sony a7rIV + Sony 12-24mm f/4 G
[ISO 4000 ~ 105mm ~ f/18 ~ 1/160s] [Hand-Held Focus Stack]
Pretty much every around it was torn apart, but it made for an intriguing scene.
The mythos of the altar seemed to center around these horned creatures, which were painted everywhere:
Whoever was here before me clearly went all in on the horror factor. At least I hope that there was a human here before me. Even the trees had scratches in them:
I’ll admit it was getting a tad bit terrifying for my taste, especially once the sun went down. Things were constantly crashing in the trees, but it always turned out to be some animal. Still… slightly unsettling given I was completely alone out here.
Eventually I found my way out, despite the slight disorienting trail.
Turns out, this was the ruins of St. Mary’s College- a seminary from the late 1800s. The church had closed in the 1960s, but since then, this altar has become a bit of a local legend in Baltimore hosting everything from ghosts to satanic rituals to midnight raves.
Apparently there were several more sites scattered along the hillside, but by the time I was reading all this information in my car, it was too dark to go back out.
Another time. And by the way, nice job past me. Keep up the good work.
