And now, the continuation and conclusion of The Weirdness at The Stagecoach Inn!

Pine Cone grew more intrigued when I informed him of what I learned about the Stagecoach Inn’s dark past and wanted to go back as soon as possible so he could take his own photos. I tagged along for morbid curiosity’s sake as he dragged his tripod and camera around the perimeter of the old inn, where we found piles and piles of the local newspaper in the backyard, still wrapped in plastic. Once inside, he took picture after picture while I trailed behind him, constantly looking around and feeling as though we were being watched. It was easier to visit the house prior to knowing the backstory; I didn’t know to be so nervous. It didn’t help that Pine Cone was helpfully pointing out stuff I hadn’t noticed before: “Hey, Stef, look how half of that chair isn’t dusty, like someone was recently sitting on it!”

The next day in the darkroom, Pine Cone was developing one of his pictures of me at the Stagecoach. I was sitting on the decrepit concrete back steps of the former inn, looking at the ground, completely unaware of the face in the window that was an extremely coincidental reflection of the leaves against the glass. Fear and excitement inspired me to examine the picture closely, and I discovered five more faces. I was probably just trying too hard, although the more I looked at one face, the more defined it became.

Pine Cone decided to make his own trip to the Stagecoach, armed with a camcorder and a couple of friends one evening. A half an hour later, he showed up at my house, cracking his knuckles and calmly stating that they’d had an “encounter.” According to them, they walked around the house, three of them holding candles. His friend picked up a check written out to the newspaper when for no reason two of the candles went out, and the friend felt a presence touching his shoulder, provoking them to flee in terror.

These experiences sparked Gypsy’s interest, so she and I ventured to the inn, where she was amazed by the hand-painted signs pointing the way “To the Body Room” and how the inside was still in fair condition even though the windows were broken and the weather was always coming inside. As though we were searching for an answer to a mystery that we weren’t sure of, we rifled through the piles of junk on the floor and found old newspaper clippings, checks made out for more than $500 that never been deposited or cashed, and liquor licenses. The amount of possessions left behind was unbelievable, like someone left in a hurry and took nothing with them.

Gypsy and I wanted to figure out which bedroom was Joseph Kly’s. The newspapers didn’t make it easy for us to figure out: some claimed it was on the first floor, some insisted it was across from a kitchen, another said that a witness lived above him, and yet another source said the room had been repainted and re-carpeted. None of the rooms downstairs looked as though they’d ever been painted, so we headed upstairs. We were in a bedroom across from an upstairs kitchen, photographing a orange body outline spray-painted on a mattress, when we noticed that the walls looked like they’d been repainted and the carpet looked new. Suddenly, Gypsy looked around and asked, “Do you hear music playing?” My heart started pounding: I had never mentioned to her that the witnesses always heard a radio playing in Kly’s room to drown out his moaning. My paranoia got the best of me and I ushered us out of the house, but the house continued to haunt me. I wanted to go back and do some “spring cleaning” just to see what the house would look like without all its contents dumped on the floor—and see if anything else might get unearthed in the meantime.

My friends and I planned to go back on a Monday morning, but the Sunday before, Pine Cone messaged me: “You know how you wanted to go to the Stagecoach tomorrow? Well, it’s kind of burning to the ground right now.”

To say I was stunned would’ve been an understatement. I couldn’t have expected anything less. After all those years of the place standing quiet and empty, why would such a thing happen now?

We visited the Stagecoach Inn—or what was left of it—the following morning, where a couple neighbors eyed us suspiciously, our interest being a little too interesting. The building we’d been exploring just a short week ago was now a smoldering, gutted skeleton. The only structure remaining on the still-smoking property was the chimney, although that looked in danger of falling. Flames still licked the gaping holes of the former house. In the grass scorched by the brush fires caused by the blaze, lay some of the books I’d gone through.

Though the fire at the Stagecoach Inn made the news, nobody seemed to care much about it. The newspaper reported that the fire was labeled “suspicious,” but authority ruled that no further investigation was warranted and no charges would be filed. The house was seen as an “eyesore,” and there was relief that it was gone.

Today, all traces of the Stagecoach Inn have been erased. I’ve driven by the property several times since, and now I can’t even tell where the building once was. I still can’t get over the timing. Suspicious fire indeed—it seemed more than coincidental that the building would inexplicably go up in flames just as we seemed on the brink of truly piecing together all that had happened there. I’d never seen a ghost there, but I’d certainly felt a strong supernatural atmosphere. Could it be that there was something in that house that wanted pieces of the story to be known, and once it was satisfied, used the fire to free itself? Or did the house hold more sinister secrets that it couldn’t let be known? Maybe those feelings of being watched were more valid than we know…

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Hi reader! Have a creepy ghostly experience/coincidence you’d like to share? Please do in the comments below! And feel free to reblog this post!

My story with the Stagecoach Inn began before I even realized it. I was sixteen and driving around with my then-boyfriend in his fourth generation Monte Carlo. (If this at all sounds bad ass a/o cool, know that this excursion featured a very innocent stop for ice cream at a family-friendly dairy farm.) I was really into photography then, and my favorite subject matter was stuff that was destroyed, abandoned, or forgotten. My mom and I would take special photography trips involving lots of trespassing so I could get a couple shots of crumbling buildings and statues with peeling paint, rusting cars and swing sets, broken windows, all that. There’s a kind of ominous magic to it; these things left behind, they feel like clues.

That night, I told my then-boyfriend how I just loved the romantic doom of stuff like that, and he told me that in that case, he knew of a place I might like, so off we went, taking more back roads until he pulled into a small driveway to a large foreboding house. Despite my proclivity toward freaking out in such scenarios, I wasn’t afraid; my then-boyfriend was so chill about everything and said he’d been there before with friends. Still, the adventure obliterated my appetite and I chucked my half-eaten raspberry cone in the bushes. We pushed aside some overgrown weeds and bushes in order to get to the front porch and enter through a red wood door. Our flashlight beams bounced around the first and second stories, revealing walls festooned in graffiti, ratty carpeting, and glass shards galore. We were young and oblivious to the potential of squatters or murderers or murderous squatters, although in retrospect, what were we thinking?! (A: We weren’t. See the part about us being young.) It was too dark to see much of anything, so it was an uneventful visit, except I cut my finger after thinking that handling a little cube of glass from an old, giant TV’s shattered screen was a fine idea. (As always, art may be subject to hyperbole.)

Cut to a year later. My then-boyfriend and I had broken up (it was too hard, us going to different schools; I can’t handle very much distance in relationships. But oh! Oh the suh-hum-mer nights!), and I’d joined an art program for high school students, “majoring” in photography. It was through this program I’d met and befriended Pine Cone, and side by side in the dark room, we developed our black-and-white photos and raved about our deep-seated love for destroyed, abandoned things. He wanted to ghost-hunt in a rumoredly haunted house, and when he drove me home, he coasted past the place: “the Stagecoach,” which turned out to be the same one my ex had taken me to the previous summer. Pine Cone insisted it used to be a mental home and that the owners used to torture their patients. I stared at the house through the window and it stared back, looming against the sky, quiet and dark.

When a roll of my film turned out to be too dark, I headed to the Stagecoach with my mom to take more print-friendly photos and explore. The last hours of daylight revealed floors carpeted with broken records and torn, dirty clothing from the 1970s. I tripped on a broken typewriter sitting in a pool of glass. Graffiti spattered the walls: Creeping Death, Axe 2 UR 4Head, Die By My Hand, and Boobs. A blackboard with names, pictures, and fucks hung on one wall, and in orange paint there was an arrow pointing up the stairs to the second floor reading Hell. By some miracle there were still a few glasses still sitting on the shelf, pristine and intact, having avoided the fate of their ceramic plate brethren. Despite the sun sneaking in through the windows, darkness lurked everywhere, and my mom kept nervously opening places of storage, looking for severed heads and bodies stuffed in cabinets and refrigerators, and poking the floor with a stick, saying it felt “squishy.” These fun games and insightful observations aided the decision to leave. (Thanks, MA!)

By now my mom was plenty curious, so she perused reels of the library’s microfilm then let me in on the back story of the house, which used to be a bed-and-breakfast known as the Stagecoach Inn. (All of the following tidbits were culled from several newspaper stories written at the time, although I don’t recall which ones; I didn’t care about citing my sources properly when I was seventeen.) The inn, which also rented out rooms, was run by a funeral director and his politically active wife who took in a 92-year-old man named Joseph Kly. According to the hospital, Kly needed 24-hour care, but instead of taking him back to their house in Scranton, the couple took him to the inn and left him there without any aid.

Kly died in November 1984, and when police arrived at the house, they discovered a corpse in a completely unlivable room. There was fecal matter all over the mattress, because Kly was too emaciated to get up to use the bathroom himself, yet there was no trace of waste on the fresh pajamas the body wore. Witnesses claimed they heard agonized moans from the room that were often muffled by a radio, and from a crack in the door they said they saw that he was always in the bed. Even though the couple claimed Kly was fed two hours previous to the incident, an unsubstantial meal of cookies on the night table was untouched, and the glass of juice was still “sweating,” as if it had just been poured.

The most appalling sight of the scene had to have been the body itself. Kly came to the inn weighing 102 pounds; when he pronounced dead, he was only 62, and a doctor said he could lift the body with one hand. A nurse said Kly looked like a skeleton with skin, and that he was so skinny one could see his backbone through his stomach. When Kly’s body was opened up for the autopsy, they found his organs had shrunk in size from working overtime, evidence suggesting he had starved to death, and it had been anything by painless.

When the doctor left and the police came back to the scene, the room had been freshly painted and cleaned. Also, when the body was sent elsewhere after the autopsy and reopened up, the organs were replaced with an average-sized heart and full stomach content. The stitching on the bags with the organs inside was different then what the doctor had used. It was also discovered that the couple also extorted $30,000 from Kly’s bank account during the course of two years. They were later found guilty.

This story will continue next week with The Weirdness at the Stagecoach Inn: Part 2!