The Weirdness at the Stagecoach Inn: Part 1

My story with the Stagecoach Inn began before I even realized it. I was sixteen and driving around with my then-boyfriend, Wade, 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 Wade 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; Wade 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. Wade and I had broken up, 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!

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