Have you traveled around New England much? Visited old farms and other relics of the region's history? In today's guest post from Tempa Pagel -- whose second mystery They Danced by the Light of the Moon releases tomorrow (Feb. 19; review here) -- it's clear that the writer's eye finds mystery and suspense in that landscape ...
Derelict Buildings as Muse
by Tempa Pagel
I’ve
always been fascinated with vacated buildings. I think many people are. We
can’t resist peaking into an abandoned house and wondering about its former
inhabitants. Faded wallpaper around an
outline of a bureau, smoke smudged walls above an old stove, imprints of lives
lived here and now gone. Who were they? Where did they go? Why? Mystery hangs
in the air.
Once,
a long time ago—I forget the circumstances—I was walking along a remote sandy strip of beach
that separated woods and the rolling waves of Lake Michigan. I came upon a house, no more than thirty feet
from the water, almost swallowed up by trees and brush. It had been a stately place
at one time, but was now in a serious state of deterioration: roof partially
gone, windows broken out, walls falling down. A large room looking out onto the
lake was now open to the elements, its elegant black and white tiled floor
merging with the sand. I lingered there, at first trying to envision it the way
it had been. And then, pondering the mystery of it: Who had lived there? What
had happened to cause its owners to desert it?
During
my teen years there were stories—perhaps
urban legends, but believed non-the-less—of an
old deserted tuberculosis sanatorium out in the countryside somewhere. Everyone
knew somebody who had broken into the TB San, as we called it, and had found creepy
things and (of course) felt the presence of ghosts. Despite the fact that I
never ventured near it, vivid stories of the TB San’s lab, with its shelves of
glass jars containing human organs floating in formaldehyde, created images that
fooled my memory into believing I had seen it all for myself. A vacant house holds secrets of a family, but an
institution holds the intersecting stories of numerous individuals who have
been isolated from society. How did they
come to be there? Did they survive?
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When
I moved to New England, two iconic buildings in my general vicinity quickly
became known to me: the Danvers State Hospital,
its gothic silhouette high on a hill reigning over Route 1 in Danvers,
Massachusetts, and the Wentworth Hotel overlooking the Atlantic Ocean near Portsmouth,
New Hampshire. A mental institution and a grand hotel, they shared nothing in
common other than the fact that both were prominent examples of 19th
century architecture on the decline. Within a few years of each other—shortly after I learned of them—they closed. Then, because what to do with them could
not be resolved, both were boarded up and allowed to deteriorate through the
years.
I
became fascinated with them in the same way I had been by the house on the
beach and the TB San years before. When I drove by Danvers, traveling south to
the mall, or passed Wentworth while meandering north along the coast, I thought
of the stories distilling within their respective walls. My imagination was nurtured
by tales of those who had snuck into the deteriorating Danvers hospital and scared
themselves silly, as well as by stories of those whose parents had known the
opulent Wentworth during its heyday. I knew I wanted to put these places in
novels someday. I envisioned an historical mystery for the Wentworth. For
Danvers, I didn’t yet know.
Over
time, I read about grand hotels, visited one in the Midwest, and let ideas
stew. When I finally started writing They
Danced by the Light of the Moon I set the first scene in 1901 at a hotel
inspired by the Wentworth Hotel. Immediately, my historical character, Marguerite,
took over, creating some surprising twists along the way, the most unexpected
being the incorporation of Danvers State Hospital. I had not planned on putting
Wentworth and Danvers into the same book, so I resisted at first. But then, since
both buildings had been at their peaks during that time period—in prestige and architecturally—I decided to go with it.
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I
began researching facts in which to imbed Marguerite’s story. There was an
abundance of information on Wentworth, including a wonderful pictorial history
by Dennis Robinson, but I found little, other than online articles with small
black and white pictures, on Danvers.
Then
I came across an intriguing website. Before it was torn down, an urban explorer
had done something I’d yearned but hadn’t dared to do: he had sneaked into the
crumbling buildings of Danvers. And better yet, he’d documented them. His spectacular pictures highlighted
architectural features inside and out and even atop roofs. He photographed
rooms, hallways, tunnels, stairwells, basements, auditorium, and sometimes just
objects: a torn curtain, a chair, a rusty metal bed, a 1970’s calendar, news
clippings on the wall. This virtual tour raised the hair on the back of my
neck, and gave me goose bumps. Inspired,
we set to work, my present-day protagonist and I, climbing through a basement
window, circumventing debris in underground tunnels, ascending a caged-in
staircase, sidling around rotting floors, getting lost and terrified, seeking
answers to the mystery of Marguerite.
How did she get here? What happened to her?
Meanwhile,
the real fates of the Wentworth Hotel and the Danvers State Hospital were
playing out. After a number of wing amputations, the main section of the Wentworth
finally had a buyer with a plan to restore it. Danvers was not so lucky. Its
buildings, one by one, were demolished. Attempts to save the last and most
distinctive one, the Kirkbride, failed, and only a small section of the entire
complex survived the wrecking ball to be incorporated into the new condominiums
that now sit atop the hill.
Tempa
Pagel
They Danced by
the Light of the Moon
Five
Star/Gale, Cengage, 2014
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