The Mercer & Fonthill Museums

The Mercer and Fonthill Museums were started by the historian Henry Mercer at the start of the 20th century to collect examples of handmade items and crafts that were dying out after the Industrial Revolution.  He collected over 30,000 pieces and, in order to display them all, built a museum to house them in.

But this was no ordinary museum: in 1916 he built a 6 storey tall castle out of concrete.  Indeed, he had earlier built a smaller one as his home (which became the Fonthill museum)

View from the street; larger version here.

Opposite side; larger version here.

Apart from being a huge manor house filled with a strange collection all from a single determined collector, which I hope sounds intriguing enough for someone to start building a game, the museum has a second appeal.  The museum’s guide book includes floor plans: with just a little editing, these could be used to create maps for this museum/castle location.

Gothic revival houses

It might not quite be Miskatonic University, but the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth does have a collection of issues of the 19th century magazine American Architect and Building News.  From that they have made a special collection of examples of drawings and floor plans of house and building designs.

These could be very useful images, both because the simple ink drawings are very atmospheric and also because the floor plans do most of the work of providing a map to use.  Print out large versions of them, touching up the diagrams, and start adding your story.

A pair of large houses, via UMass Dartmouth

All of the designs are examples of Gothic Revival architecture, and specifically they are stick style, meaning that they resemble half-timbered Tudor buildings.

As old and romantic as they look, these are not the kinds of buildings that Lovecraft is forever talking about (in The Dunwich Horror, for example).  Those houses are generally the starker, simpler Colonial style, the “gambrel roofs” that feature so prominently being the arched roofs you would see on a Dutch barn.  These designs are more recent than them, and are harking back to an even earlier time.

But if the colonial houses suggest the decay of isolated, impoverished people, the Gothic style suggests the madness of excess and indulgence.

Two more houses from the UMass

Apart from the numerous large homes, the collection has several other kinds of buildings, ranging from small cottages, various public buildings (fire stations, train stations, churches), and even a couple of asylums.

A cottage and an asylum, each from the UMass collection

Buyer beware – part 3

Following on from the first two parts, our third house that gave the new owners more than they bargained for.  In the 1960s, Helen and George Ackley bought a large Victorian house in Nyack, NY.

The house in Nyack, photo via Atlas Obscura

Over the years, the Ackleys find that the house is haunted, but it doesn’t bother them too greatly.  Around 1990, the Ackleys decide to sell the house, but neglect to advertise any stories of ghosts.  After all, nobody had mentioned it to them.

It turns out that their buyer felt differently.  With their $32,000 deposit in escrow, they hear from a local architect “Oh, you’re buying the haunted house”.  They turn around and remove their offer, and then start legal proceedings to regain their deposit.  In what became known as “the Ghostbusters trial”, the courts agreed with them finding that, in the absence of some reasonable way for it to be found during house inspections, the owners were obligated to divulge the presence of a ghost.

Although, really, how could this home not be haunted?  Reviewing the facts:

1. It’s a 5,000 square foot rambling Victorian house with three full levels, basement, and attic.
2. It’s on a dead-end street.
3. It’s on the banks of the Hudson River, and not far from Sleepy Hollow.

A nice setup for a light-hearted Ghostbusters game: the team are reduced to doing pre-purchase home inspections with Egon’s latest device that both takes PKE readings and detects rising damp, when one house shows up something unexpected.

Alternatively, some one has bought a haunted house and starts legal proceedings against the people that were involved in the sale.  The players take the roles of the real-estate agents, lawyers, architects, engineers and the like who are defending the case and find themselves drawn into a situation far stranger than they expected.

Buyer beware – part 2

Carrying on with this little series on houses that packed a surprise for the new owner, we now move our attention to Greenville, South Carolina.  There, the Brown family bought an old mill home that, like our previous example, harboured a secret, but this time it was one that posed a very real danger to them.

Shortly after moving in, they discovered that behind a bookcase was a “secret room”:

and what was inside was a nightmare beyond their wildest dreams.

"This can't be happening. This can't be true. It terrified me," Kerri Brown told News 4's Tim Waller.

The secret room … contained a handwritten letter from the previous owner titled, "You Found It!"

"Hello. If you're reading this, then you found the secret room. I owned this house for a short while and it was discovered to have a serious mold problem. One that actually made my children very sick to the point that we had to move out,"

…

The Browns later learned the home contained the worst types of mold including Stachybotrys, the so-called Toxic Black Mold.

[from the news report on the story]

Moulds like Stachybotrys can cause a variety of lung problems, from asthma attacks to bleeding in the lungs.  The previous owners had learned about the mould problems the hard way: their kids became so sick that their doctors told them to leave the house.  Realising that nobody would buy the house with this problem (fixing it would cost almost as much as the house did itself), they hid it as best they could and put it on the market.  But then their conscience pricks up and says, “no, this is not cool”; not strongly enough, it seems to actually own up to the problem, but enough to put in a note saying what the problem was.

This story strikes me as being tremendously creepy; although the problem was found quickly, there was certainly the possibility that they could have missed this message and lived there for years with the mould multiplying behind the makeshift wall.  Over time, they grow sicker and sicker, perhaps only later discovering the source of their problems and the letter (itself now covered in mould).  That reminds me of Lovecraft’s The color out of space.

Using this device in a game seems a little tricky, as it is a protracted process.  Perhaps it would need to involve an NPC, somebody that the players interact with regularly and that goes through a steady decline over time.  At first, he is wheezy and mentions that he can’t shift his cold, but his wife tells him to stop his whining and says he’s always been a complainer, so it just seems to be part of his “flavour text”.  He gets a little worse and becomes bed-ridden, but he’s still being a little theatrical about it.  Gradually, it becomes clear that this is no hypochondriac and he is genuinely declining.  Would the players find what the cause was?  If they didn’t find it in time to save their friend, when they do find it what do they do next, seek revenge?

Alternatively, for a Cthulhu setting, some of the players take up some lodging in a large house, renting a room there.  The owner is a sickly chap with a rasping wheeze, and another tenant is sick too.  Perhaps they learn that most tenants don’t hang around too long, and more than one has died (which wouldn’t be so strange in the classic era; back then, TB still has no cure and it’s only a short time after the 1918 flu pandemic).  Eventually they might find the secret room with its infected walls; in the Lovecraft world, I suppose that it could do with some kind of shrine or something too.  Now, who put this there: a previous owner? a previous tenant? or a current one?

Buyer beware – part 1

Ahh, late October, that means Halloween is fast approaching.  Or at least it does back in the States - here in Australia we don’t bother with that annual festival of costumes and confectionary, try as the supermarkets might to convince us that we should.  Here, October is Spring and is the start of the busiest time for the real-estate market: the sunny weather makes even a dump look good, and weather that’s neither hot nor cold mean people don’t notice that the house is poorly built.

Putting those two ideas together, here’s a trio of houses that had a little surprise for their new owners.

First, we travel to Shropshire, UK, where after a few drinks a family decided to start exploring some more of their house.  Their 20 year old son lifts a grate in the floor and climbs in to see what he can see.

The unassuming house, photos via newslite

And under there he finds that the entire house was built on top of an earlier structure: a hall that dates back to the 1700s and may have been a clandestine church.

What lies beneath, photo via newslite

The hall was empty apart from some piles of old newspapers and wine bottles, and what appeared to be a wooden crucifix lying on the floor.  And as surprising as that was:

… that was nothing compared the the shock the rest of the family got when he followed a staircase in the chapel and came out of a cupboard in the dining room.

A hidden church and a secret passage, I suppose in real-estate speak that would be a “bonus room”.  It’s Rats in the walls all over again.

The comments on the article mention that this isn’t unheard of across the UK and that at various times in their history it’s been illegal, or at least dangerous, to be a Catholic or a Protestant (depending on who was in charge), or to be Irish, or to learn to speak Gaelic.  So secret churches, meeting halls, or schools were built across the British isles, and priests or teachers would travel from town to town in disguise.

That sounds like an interesting scenario for a game, the characters are part of an underground religious (or political) group, travelling from place to place representing their faith in a land dominated by some oppressive regime.

A 13-storey house of wood

image via Inhabitat

Built in the northern Russian city of Archangelsk, this enormous wooden tower was originally going to be a simple two-storey house.  For one reason or another, over the course of 15 years owner Nikolai Sutyagin continued to add level after level until it reached a height 144 feet.  In 2008 authorities finally stepped in -– he had no building permit for a structure like this -– and declared it needed to be removed as a fire hazard.

The wild structure of this building is very compelling, the shapes all seem familiar, but are extended to absurd dimensions.  And the way that the pieces aren’t perfectly finished -- the way that the central tower bends perilously one way and then the other, for example – certainly emphasizes the impression that not all is well in such a place.

And why not have the same wildness on the interior of the building as well?  Not just that level one joins to level two joins to level three, but a three dimensional labyrinth.  In a typical “dungeon” going deeper means moving to the next stage of the adventure; perhaps in this building the levels are not layered one on top of the other, but one within another like a Matryoshka doll.

As to why someone would build something like this, at the end of the Atlas Obscura entry there is a mention that he may have built it for his betrothed.  Personally, I was taken with the idea that it wasn’t built by anyone per se, but that the house itself was somehow responsible.  Even better, put those two ideas together – someone built a magical house for their beloved so that they can always have a house around them, one that can repair itself and perhaps grow to accommodate their needs; but something is wrong and from a simple cottage it grew into this rambling tower.  Perhaps, deep inside, that original cottage is still there?