Saturday morning began like most others, uneventful. My weekend routine in full swing, I was driving southbound on Commack Road just after dawn. Entering Deer Park there is a long stretch of road devoid of homes, businesses or buildings of any kind for several miles. In the middle of this seeming wilderness the road ahead was blockaded. Commack road was closed. My choices were simple; turn left into unknown territory or hang a ‘U turn’ and go back where I came from! I was late for an appointment so left it was – at least I wasn’t making backward progress. They say hindsight is 20/20. It’s what you say after you’ve made a mistake.
60 seconds from Commack Road I found myself in a place as quiet and still as death itself. Somehow, I had strayed unwittingly into The Pilgrim State Psychiatric Center. I drove through winding streets where life only made it’s presence known in the growth of weary trees and weeds gone wild. It’s a city all it’s own with block after block of large stately buildings, fields, farms and many facilities from a bygone era. This estate is HUGE. All deserted. Can you spell S-P-O-O-O-K-Y!? Here is where my sensitivity starts kicking in. There are horrific residual energies left behind in an insane asylum. The buildings are empty to the naked eye but to the spiritual eye, not so empty. There was an earie sense of traveling back through time. It was like stepping into an old, tattered photograph you found in grandma’s attic. Crazy, right?
A stop sign broke my reverie. I took a 360 degree reconnoiter. Haunted houses surrounded me on all sides, but not a living soul was to be seen anywhere. Then it dawned on me. I’m lost. My appointment would have to wait. Since the roads curved and twisted and the buildings looked the same I was soon turned all around and didn’t know where the hell I was. How would I find my way out? My gas gauge told me the tank was almost empty and so wandering around these vast grounds for an hour wasn’t an option either. I had fifteen minutes tops.
Just outside of my field of vision I saw … I didn’t know what it was. Something had moved. In a place like this, silent and still like a tomb, movement qualified as a special event. I turned quickly to see the local security patrol car. Ah yes, the break I was looking for!
I flagged him down and asked the quickest route back to Commack Road. He looked a bit disoriented and struggled with the answer. He paused… then paused… then looked into his lap… then paused again. As he began talking my hopes of gaining anything valuable from him faded. He began his “directions” by telling me to take this road to the end then take another unamed street until it crossed another. I was to take that unamed road two blacks until it met another unamed intersection, on and on. Mind you, there was not so much as a street name or turn right or left here and there in his meandering explanations!! Despite my attempts to get more specifics, at the end of his tortuously long and convoluted directions he smiled sheepishly and ended this way- and I quote; “Then it gets a little tricky. You’ll just have to follow your heart.” I stared in disbelief. Unbelievable. I began to wonder if he wasn’t better suited to be a patient here rather than a security guard.
Fortunately, just then we saw some cars passing by and he suggested I follow. I was delighted to comply.
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