Minneapolis / Saint Paul / Twin Cities urban exploration

  Hellhouse
(Mudcura Sanitarium & Monastery)
 

PICTURES OF THE HELLHOUSE IN ITS PRIME:
   
Exterior in Color, 1914
    Exterior Black & White, 1924
    Interior, Black & White, 1910


Pictures taken by Laura Palmer (added 4/14/05)

         Man, do I wish we had our own pictures of the Hellhouse, or even some interior shots taken by other people.  In the mid-90's, w e took 4 or 5 trips to it, and explored every nook, including the roof - which could only be accessed by a n exterior ladder attached to some extremely rotten wood.  Hellhouse was a huge, scary, abandoned institutional building, with three major wings, four stories, a freaky basement / boiler room, and an overrun outdoor courtyard in the middle of it all, with railingless connecting bridges crossing over it on the 2nd and 3rd floors.  Hellhouse was in the middle of the woods by a stream in the hills, and it had been abandoned for at least 30 years.  It was full of great satanic graffiti, plus an awesome 8-foot rendition of the Misfit’s Crimson Ghost on the floor of a basement room.

     The owner lived in a run down house nearby and chased people he caught in there with a shotgun.  The creek ou
t back burbled like dead people muttering. It was infested with bats and birds and rats.  It had a huge hole burned through the floor on the top level and up through the roof.  The rest of the floors creaked and dipped when walked upon; we stuck near the walls.  It was fucking beautiful, and one of the creepiest places we've ever explored.  Unfortunately, we’ll never be able to go back and get some photos because it burned to the ground under suspicious circumstances several years ago.

     It had originally been a sanitarium for arthritics in the early 1900’s; people took mud baths in mud from the nearby sulfur springs.  Then this went out of style and it became a monastery, and a bunch of monks ran about in robes looking like freaks, until the monks all committed mass suicide in the mid 1960’s.  OK, they didn’t really.  They just went somewhere else, I suppose … but damn it, that’s boring.

     Since it no longer exists, there is really no point going into much more detail than that.  If anyone has pictures (or links to pic
tures) of the infamous Hellhouse, please let me know and I will post them on here.

 

Link: http://community.livejournal.com/abandonedplaces/1235922.html

 

 

 

Urban Adventure | Action Squad