The day that I married Marjorie, I felt like the luckiest guy in the world. She was smart and beautiful, and ever since I had met her six months earlier, not a day had gone by that I didn’t wonder what she was doing with a guy like me. It wasn’t that I’m a loser—I think I’m a good guy and look well-enough, and the only real ding in my eligibility as a good boyfriend or husband was that I lost my job recently due to layoffs. But even that was turning around, as I’m supposed to be starting the process of getting a U.S. Customs job at the Savannah docks at the end of the month. If it all worked out, it would mean better pay and benefits, plus great retirement.
It was just that Marjorie seemed close to perfect. She didn’t have any family aside from an older brother she was close with, and she was the type to have tons of casual friends but few close ones. Everyone loved her, and I could tell when we went out all the guys (and a few of the girls) were jealous that I was the one with her. When she proposed to me three weeks ago, I was taken by surprise, but I’m not overly traditional. It never occurred to me to say no or put off us getting married.
Some of my friends asked me about it of course, wanting to make sure I wasn’t moving too fast. That I knew her well enough to know that she was the right one and this was the right time. But I just laughed at that, joking more than once that not only was I sure, but I needed to hurry up and marry her before she realized what she was getting herself into.
Initially, we hadn’t planned on taking a honeymoon for awhile so I could start this new job and we could both save up money, but the day of the wedding, Marjorie’s brother Pete surprised us with an invitation to take an impromptu trip west with him for a few days. He was a very successful long-haul trucker and had just bought a brand-new semi that he claimed could comfortably hold six people, much less three, and he was heading out to California in a few days.
I had misgivings at first. It sounded like a long and potentially uncomfortable trip, particularly for a honeymoon. But Pete explained that he had a “hot site” lined up out there and he would love for us to go.
“Hot site” was the lingo he used for places that were supposed to be legitimate locations of documented paranormal activity. Ghost hunter type stuff, though it wasn’t limited to ghosts. He had told us tons of stories the few times we had hung out, ranging from looking for bigfoot up in Canada to exploring a deserted high school for a ghost in the Midwest. He was passionate about the stuff, and while I didn’t believe in ghosts and goblins myself, I could tell that Marjorie did. And Pete was a fun guy in my limited experience, full of interesting tales and funny jokes. I had always felt comfortable around him. Accepted. And that meant a lot.
Still…the idea was to drive to California over four days, spend a week out there having fun, and then four days back. That was a long time to be traveling with a new bride and a brother-in-law I didn’t know that well. Plus, there was the financial side of it. We didn’t magically have a lot of money just because he was offering a trip.
But Pete had answers for that too. His company, which he was partners in, would cover the room and the travel expenses, including a rental car for the week when we got to California. Same went for food. When I started to object to him paying for everything, he shook his head and patted my shoulder. He said it was his wedding gift to us, and it was not a big deal. He’d write off the expenses on his taxes and appreciate the company.
And naturally, he said with a wry grin, he knew that we would want our privacy. We’d have our own room on the road every night and he knew a great hotel for us to stay at once we arrived in California. The owner was a friend of his and had already said he’d comp us two rooms for the week we were there.
It all sounded great. If I’m honest, it all sounded too good to be true. I suddenly had images from half a dozen movies I’d seen where people end up being arrested as drug mules or dissected in warehouses run by sadists or organ thieves. I was probably being overly dramatic and letting my pride get in the way of a great opportunity, but I just felt uneasy about the whole thing.
But then I saw Marjorie out of the corner of my eye. I could feel her gaze on me, and as I turned to look at her more fully, I saw the hope and worry in her face. She wanted to go--wanted a honeymoon with me and time with a brother she didn’t see as often as she’d like. I knew she’d accept it if I said I didn’t want to do it, but how could I deny her something so simple and harmless? A few days with the people she loved most, having fun and relaxing. I knew, if I was lucky, I would be stretched thin by the new job for the next few months. This might be the last chance we had to get away and do something cool for some time.
So, I said yes. She had let out a squeal and hugged my neck, and I let my misgivings and pride slip away as I held onto her tightly. We left the following Tuesday with two suitcases, a laptop, and enough folding money to cover souvenirs and emergencies.
The first day was uneventful but fun. Pete’s truck cab was truly amazing. Between its flip down seats and bed, mini fridge and television, it felt more like a small hotel room than the interior of a transfer truck. Looking out through its massive front windows as Pete drove down the interstate headed west, it was surreal seeing everything from so much higher than I was used to when driving. It was neat, but I couldn’t help but think that driving the truck must be terrifying given how easy it would be to hit something and not even realize it until it was too late.
But it didn’t seem to bother Pete. He chatted with us some and let Marjorie control the radio, and by late afternoon we were pulling into a small but nice chain hotel off the interstate for the night. Pete checked us in and gave us our key cards, telling us he was going to go get some sleep, but he’d see us in the morning for breakfast. We were excited to finally have some time to ourselves, so we didn’t leave our own room except to pay the pizza delivery guy later in the evening.
The next morning we went to meet my new brother-in-law at the restaurant across the road, and once inside we saw he was already set up at a booth near the back, two accordion folders sharing his side of the table. Marjorie rolled her eyes and groaned when she saw the stacks of papers Pete was going through, burying her face in my shoulder.
“Oh no. It’s started. My ghost hunting nerd of a brother is on the case.”
Pete looked up and gave us a smile. “Yeah, yeah. Make fun. This is good intel, and I thought I could bring you both up to speed before we start making miles today.”
Marjorie gave a light snort as she raised her eyebrow. “Good intel, huh? I didn’t realize this was a military op. Are we going to have code names when we visit the ‘hot site’?” She did air quotes on the last bit, and it was clear from her tone and expression that she was making fun of him.
This was all very odd. Marjorie idolized her brother, and short of him taking a shit on the table, I doubted she’d find fault in pretty much anything he did. And they would joke around from time to time, but not like this. She seemed mad about something, or at the very least mean-spirited in her joking. Pete just gave her a smirk and went back to looking at the papers he had, but I decided to go ahead and try to head off any further comments.
“I think it’s a pretty cool hobby, Marjorie, and if we’re going all this way, it’s good he’s done his research.” Pete grinned at me and nodded. Emboldened, I went on. “And Pete has always told us good stories about this kind of stuff before, so let’s see what he has to say.”
Marjorie shot me a dark look and flopped down in the booth. “I guess. Let’s get some food ordered first though, I’m starving.”
Ten minutes later, our order was placed and Pete had gotten his presentation organized, which really just amounted to him pulling out a few pictures to show us during his account of Wizard’s Folly. Carefully stowing away the rest of the papers and securing the covers on the accordion files, Pete began his tale.
Wizard’s Folly was an amusement park that opened up in 1947. Initially it was a haunted house more than anything, as the original attraction consisted solely of the large, abandoned mansion at the center of forty acres nestled in the outskirts of the small north California town of Firenze. The town itself had been established back in 1894 by Frank Pazzi who had immigrated to New York from Florence, Italy a decade earlier before making his way west. Pazzi was extremely wealthy, and though no one knew how he had gained his fortune, he found little complaint when he poured nearly three million dollars into the town itself and another half a million into building his own nearby estate.
Firenze was small and somewhat cloistered in the expanse of wilderness Pazzi had purchased, and for a time it seemed to be the perfect community. Everyone had work, a nice house, and plenty to eat, and if Pazzi was a bit eccentric, who really cared? It was expected that such a man, with foreign ways and rarified tastes, would seem somewhat strange to the working folk who had come to the area. Once his house was finished, he only allowed a handful of people into his home as servants, and they largely lived on his grounds in one of three guest houses he’d had constructed. The only person who still lived in town was his head housekeeper, who went by the name Susanna Templeton. People said that after just a few weeks of going into that house, Templeton had changed dramatically, becoming withdrawn and quick to anger. For a time, vague gossip such as this was all the acknowledgement you would find from the townsfolk that something might be wrong. It wasn’t until around 1912 that the town started talking about the missing people.
Fifty miles from Firenze there was a small clinic called Greenheart Home that catered to all kinds of cases that were too sensitive for normal hospitals and institutions. More to the point, it was a place where wealthy families would stick family members that they had decided were too much a burden or embarrassment to keep at home or send elsewhere.
The insane, the addicted, the pregnant woman out of wedlock or the deviant man, these were just a few of the menagerie that could be found housed inside its walls. From the outside, the clinic maintained a facade of genteel civility and gentle care. But the staff cared little about the comfort of their patients, and they knew the checks would keep coming so long as their charges remained quiet. Over the years it became a black pit of cruelty and abuse where people were thrown to be forgotten. Small wonder then, that it took some time before anyone noticed that every year a number of its “clients” went missing.
During the early years, when someone in Firenze saw the white truck from Greenheart Home trundling through town toward the Pazzi estate, they would just shrug and raise a questioning eyebrow. Over time this evolved into a knowing look and a furtive whisper if you were bold. But those that spread gossip and rumors about what Pazzi was doing up there were careful to do so discreetly. It was too good a town, too good a life, to risk angering the head of their little forest kingdom.
In late 1911, there was a massive fire at Greenheart Home. Thirty-seven people died, and those that survived were sent back home or to other institutions in other parts of the country. For a time afterward, everything was quiet and nothing changed in the town of Firenze. But then people from the town started disappearing.
In the 1910 U.S. Census, Firenze was reported to have 958 citizens. By the 1920 Census, that number was down to less than 500. Now most of that wasn’t missing people of course. Those with better sense or more resources left the town before it got really bad, and that accounted for several hundred people over the course of several years. But in the ten years after Greenheart Home caught fire, there were an estimated 65 or more people that just disappeared.
Now listen closely to this next part, because it’s important. The records are spotty from back then, particularly in an isolated town like Firenze, but for the most part the journals and newspaper articles agree with the handful of eyewitness accounts that were collected by ambitious authors and reporters scavenging the area after it was all over.
When I say these people disappeared, I mean just that. Not that they were abducted from their homes by Pazzi’s henchmen in the middle of the night. Not that they were snatched off the street by mysterious figures. These were wives in the middle of a conversation with their husband and he’s suddenly not there. Children playing in a swing one moment, and gone without a trace the next. There were over a dozen accounts of different people literally disappearing in front of people’s eyes, to say nothing of the scores of other people that went missing when no one was around.
After a few months of this, the leaders of the town had gone to Pazzi, hats in hand, trying to probe him for information, help, or some clear sign that he was involved. Pazzi listened to their concern with all the attention of a disinterested king before clucking his tongue with concern and patting them on the head. He promised to offer rewards for any and all of the missing, and the next week there were several flybills up around town proclaiming $1000 for the return of any of those that had gotten lost.
Because that’s how the townsfolk that stayed in Firenze started to refer to them. “Oh, Bill Gunderson? Yeah, he got lost last spring. His wife Polly is still running the store though, and isn’t she doing a good job?” There was an unspoken consensus in the town that while concern and action would be given lip service, no one was really going to rock the boat. The flybills would be torn down until the next season of disappearances, when they would go up again for a few days. In between, people were growing tenser and more frightened, but they largely kept it to themselves.
Then Annabelle Perkins got lost. Her husband, Rudolph Perkins, had moved them to Firenze two years earlier, and while by all accounts they were well-liked and respected, it was known that Rudolph and Annabelle were both more vocal in their concerns about the periodic rash of disappearances that seemed to plague their town. Their friends and neighbors tried to mollify them, of course, and for a time that seemed to help. But when Annabelle went missing while in the middle of taking a bath one night in December of 1921, Rudolph was beyond persuasion.
He gave voice to what so many in the town knew. Frank Pazzi was the one behind the disappearances somehow. And whatever he was doing to those people, they were never seen again. It took only a couple of hours to talking to his friends to gather up a large crowd that had grown tired of living in fear and dread. Like a scene out of an old monster movie, they stormed the estate and began searching for Pazzi to demand answers.
Unfortunately, he was nowhere to be found. What they did find…well, there’s not a lot that’s clear from that night. I know that fifteen people went to the house, and several of them died inside, but it’s unclear how or why that happened. They tried to question his house staff, but they were all gone as well, and when they went to the head housekeeper’s home, Susanna Templeton was dead, having hung herself from a clothesline in the back yard.
One of the survivors of that night wrote a brief account of what they found in the house. Much of it was garbled and hard to make sense of, but one thing was clear. At some point they went into the lower levels of that house and found hidden chambers no one knew even existed. Pazzi had recruited some of his builders from somewhere else, and it must have been those men that had dug out the subterranean rooms and installed all of the cages and apparatus.
To call it a torture chamber or a dungeon is inaccurate. More accurately, it was a black shrine to some form of occult worship. There were strange symbols etched into every surface, and one of the spaces included a large pit filled with the refuse from nearly two decades of human sacrifice. It was here that the account gets especially hard to follow, as it seems to be talking about the mound of bones and flesh moving or rising up against them while also talking about Rudolph finding his beloved Annabelle even as he joined the other men in a terrible scream…it’s very weird, raw stuff. The guy who wrote it died only a few weeks later, so there was never a chance for anyone to find out what he really meant. In any case, that was the deathblow for Firenze, and by 1923 it was a ghost town.
It might have just faded away forever, slowly getting consumed by the forest at its edge, if it hadn’t all been bought by a man named Wilson Tattersall. The owner of a large security firm in the east that was slowly taking business away from the Pinkerton Agency, Tattersall knew the value of grabbing up land in the West with his newfound fortune. By 1932, Pazzi had gone from having been declared missing to being declared dead. With no will or heirs, the estate and the city itself reverted to the state of California, who was more than happy to sell it cheaply to the man from Virginia who was already buying up large swaths of land around the state.
It lay fallow for several more years before Tattersall began to develop it. In 1945, he announced plans to turn it into an amusement park of sorts. Keep in mind that this was ten years before Disneyland opened, so the idea of an amusement park in the mid-forties was typically confined to state fairs or a few bigger places like Coney Island or White City. The parks had rides, even rollercoasters, but between the Depression and World War Two, a lot of them had shut down. The idea of building a brand new one, particularly in the middle of nowhere, and especially at the scene of so much horror, seemed insane to me when I first read about it.
But then I realized that no one really knew what had happened in Firenze. Aside from a few articles at the time and the journals that were found by authors and researchers in the years since, it was just never widely known or talked about. And Tattersall, for all his money and ambition, started small when he rebuilt the town. He renovated the house and estate to play up the preexisting gothic architecture, remodeling here and there to suit its new purpose as a haunted house by adding secret hallways and staff areas as well as many nasty surprises for guests. The lower levels were supposed to be off-limits, however. Whether that meant that he sealed them off or had preserved them in their original state, no one knew.
When the park opened in 1947, it was called Wizard’s Folly. This played into the new legends that Tattersall had been strategically inserting into the rumor mills of towns in the surrounding counties. Instead of dozens of dead and missing, there were only a couple of girls and a little boy that were victims of the cruel Francesco Pazzi, a vile man who considered himself a wizard and alchemist of sorts. He had allegedly taken the victims’ blood as part of some insane ritual to make a Philosopher’s Stone, which he hoped to use to convert various substances into precious metals. Instead, the ritual went awry and he wound up burning to death in the bowels of his strange home. It is said that he and his “guests” still haunt those very halls…
Or so the ads said. A bunch of bullshit, but it spread like wildfire. Most people were tight on money back then, but they were also hungry for some time away from the realities of daily life. At a penny per person, carloads of people were making the trek and standing in line to get in from the first week it was open. By the time word had spread about how terrifying the house was, how you really did need to try it for yourself, the wait to get in was over four hours.
In the following six months, the park not only grew in popularity but in size as well. This was, for all intents and purposes, an adult theme park, but the estate could only hold so many visitors at a time if it was going to be an effective haunted house. So they added a go-kart track and a tilt-a-whirl, followed by a hot dog stand that served beer. Next was a handful of booths where guys could try to win cheap toys for their dates along with a “curiosities” show that was essentially a freak show on the front end and a peep show on the back. By October of ’47, they had started building a real, honest-to-God wooden rollercoaster too.
It was toward the end of that month, just a few days before Halloween, when it all fell apart. They called it a “toxic infection caused by mold”, and it was traced back to dozens of people that had visited Wizard’s Folly. But based on some things I’ve found, that was just a cover story. Over three hundred people scattered across six states reported seeing and hearing things, vomiting, and feeling an oppressive sense of being watched. This was covered up because of the two things that they all had in common. The first was that they had all visited Wizard’s Folly at some point in the six months it had been open. The second was that all of them started experiencing symptoms at exactly the same time: 9:23 p.m. pacific time on October 27, 1947.
Whatever happened that night in October at Wizard’s Folly, it was covered up. And the park was closed permanently the next day. Since that time, it’s been abandoned and forgotten--the Tattersall company, now called Tattersall Global--still owns the place, but it’s just a relic. They have a couple of guards patrolling it, and it’s become a bit of a holy grail in some corners of the internet paranormal community because no one has ever managed to get in more than a few yards before they are caught and turned away.
Then two months ago a guy started posting on a forum I frequent. Claimed that he and a buddy of his worked as guards for Tattersall at the old Wizard’s Folly park. People immediately called bullshit, but the next day he posted several pictures online of him at the park, and it looked legit. He said that for $5,000.00, him and his buddy would “take off” a couple of hours at an appointed time, leaving the gate open for the buyer and whoever he wanted to bring. The only rules were that they didn’t break or take anything and they were out again before the two hours was up.
I wound up in a brief bidding war with a lady from Seattle, but I managed to get it for $8,000.00. Marge, don’t look like that. I’ve got the money to spend, and this is a once in a lifetime chance. But anyway…that wraps up my presentation for now. There’s more to show you, but we’ll get to that later.
A look passed between Pete and Marjorie, but I couldn’t read its significance. I was kind of blown away by everything I had just heard and that it had all come from Pete. When I told him so, he smirked at me as he forked in a mouthful of cold eggs.
“Oh, because I drive a truck you think I can’t be smart? Can’t read?”
I felt my face flushing crimson. “No, no. That’s not what I meant at all. It’s just…all that information. It’s impressive is all. It must have taken you a long time to pull all that together.”
He laughed and Marjorie joined in now, her earlier anger seemingly forgotten. “I’m just fucking with you, Phil. But yeah, it took a long time, even with the internet. This shit is obscure, and some of the people you run across in these circles don’t like to turn aloose of the little nuggets they’ve found along the way. It was fun though, and I think it’ll be worth it. This one is really something. I can feel it.
I gave them both a relieved smile and nodded. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings and I didn’t want to be stuck on an awkward trip for two weeks either, so seeing them both joking and in good spirits again eased my worries. I realized I had never looked at the pictures he had pulled out at the start of his story, so I picked them up now. Two of them were old and faded black and white photos of Wizard’s Folly back in its heyday, steady streams of people headed this way and that through what looked like a cross between a carnival and a strange garden party. The last one was obviously far more recent, and it showed a chubby, balding man in a security uniform smiling uncomfortably in front of the looming face of a gothic mansion, its dark stone a stormy gray in the overexposed picture. I felt an unexpected shudder looking at that last picture, and I set them all down quickly.
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Credits
