737 replies to this topic

[kiddglock]

clumsythief, on 25 September 2010 - 05:26 PM, said:

Not sure if anyone's still prowling this thread. I only read the first fifteen pages or so before I got tired of the monotony and decided to post.

I install security systems for a living and completed a contract for a home along Cossart Road over the summer. It's not the property of the infamous cult house(s), but it's within a short walk through the woods to get to it and take a look. There are pictures and some videos available on the internet; most are about as high quality as you'd expect from a bunch of weekend ghost hunters with Motorola Razrs and the Best Buy special cameras, but they get the point across. You're not going to find anything taken at the front door because, simply put, if you get within more than a quarter of a mile of many of the estates in the area you're very likely to be apprehended by the security firm that patrols the grounds and turned over to the state and local police. You're not going to be put in prison, but the fines that come along with the trespassing charges are substantial.

From what I can tell after spending three months in the woods around Pennsbury Township, there are about four homes that could be considered "cult houses" depending on who's posting a story about it on any given night. One is a home approximately half a mile from the Route 100 intersection, and is the only obvious set of gates right along the road. This house doesn't exactly qualify as a mansion, and while gorgeous is somewhat modern compared to the other homes in the area.

The second is located about a quarter of a mile northwest of the gated property mentioned before. It's actually not connected to Cossart at all, but has a driveway coming off of Fairville Road just to the north. You can't see it from Fairville. There's a rather large wall of trees planted to keep it from view, though it is clearly visible from the peak of the hill traversed by the driveway to the first home. This is probably the jackpot for most people reading this thread. The house does have some fairly gothic looking window panes which resemble crosses, and while these are definitely on the eccentric side of architectural design the look is not especially uncommon throughout Chester County, and in old construction in general.

The other two possible homes are probably the most difficult to get a glance at. They're both right around the midway point of Cossart's stretch between Fairville Road and Creek Road. The driveways aren't especially long, and one is gated, but for the most part their visibility is severely obstructed by the surrounding woods. Neither one is any more creepy than the rest of the homes in the area, but most of this stems from knowledge of the legends and the general appearance of the township.

There is a private security group which works on the grounds. Their employment is a joint effort between Pennsbury Township and the wealthier homeowners along Cossart. They are equipped with a variety of SUVs and pick-up trucks, and have tracked and monitored vehicles that shouldn't be there. Regardless, a huge number of the chase stories and experiences are just teenagers screwing with each other.

I can answer more specific questions if anyone cares, I guess. I've met the owner of the infamous Cult House and he's actually a fairly mild-mannered, nice guy. He's just grown sick of the intrusions and vandalism, and from what I've gathered doesn't believe for a second that he owes an explanation to the public, if only because their constant destructive behavior has gotten to him and everyone else living there.

Like I said, any specific questions feel free to post them here or PM me. I suppose it's also worth mentioning that the Skull Tree is gone. It was taken out by PECO's subcontractors in June or July of 2010. We had a storm in early June which caused quite a lot of damage, and the tree was removed because it had become unsafe. There's still a tree that resembles it, but it's not the same one.

Dude, I think you just killed it.  I think you killed the thread.

[clumsythief]

kiddglock, on 28 September 2010 - 07:03 AM, said:

Dude, I think you just killed it.  I think you killed the thread.

Like a rational explanation would diminish the hallucinations and imaginations of those who WANT to believe...

Really though, just trying to give the most objective viewpoint I can in the context of an urban legend. I didn't know much about the cult house until I landed that job, and the only thing that really piqued my interest was the story of the Johnston murders. My father, the bumpkin that he is, has lived in Chester County his entire life and has a really remarkable knowledge of the place. He was friends with some of the gang members and their acquaintances, so I guess I had a little back story to those particular parts of the legend.

I learned about the stories a few weeks into my time there, and I'd be lying if I said it didn't coax me into looking for odd things, but I never found any answers. The houses down there are really, truly staggering, but to understand that kind of stuff you have to ask yourself how exactly you'd live if you were an old (wo)man with bottomless wealth, and likely just wanted peace and quiet without sacrificing all the pleasures and activities you enjoy.

I believe the only regret I have about the whole situation is that I didn't curl up in the fetal position below the skull tree and get a picture. If only I had know it was about to be cut down and chipped up.

However, I only spent a few nights down there. Lots of time I wasn't present when the human sacrifices and genetic experimentation could have occurred...

[kiddglock]

clumsythief, on 28 September 2010 - 09:35 PM, said:

Like a rational explanation would diminish the hallucinations and imaginations of those who WANT to believe...

Really though, just trying to give the most objective viewpoint I can in the context of an urban legend. I didn't know much about the cult house until I landed that job, and the only thing that really piqued my interest was the story of the Johnston murders. My father, the bumpkin that he is, has lived in Chester County his entire life and has a really remarkable knowledge of the place. He was friends with some of the gang members and their acquaintances, so I guess I had a little back story to those particular parts of the legend.

I learned about the stories a few weeks into my time there, and I'd be lying if I said it didn't coax me into looking for odd things, but I never found any answers. The houses down there are really, truly staggering, but to understand that kind of stuff you have to ask yourself how exactly you'd live if you were an old (wo)man with bottomless wealth, and likely just wanted peace and quiet without sacrificing all the pleasures and activities you enjoy.

I believe the only regret I have about the whole situation is that I didn't curl up in the fetal position below the skull tree and get a picture. If only I had know it was about to be cut down and chipped up.

However, I only spent a few nights down there. Lots of time I wasn't present when the human sacrifices and genetic experimentation could have occurred...

Naw, you kilt it.  47 pages...and now it's daid.

[conspiracybeliever]

No he didn't! How do we know he's telling the truth? He has no evidence. Come on! Other people have come on here with explanations but miraculously haven't even had one picture to prove anything they are saying. The legend lives on.  

[~TheBigK~]

clumsythief, on 28 September 2010 - 09:35 PM, said:

Like a rational explanation would diminish the hallucinations and imaginations of those who WANT to believe...

Really though, just trying to give the most objective viewpoint I can in the context of an urban legend. I didn't know much about the cult house until I landed that job, and the only thing that really piqued my interest was the story of the Johnston murders. My father, the bumpkin that he is, has lived in Chester County his entire life and has a really remarkable knowledge of the place. He was friends with some of the gang members and their acquaintances, so I guess I had a little back story to those particular parts of the legend.

I learned about the stories a few weeks into my time there, and I'd be lying if I said it didn't coax me into looking for odd things, but I never found any answers. The houses down there are really, truly staggering, but to understand that kind of stuff you have to ask yourself how exactly you'd live if you were an old (wo)man with bottomless wealth, and likely just wanted peace and quiet without sacrificing all the pleasures and activities you enjoy.

I believe the only regret I have about the whole situation is that I didn't curl up in the fetal position below the skull tree and get a picture. If only I had know it was about to be cut down and chipped up.

However, I only spent a few nights down there. Lots of time I wasn't present when the human sacrifices and genetic experimentation could have occurred...

Have you actually seen the supposed house that they allude to in the two stories at the beginning of this thread? I know you mentioned the possible candidates but I'm just curious if there's one in particular you think they were referring too. You would think being so revved up about their experiences they would try to take some pictures of it or get some kind of validation. I mean, if it is someone who just wants to be left alone without teenagers trespassing, then I guess taking pics isn't the best idea. But still, if you've got the audacity to do something like that and you're going to tell everyone about it, try to back it up with stuff. I looked up pics of the skull tree and a few of the homes, but I just wish there were more.

[kiddglock]

conspiracybeliever, on 30 September 2010 - 12:52 PM, said:

No he didn't! How do we know he's telling the truth? He has no evidence. Come on! Other people have come on here with explanations but miraculously haven't even had one picture to prove anything they are saying. The legend lives on.  

Sorry.  Dead.

[conspiracybeliever]

kiddglock, on 01 October 2010 - 06:49 AM, said:

Sorry.  Dead.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!  

[triplestagedarkness]

conspiracybeliever, on 01 October 2010 - 01:03 PM, said:

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!  

Well...Technically he could be "working" for the demons, a.k.a Cult and trying to throw us off.... Of all the things that have personally happened to me, I truthfully could only chalk up one to something other than beer, and the company of loose women.

Edited by triplestagedarkness, 01 October 2010 - 01:07 PM.

[clumsythief]

Quote

Have you actually seen the supposed house that they allude to in the two stories at the beginning of this thread? I know you mentioned the possible candidates but I'm just curious if there's one in particular you think they were referring too. You would think being so revved up about their experiences they would try to take some pictures of it or get some kind of validation. I mean, if it is someone who just wants to be left alone without teenagers trespassing, then I guess taking pics isn't the best idea. But still, if you've got the audacity to do something like that and you're going to tell everyone about it, try to back it up with stuff. I looked up pics of the skull tree and a few of the homes, but I just wish there were more.

The problem with specifying the exact house is that none of the ghost hunter tales ever point out a particular home in an exact location. All anyone can give are ambiguous characteristics, and unfortunately most of them not only apply to more than one house on Cossart but are gathered from a friend of a friend's cousin or some other cloudy relationship which gives no clear facts. Cossart Road may only be a few miles long, but the surrounding area is quite large and contains several dozen residences. I talked about this in my original post, but I guess I'll try to paraphrase myself and clarify my thoughts a bit more.

I was only on ANY of the properties because I do home security for a living. Not the kind of work that involves carrying a gun and routing patrols, but installing general residential security systems and more specifically closed-circuit surveillance video. I installed a DVR surveillance setup for the first property I mentioned; the house behind the clearly visible set of gates near the eastern end of Cossart Road. Part of the job was doing some research, and hiking around the property and its connected areas to see what the most practical way to install things was to achieve what my customer wanted-- knowledge of anyone coming within a certain distance of their home, as well as a way to archive hard evidence used to aid Pennsbury township in their prosecution of chronic trespassers and vandals.

The house that possesses more of the "known" attributes of the cult house than any other is the house to the northwest of mine (a Fairville Road address), as it is completely obstructed from view from any surrounding roadways, and can only be seen by either walking within a few hundred feet of it, or standing on the hill traversed by the driveway to the home I serviced. The details relating to the seclusion and isolation of the home apply to most of the homes in the area, so I'm basing my assumptions on the only consistent detail of the legend, which is the inverted cross window panes. So, yes. This house does fit the bill. It's exceptionally large, old, and on the back side has windows that look a lot like crosses.

The two other houses I could reasonably consider to be the source of the legend are a bit farther west, but small by any definition of the term mansion, and while old and out of place looking in the context of modern construction don't really have anything about them that fuels the speculation about the cult house.

I've met the owners of three of the four homes. I had to introduce myself before I began trekking through their properties. The old man living in the house everyone seeks seemed to be a decent enough guy. Definitely eccentric, but pretty quiet and demure and mostly only interested in spending his days alone. He's also really wealthy.

I know the only thing that would make anyone believe me is a photo of the front door or a video of me circling the house, but I respect the people paying me enough to not put their personal business up in a public forum. Besides, unless the pictures contained a man being sacrificed they still wouldn't do anything to curb the thrill seekers.

I know I'm not going to satisfy anyone's curiosity with my posts, but like I said before, if anyone has specific questions just ask. I actually fell into this forum looking up information about a different local legend, but I'll admit, this thread has kind of intrigued me. I'll get into GoogleMaps and grab coordinates of the exact house if anyone really cares and is having trouble finding it themselves.

Also, I think kiddglock might kill me someday.

triplestagedarkness, on 01 October 2010 - 01:06 PM, said:

Well...Technically he could be "working" for the demons, a.k.a Cult and trying to throw us off.... Of all the things that have personally happened to me, I truthfully could only chalk up one to something other than beer, and the company of loose women.

I'm figured out. The master will never forgive this.

Edited by clumsythief, 02 October 2010 - 02:33 AM.

[kiddglock]

clumsythief, on 02 October 2010 - 02:32 AM, said:

Also, I think kiddglock might kill me someday.

No, not for the murder of a thread on the internet.  In Texas, "he needed killin'" is known to be a viable self-defense claim.  (Please research this yourself before exercising).  The same might be said of some threads.

Several have tried to kill this thread though.  Speaking honestly, I doubt your killin' will take.

[conspiracybeliever]

kiddglock, on 04 October 2010 - 06:52 AM, said:

No, not for the murder of a thread on the internet.  In Texas, "he needed killin'" is known to be a viable self-defense claim.  (Please research this yourself before exercising).  The same might be said of some threads.

Several have tried to kill this thread though.  Speaking honestly, I doubt your killin' will take.

It won't! It will be back!  

[clumsythief]

kiddglock, on 04 October 2010 - 06:52 AM, said:

No, not for the murder of a thread on the internet.  In Texas, "he needed killin'" is known to be a viable self-defense claim.  (Please research this yourself before exercising).  The same might be said of some threads.

Several have tried to kill this thread though.  Speaking honestly, I doubt your killin' will take.

I learned everything I need to know about Texas and their killin' ways by reading and watching No Country for Old Men. I carry a 12-gauge with a machine-shop suppressor everywhere I go. You know, for when someone needs killin'.  

Anyways, cheers. This thread is a lot of fun.

Edited by clumsythief, 08 October 2010 - 01:43 AM.

[Nigel Forest]

Back in the early 1980's, my brother Kyle went to college in the United States.
One night, during a long phone conversation, he told me an odd story about an old house,
just a few miles outside of the town he was living in Nebraska.
The local people were apparently very afraid of this house, to the extent that even the local police
refused to go near the road that leads to it.
In his second year of school, a faculty professor was conducting physics experiments having something to do
with local geology, a seeming common study on electromagnetism and its effect on radio waves.
Supposedly this teacher had found that radio broadcast was consistently thwarted by a very strange form of
interference which seemed to come from, you guessed it, the area around the old house.
The house itself had been named the "house of recipe" for a very long time, this was due to a mailbox at the end of the
road with the only the word "recipe" painted on it. Kyle told me that his roommate was trying put together a research team to run a series of test from the property but his professor was having trouble getting permission from the town to gain access to the property. We both had a good laugh about what they might find there, then I didn't speak to my brother for a few weeks after this.
Then, about 3 weeks later and to my absolute shock, my brother called me one afternoon in a total panic.
He said that his roommate had been missing for 5 days and that his parents were on their way from France to try and find him. According to my brother, his roommate's team never got permission from the town to access the property for testing. So earlier that week, the roommate decided to go, by himself, to see what all the fuss was about, but never returned home. My brother said that he told the police everything he knew and that when they found out about the recipe house they became somber and immediately wrapped up the questioning. Later that day the FBI payed Kyle a visit and asked mostly the same type of questions as the police, with one obvious exception, they asked him if he had ever head the term "The Casserole Masters", he hadn't and neither had I. My brother thought, for a long time, that this must have something to do with his roommate being a French national citizen, perhaps he was a member of some french anarchist league, and maybe they called themselves "Le Cocotte Un Maître". What else would compel the FBI, to not only be involved in the investigation, but also to ask such an odd question. The FBI told Kyle to never speak of or divulge any information relative to any of this to anyone, or he would not only be deported but could be detained indefinitely.

When Kyle returned home later that year we sat down and he filled me on everything else that had happened, but was afraid to disclose over the phone. The story kept going for months, and for some reason had been mostly been covered up by the town and the school, like nothing had ever happened. The professor stopped going to work, and wouldn't talk to my brother about what had happened. His roommates parent went back to France months later, broken hearted. Even Kyle himself, in order to pass his classes, had to try and stop thinking about it all, he had become convinced that his roommate had either been in an accident of some kind or was murdered.
Shortly before he left to come back to the UK for the summer, he decided that he needed to know for himself, so he had a friend drive him to the old house. When they arrived, there was a 13 foot high chain link fence surrounding the property, so they never went any further. The mailbox was, just as it was said to have been, labeled "Recipe" in white paint, on rusted steel.
My brother chose to open the mailbox before he left, perhaps out of desperation. Inside the mailbox he found the most terrifying and confusing clue of the entire ordeal. He found an antique Christmas card, old, yellow and faded the inside of which read "Merry Christmas, quite a bit! Sincerely, The Sheriff".
As far as we were ever able to determine the town never had a sheriff, and on top of that it already June.
Was this a threat? a joke? Was it meant for him or someone else? Did anyone still live in the house? Who owns the property?
These questions and thousands more would continue to plague my brother for many years to come, with never even a single answer.
To this day Hastings College faculty rarely talk about what happened back in 1981, and most of the student population knows nothing about it. The specter of the house itself is still strong enough to spawn ghost stories and other adulterated versions of what really happened in 1981, but no one ever talks about the missing french student or the former physics department and their experiments.
My brother still has the Christmas card, he keeps it in a frame on the wall of his reading den, next to a photo of he and his old college roommate Adrien. Even though its been almost 30 years since this happened, his obsession with solving the riddle of what happened to his friend all those years ago still haunts him every day of his life.
Even though there are hundreds of stories out there regarding that old house in the woods of Nebraska, this is the actual event that spawned them all.

Attached Files

•  christmas.jpg   55.12K   11 downloads

[kiddglock]

Nigel, you need to either post this someplace else, Urban Legends would be good, or request the mods move it.  As far as I can tell, the only connection it has with the House of the Unholy, is that it is about another weird house.  This story is very interesting.  I hope you didn't make it up.  It deserves its own thread where people can comment on it.

Personally, I think it is a made-up story.  No offense but it just doesn't ring true.  It is still interesting.

Sheriff's aren't attached to towns in the US.  They are a county officer, not a city one.  I'm sure the county in Nebraska where this area was, had a Sheriff.

[~TheBigK~]

kiddglock, on 08 November 2010 - 02:32 PM, said:

Personally, I think it is a made-up story.  No offense but it just doesn't ring true.  It is still interesting.

So I looked up the term "Casserole Masters" for curiosities sake. From what I can gather, it's a tv show on blip.tv. It mentions Christmas, Recipe, and a sheriff. Somehow it's connected to aliens and SETI, and other sites said it was some code name not unlike MKULTRA. Regardless, the show I came across is nothing but a bunch of kids with too much time on their hands, and drugs. Heavy drugs. I can't describe it, and probably shouldn't provide a link cause of language and such, but if you want to see for yourself go ahead.

While what Nigel wrote was a good read, it's not based on anything real.