Saturday, May 25, 2013

Sorry-in-the-Vale meets Potsdam, NY

Well hello there. Pardon me while I wipe the dust off this blog. I have a couple of posts upcoming - an update and some other things. This is something else.

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So Sarah Rees Brennan is hosting a contest for an ARC of her upcoming book, Untold. One of the categories for this contest is to take a picture of yourself reading Unspoken in a weird place.

Naturally I translated this to “PHOTOSHOOT ALL OVER POTSDAM!” and recruited two lovely friends (Debbie Scharbach and Maria Gonzalez, they are wonderful!) to take pictures of me. So here is a tour of my much-beloved college town with the premise, “How many parallels can I possibly find between Potsdam, NY and Sorry-in-the-Vale?”


Attempting to mimic the cover at the gates of Bayside Cemetery.





Old Snell Hall is a part of Clarkson College. It is a very creepy, most probably haunted old building DESPERATELY in need of rennovation. It’s not *quite* a Gothic manor, but I think it does almost as good a job as the old Sisson mansions, which are now frat houses – I didn’t know how to find them or get into them.

The Sissons are one of the old families of Potsdam – along with the Clarksons, the Snells, and probably some other names that adorn the buildings of the local colleges. There are lots of stories about their nefarious schemes to keep money in the family and the bizarre things they did in their mansions. One of the popular legends is that they have tunnels connecting their mansions under all of town, and some of these tunnels are blocked off from the current owners until the last living Sisson dies.
In lieu of a proper Sisson mansion picture, have a ghost story here: The Sisson Haunted Mansion. True story: Three of my sorority sisters got a tour of this house. It has at least one secret staircase.


Inside Old Snell.





They went over the wooden bridge over the Sorrier River, stands of bright red wolfberries waving at them from the bank.
“The Sorrier River?” Jared asked when he saw the sign by the bridge.
“It’s haunted,” Kami said with some pride.

– p. 102. Taken by the Racquette River, which is not haunted (by bells or otherwise).





Bayside Cemetery is a gorgeous, old riverside cemetery that contains the mausoleums of most of those old families I mentioned before.





Potsdam, like Sorry-in-the-Vale, has its very own sandstone. It is red and called Potsdam sandstone. I find this vastly less interesting than Cotswold sandstone, whether you consider it the color of honey or of pee.





Obligatory hole in which a person might be buried alive. This picture was taken by Samantha Fay on an oboe studio hike (Mt Arab for those who know the area). I was DEEPLY DISAPPOINTED to have neither a camera nor Unspoken when we came across this hole and demanded that somebody take a picture for me.


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That’s it for the parallels, but here are some other fun pictures we took:




Believe it or not, this is a roof. The Crane School of Music is built into a hill and most of it is underground.




Cassie’s Harp – a wind harp dedicated to a student who died before finishing her degree. A beautiful spot, and haunting when the wind makes the harp sing.




I have no idea why this is not behind the construction fence.

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