Preston Castle Gets Its Own Blog Label

I'm going to post my Preston Castle pictures soon. Part of the delay is I took 800 pictures and I cannot quite sort through them as quickly as I would like due to my mother's birthday being next week and I am trying to bead a necklace and get it in the mail by Friday.

Quick recap: All the Castle docents and volunteers were really helpful, friendly, conversant, and oh yeah- uh, weird shit happened. I doubted anything out of the ordinary would occur due to the fact that it was the middle of the day, we would be in tour groups, and only inside the castle for only a short time. I was completely wrong!

1. I heard a breathy but non-threatening "Hhhhhhhha!" in my ear while I was looking down at my camera and thought it was my boyfriend. I answered, sarcastically, "Boo," and looked up to see that my tour group went on without me and I was left alone lost in a corridor with no one in sight.

2. My legs went wobbly at two points in the tour (the hospital and in a hallway later) requiring me to concentrate to remain upright and walk properly. I felt like I was trying to stand on a waterbed in an earthquake. Moments before that really hit I started to feel a feeling that I can only describe as ecstasy- the drug, not the emotion. I felt floaty, spacey, and physically sensitive as though my skin were tingling.

3. My phone started turning off by itself until we left and it then resumed normal function. I had a fake ghost app running just in case. I had attributed it to a random word generator [once working it spits out a word about once every minute or two with long silences in between] but in rapid succession just before it turned off the final time inside the castle's basement it said, "I" "Still" "Train". A complete sentence? Interesting. [Every ward at the reform school learned three trades.]

4. My fully charged camera battery drained to a sliver in barely more than an hour inside. Consequently, I changed to my backup battery upon walking outside, which I used for the rest of the afternoon to no remarkable or ill effect. As a matter of fact, that battery still appears to be almost fully charged as of tonight.

Odd. All of it.

So- we're going back. I want to go back every chance I get. In lieu of that, maybe I'll try to take in a photographer day and maybe another tour. I'm thinking about volunteering. I'm seriously in love with this place. And yes, my boyfriend and I ARE spending the night there in June. Can't. Wait.

To hold us over until I get my act together and organize my pictures, here's a shot of the Castle from the next tall hill across town, the Ione Catholic Cemetery.