Vacant New Jersey

Photostream » March 2019 » North Brother Island


Aloysius Snuffleupagus

The creature wears a mangy hide of vines and ivy which forms an impenetrable wall of various toxicities grasping a decades long stranglehold over the decaying asylum buildings in which the creature dwells. Once doors and windows are now masked by a poisonous curtain of shiny leaves and meandering snake-like stalks, beckoning only the most foolish of prey to enter past their itchy grasp. The intertwined mess of vegetation creeps around all corners of the blighted and desolate island, smothering all within its vegetative grasp, like a massive blanket strewn overtop the island. But this is no snug goodnight, tucked tight and safe between the sheets, oh no, the creature, it always awaits.

Grotesque, hairy trunks significant of poison ivy appears more like a monstrous centipede and spreads epidemically as fast too, across the warm, sun baked brick, reaching their tentacle roots across the warm masonry, digging into the most minuscule of cracks, never to let go. Oddly, this thicket of itchy hell now works to hold together the crumbling buildings, which act like a skeleton for the creature to fester its guilty, filthy soul. The original mortar and cement between the bricks has long since weathered and withered away, and without the perpetual strangulation by the vine creature I'd imagine the old asylum would just collapse into a plume of dust upon the very next gust of salty sea breeze. And such is the vine creature's purpose; a symbiotic monster camouflaged by the nest of snarled vines like a tree frog hidden within a jungle of green.

In order to safely lurk inside the curious decaying asylum structures buried within the dense ivy forest in which the creature squats, one must caution not to approach any inviting ruin too close for the venomous snakes trapped within the creature's thick hide will eject an oily bane about one's bare skin. A clear viscous poison, which turns its prey into a prisoner of irritation; itching oneself incessantly down to the bare bone marrow until you dissipate back into the ground from which the creature draws its nutrients, much like a stubborn summer weed. Instead, it is much wiser to approach the asylum from a less obvious route; stick to the shadows and slip into the darkened basement steam tunnels which appear like fissures beneath the crumbling concrete pathways outlining the asylum's sandy shores.

The vine creature is afraid of the dark and its wicked hide, festered by Medusa's wrath, defective only by the darkness too. But be warned, for once inside the creature's grasp, you to become strangled by its eternal grip, quarantined forever upon North Brother Island. Your screams of distress, for S.O.S., they all fall deaf, muted by the roar of the mighty East River. You can only lament as you gaze out from between the barred asylum windows choked forever closed by impassable ivy; a claustrophobic hell of rotten hallways and wards peeling with paint like a moulting snake; this is your home now.

Perhaps at best and upon the clearest of night skies, framed ever so picturesquely beneath the corroded arching horror that is the Hell Gate Bridge which guards the creature's murky moat abound, you may obtain just a mere glimpse of Manhattan afar. Its glimmering skyline of steel and greed situated just barely in reach across the narrow briny channel, but yet so ever distant enough as to be merely a tease. Her slutty skyscraper lights glisten and wink at you in jest as the aroma of dollar slice pizza pleasures your nose from behind the jail of vines you're forever confined within. This is your home, now die in it.