eerie accident

I'm disturbed today by my accidental detour into an abandoned complex full of large brick buildings, overgrown vegetation, rusted stop signs and a general eerie feeling. Once I realized I didn't want to go further because of the strangeness of it all, we managed to get observed and escorted out by a state trooper. He said it was all state property and we weren't supposed to be there at all. We had assumed that the no trespassing signs referred to the land and not the street and, without any other signs or indications, went along the way that my google map guided me.
We tried making sense of it and decided it must have been a former military base, but it kept haunting me. When we finally made it to the little French Creek Inn, I asked the hotel front desk lady that I'm calling Madge because she looks like one, what that place might be. True to old women all over PA, she told us exactly that it was the Pennhurst State School and Hospital. Opened in the early 1900s, it housed the mentally and physically disabled but was closed in the 1980s after a lawsuit of abuse and civil rights violations. The I read about it, the more eerie the experience becomes. The size of the place was less like an abandoned building and more like an abandoned town. I feel like I had a special glimpse into something rare, found completely by innocence. After our 2nd encounter with the state trooper, I had wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible, which is how I'm sure the patients there felt too.

I don't think I've ever come across something seeming so secret and odd. And now it's just consuming my thoughts.