I set off for The Bennett School for girls at 8:30 last Sunday morn. Although it was already March, the winter refused to let up, and the high for the day was around freezing.

I had attempted to get several people interested in exploring the abandoned school, including Jason the Forager, but the early time and its corresponding temperatures turned everybody off.

The Bennett School is located within sight of a major road, Rt. 343 in Millbrook, New York. I saw the school leaning macabre as I hid my car a few blocks away on Halcyon Road.

There’s actually two sections to the school. The first, Halcyon Hall, was built in 1893 as a hotel. The whole hotel thing failed to catch on, and the structure became part of the Bennett School for Girls in 1907.

The second part of the school consists of two wings added to the structure during it’s scholastic days. I entered this part first.

This was most definitely the less scary part of the school. It seems that high schoolers (well, I ASSUME high schoolers) partied here a lot. One of these high schoolers was apparently obsessed with the movie “Blackfish,” because there was a copious amount of graffiti on the subject.

You couldn’t enter Halcyon Hall through the wings, so I had to venture back outside. Thankfully, it was rather easy to get through the fence:

Halcyon Hall was scary. Not because I feared zombies or ghosts or the like, but because a lot of the floor had collapsed into the basement below. The footing was perilous.

There were five floors to Halcyon House.  There was an elevator, but it didn’t seem to be working anymore.

I instead mounted the safest-looking set of steps.

…and managed to get up to the third floor without anything collapsing beneath me.

After about an hour of leaping over pits in the floor, I was freezing, and it was time to leave. However, what I most feared would happen, did: I couldn’t find my way back to the jimmied door where I had let myself in.

I wandered back into one of the wings (apparently, at least one of the wings IS connected,) and came upon this:

…totally worth getting lost. There was also a legit piece of graffiti in there:

I wandered around for a bit longer until I found a broken window, and was gone.