 What's up guys, this is Theron, and tonight we're taking another dive into the Parawatch Wiki. Tonight's tour was started by user Spectral Sprite on August 12, 2009. It's called The Clock at St. Claude's. Let's begin. Despite popular belief, the building is still occupied. I've come to be on a first name basis with a couple of the men who guard the property, so I won't make their jobs any more difficult by giving out the name of the location. Still, those of you who are from the area will know the place I'm talking about, and anyone else dedicated enough can probably find it with some clever googling. Suffice to say that somewhere in the United States, there was an orphanage. Let's call it St. Claude's Orphan Asylum. Before it was an orphanage, it was a boarding house, and before then, it was a would-be dormitory. Today, the building is the wellspring from which our entire local mythology flows. Most of it is bullshit, of course. After all, it's a spooky old orphanage. The place probably would have attracted stories even if nothing bad ever really happened there. The fact that bad things did happen there is just the icing on the cake. It's the perfect source for campfire fodder. I can attest to that. My first exposure to the St. Claude's mythos was at a sleepover in third grade, told in hushed tones amidst blankets and flashlights. In recent years, I began to wonder how much of this lore was fact and how much was fiction. Obviously, the tales of ghosts and curses and whatnot would be difficult to verify, but what about the human horrors? I decided to do some research. Right off the bat, I was shocked to find that several of the most lurid atrocities attributed to St. Claude's weren't just matters of public record, they were practically mundane by virtue of how many similar cases you can find in the history of our country's orphanages. Based on everything I've read, I can say with no exaggeration that for most of the 20th century, orphanages could murder children with no effort or consequence. There were countless acts of cruelty committed on the grounds of St. Claude's. Every case of abuse is a tragedy, and I don't mean to diminish the significance of any injustice by excluding it, but exclude I must. For today's purposes, we won't linger on the beatings, the molestation, the daily humiliations, or the alarming number of accidents involving stairways and windowsills and electrical sockets and pointed chaps of wood. Many orphanages have been places of cruelty, but today I'm gonna tell you why St. Claude's was fucking weird. Next post. The first thing you need to understand is the building itself. In its earliest life, it was intended to be a dormitory for a privately-funded college, but the private funder went broke and the project abruptly ended. Still, the dormitory was mostly finished, and a couple of enterprising businessmen finished up the property to use it as a boarding house. One key feature remained incomplete though, the clock on the facade. The face was set up and ready to go, numerals embossed and polished, but there were no hands to be found. The issue seemed to stem from a miscommunication between the clockmaker and the architect. Normally there's a shaft which connects the hands on the exterior with the clockwork inside the actual building, but the shaft delivered to the site was too short to bridge the gap and too wide to fit through the opening in the wall. The clockmaker and the architect each claimed each other for the mistake and demanded further payment to fix it. So naturally, nothing else was done about it until the Catholic Church paid to have the clock face covered by brickwork when they bought the property two decades later. As for the clock's internal mechanisms, never removed. The second thing you need to understand is the children. Despite its name, St. Claude's Orphan Asylum did not how it was mentally ill children. What's more, the children weren't even orphans in most cases, but simply extracted from troubled families by the church or government after their parents were deemed lacking in morals, or money. Children up to the age of 13 were accepted in St. Claude's, but sometimes stayed through early adulthood if they had nowhere else to go. Adoptions were rare, and when they did happen, the happy new parents were often said to look disturbingly familiar. The sisters taught the children employable skills such as sewing, although actual employment was not permitted while under the sisters' care. Not that they opposed child labor, of course. The children were still expected to earn their keep. Idleness is a sin, after all. Whenever an enterprising scamp would sneak off to work in odd jobs in town, their wages were confiscated without fail. The sisters always knew, and the sisters always punished. Of course, punishments didn't always require an actual offense. The children of St. Claude's had a reputation, you see. Most had come from other orphanages who were ill-equipped to deal with that particular child. The sisters attributed these children's issues to spiritual matters, generational sin usually, though satanic influence wasn't out of the question. Survivors have recounted tales of exorcisms where the accused was physically restrained for hours, sometimes days. In one case, a child is said to have been tied feet and hands to a brass light fixture and fed meals by their peers by use of a pole. One former inmate of St. Claude's recalled an incident where a five-year-old girl was accused of black magic. A nun claimed to have seen the girl levitating, and when the girl embarrassed her by failing to reproduce the effect for the other sisters, she took the child and threw out a second-story window. The girl reportedly screamed, catch me, catch me, as she fell. By the time the witness made it outside, the little girl was nowhere to be found. The sister simply said that she had gone home to be with her parents. Fear was a constant companion for the children of St. Claude's. All punishments and reprisals were the stuff of nightmares, but the one that brought me to write this today is the winding of the clock. The foyer of St. Claude's takes up both stories and has a curved staircase and a small balcony on the second floor to give the impression of grandeur. Unfortunately, the clock was built on the central gable directly above the front entrance, which means there's no way to access it directly from below. Instead, one asked to traverse a narrow, raised attic that protrudes along the center of the building from front to back like a spine. The entrance to the attic was, of course, at the other end of the building. Almost every single day, a child would be forced to climb into the attic, travel the full length of the spine, and wind a clock that had no hands, no face, and no bells. On all the other days, the child would still be there from the day before. Final post. Urban exploration of an abandoned space is technically considered a form of trespassing in most cases. On the other hand, trespassing in an occupied space is hardly ever considered urban exploration, and it always struck me as a double standard. Don't get me wrong, there was no force entry involved. I'm not a thug. All I had to do was become buddies with one of the guards. After we got to know each other, I explained the history of the place and assured him I only wanted to look around, and he gave me an hour. I walked through the front door. St. Claude is a clergy house nowadays. The only folks who live there are a few old white men who go to bed before 10pm. The floors are creaky, but the rooms are close enough together they just blame each other for the noise, so getting to the attic was a piece of cake. Getting through it was the hard part. There was crap everywhere. Old furniture, mountains of bibles, old Christmas decorations, all of it ancient, all of it ruined by water damage and infested with rot. Ceiling was lower than expected, just a little under 5 feet of clearance. Explain why they sent the kids up to do it. Walking more than two dozen yards while hunched over would be bad enough on its own, let alone we have to constantly stop and crawl over a moldy love seat or a box of tinsel and spiders. The far end of the attic drops down under a couple of steps leading up to the gable, which allowed me to stand up straight again. The clock mechanism itself isn't terribly large, at least not to an adult. About 4 feet tall, roughly the size of a chest of drawers. A skeletal frame wraps around the base like the edges of a box, leaving every tooth on every cog fully exposed. To wind it, one must have fixed a detachable crank to the top of the device and give it a couple dozen turns. Now if you're about 5 feet tall this is no problem. Unfortunately, most of the kids at St. Claude's were under 10 years old. Let me walk you through it. You're 8 years old. The nun threatens to send you to bed without supper or worse if you don't wind this damned clock. You're sent up to the pitch dark attic with only a box of matches, maybe an oil lamp if you're lucky. You're too short to reach the crank, so what do you do? You climb up onto the frame and kneel over it. The crank is stiff and heavy. You can't see shit and you're shaking like a leaf because you're fucking terrified. The crank hits a hitch. You lean on it with all your weight. It suddenly gives, but you're not ready for it. Your foot slips. Your leg slides between the gears. The heavy clockwork snaps your body in three different places as it pulls you in. More than a dozen children are said to have died this way. No bodies were ever found, but there were remains. One survivor told me that she was put on clock duty a few days after a little blonde girl had vanished. And sure enough, she found a knot of wispy golden hair snared around a sprocket. She took it for evidence and hid it in her pillow, but a sister discovered it two years later. Having seen the clock myself, I can't quite tell you whether I think it's as deadly as the stories say. The machine and area around it are clean, no blood or hair or even rust to be found. The teeth on some of the gears look quite sharp and there are certainly a lot of pinch points, but it doesn't strike me as a meat grinder for children. I guess my verdict is that any child who fell in probably wouldn't be reduced to a pulp, but they would definitely come out broken. Speaking of which, I made a discovery. Three of them actually. The first is that there's a ladder right behind the clock mechanism. It's wedged in tight, not like someone stored it there by accident. It's clean too. The second is that there's a conspicuous series of seams in the wood beneath the machine that form a small rectangle, just big enough to fit a small adult through. The third discovery, and the reason why I'm sharing this with you all today, is that it's still ticking. Someone is still winding the clock. But okay, wow, that's it. That is...weird. Alright, so what do you guys think? Is this clock eating kids? Are the nuns weird or the clergy weird? I don't know. Leave your answer in the comments below. Subscribe and hit the bell, join the Cy42 Patreon, and I'll see you next time.