In addition to the Ford mines proper, Ford mined out 1.5 miles of passages below what is now Shepard Road, at a location several miles downriver. The passages are about 20 feet wide and 30 feet high—wide enough for two trucks to pass side by side, and higher than a telephone pole. The Civil Defense map of the mines—usually called “caves”—dating from 1962 shows the “Holiday Harbor Sand Caves” with its dozen entrances in the bluffs behind the St Paul Marina. These passages were rated to shelter 1,953 occupants. In April 1963, the Public Works Department drafted a more detailed survey map of the mines. It all looked very interesting to us.
Svoboda found that he could store as many as 450 boats, up to 60 feet in length, in the old sand mines, adding “a King Kong-sized steel door” for protection. The installation of mercury-vapor lights, blacktopping, and guniting the walls to reduce erosion, cost $100,000. It was advertised as the “Upper Midwest’s Largest Underground Storage Facility.” But boat storage didn’t pan out ultimately because mice and mold gnawed at the boats during the winter, while chunks of ceiling occasionally came crashing down onto the boats from above. The boats also took on a peculiar, lingering, earthy odor that was difficult to eradicate. The same odor that permeates my caving clothes!
In 1982 the Jaycees (Junior Chamber of Commerce) offered their first Halloween house of horrors at this former sand mine, using the eastern third of the mine network. Prior to renting this space they had staged the event peripatetically, moving from one venue to another each year. In 1980, for example, it was held in the Castle Royal Cave. They never expected to be in the mine very long, either—let alone 22 years. Initially there were no elaborate set-piece scenes as there were in later years, when a sense of permanence allowed them to flourish. The volunteer ghouls simply ran about in the dark, clad in discarded graduation gowns, scaring the visitors in an effective but unsophisticated matter. Visitors were not required to hold onto a rope as they do now, or to be led about by a guide. From the beginning, the event was aimed at teenagers and adults, the experience being judged too scary for children. There was usually a Kid’s Day, however, during which the lights were left on and the fog machines off.
In later years the Tunnel of Terror got 12,000 visitors annually in their October weekend showings. Live bats from the caves flew about at dusk, and as if on cue, dived into the waiting lines, gave added verisimilitude to the plethora of fake bats ornamenting the passages. I personally recall having seen lines a quarter of a mile long waiting to get into this very popular event.
“The Unholy Tomb and the Sanitarium,” operated by Mike Kamrad since 1992, was an elaborate set piece. Mike devoted a dozen years of his life to developing this Halloween tableau, continually improving the scenery, as indicated on a commemorative plaque he affixed to the entrance to his domain—a pyramid topped with a garish cyclopean eye, like the Masonic pyramid on a dollar bill. Once inside the set, you saw a grasshopper-green, 2-armed, 4-legged object of devil-worship in a graveyard, with a rotating fireplace light behind the set creating the appearance of fire on the sandstone walls. Volunteers pretended to worship this devil, while a recording of a monk chants the seven names of the devil. I thought the Hoofed One surely had more names than that.
On their final Halloween before closing down, in 2004, I volunteered to help at the Tunnel of Terror to gain insight into the whole operation. I wore a Soviet-era gasmask that I had purchased at Ax Man Surplus, in conjunction with a shredded sewer jacket that required no retouching to look authentic. While I strolled about the Sanitarium and scared visitors for a while, my real job that night was to operate the power tower with its blinding searchlight and “Gordon,” the flying lobotomy patient. From here also, using a vocal mixing system that Kamrad had rigged up, I did a chilling wolf howl that echoed throughout the caverns.
Excerpted from SUBTERRANEAN TWIN CITIES.