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Journal: Knox Church
| Unfortunately, accessing the church through the roof didn't work out. |
Knox Church (June 2003): When I was making the churches issue, one place that continually thwarted me was the beautiful stone edifice known as Knox Presbyterian Church. Unlike other churches that occasionally leave a door unlocked to accommodate community events and the like, Knox was locked up tight and seemed to only open its doors during Sunday services, at which time greeters made sure everyone who came through the front door sat right down and got some good praying done. After three or four attempts, each during different times of day, I'd resigned myself to never getting to know the building, which I'd begun to refer to as Fort Knox.
Then one happy day I received a note from a fellow who said he'd been reading Infiltration for a while, and wondered if I might be interested in looking at Knox with him, as he happened to have access to a key with the letters "GM" on it, and they didn't stand for General Motors. Naturally, I was there.
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After climbing around on top of the false ceiling for a while, we headed up into the bell tower to ring the bell from below. |
| The third one didn't sink. |
Meeting up with my host and two other would-be explorers on an evening when the church was all but empty, we hopped over the velvet ropes and made our way up to the church's balcony. Here our host whipped out his grandmaster key and led us into an extremely dusty and dimly lit attic. We climbed several makeshift wooden ladders to stand on top of the church's arched false ceiling, and then climbed down the other side to look at some long forgotten and unlit rooms.
Finishing with the attic, we turned our attention to the bell tower, where we climbed up still more steep stairs and ladders before coming to the church's giant bell, now replaced by recorded chimes and no longer used except on special occasions. Feeling bad for the poor old bell, we decided to give it a few rings, which reverberated throughout the tower very loudly. We then climbed up to the summit of the bell tower and popped our heads out through the hatch at the top of the building, for a great view of the area all around.
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Making our way past the old bell, we climbed up and lifted off a small hatch on the roof for a great view of the area. |
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Though it has been abandoned for a while, this little chapel was still quite easy on the eye. |
Having seen the church proper, we turned our attention to the more community centre-esque parts of the building, touring a pretty abandoned chapel and then looking in on the unlit bowling alley in the basement. We'd just finished bowling a few quick games when suddenly a whole bunch of orcs attacked us and killed us all!
(Okay, not really. I just added that to make this story more exciting. That's the problem with guided tours.)
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