At first look, Massive Gap Street seems to be an unusual, dusty nation highway—the type of dead-end avenue a fallacious flip would possibly lead you down when you’re misplaced in Pittsboro.
But when that fallacious flip takes you farther down Massive Gap Street, you would possibly discover that among the homes alongside the highway appear a bit misplaced—mismatched and clashing in a world of householders associations and uniform suburbia. You may additionally surprise why the highway is empty, regardless of it being the center of the day.
The lure of this place, although, doesn’t lie alongside the highway however on the finish of it, the place you’ll be met with an empty guard field, a warning register blaring purple font, and a tall barbed-wire gate adorned with the AT&T brand. Dig a bit deeper—seven tales deep, even—and also you would possibly discover a big, secretive underground bunker that stretches someplace beneath the location’s 191 acres of property. You would possibly want a reasonably large shovel.
Like Nancy Wheeler, one of many characters within the wildly popular Netflix show Stranger Things, I’m an intern at an area paper making an attempt to get a begin on this planet of journalism. Not like Nancy Wheeler, although, my editors truly give me the possibility to discover tales.
Stranger Issues is the inventive brainchild of similar twins Matt and Ross Duffer, who have been born and raised in Durham. When you pay cautious consideration by way of the present’s 4 seasons, the Duffer brothers have hidden North Carolina Easter eggs all through your entire present, together with the format of the present’s fictional city of Hawkins, Indiana with similar streets to Durham like Kerley and Cornwallis; our bodies of water named Jordan Lake and Eno River; and a direct reference to Durham in Season 4.
The brothers have confirmed many of those particulars as being influenced by their childhood—however have offered little data on the inspiration behind Hawkins Lab, the creepy authorities constructing on the middle of the plot.
That’s is the place this task on Massive Gap—an underground facility situated in Chatham County—is available in. Named after the not-so-subtle 75-foot gap dug within the floor throughout its building, it’s rumored to be a number of tales deep, whereas atop its grassy floor sit a number of oddly formed buildings, big safety cameras, and antennae. Everything of the power is surrounded by a barbed-wire fence and “no trespassing” indicators.
The location dates again to the Sixties when AT&T constructed 5 central amenities as a part of the Mission Workplaces program. Inside this confidential program, AT&T constructed and maintained a number of structurally sound amenities alongside the East Coast of the US within the mid-Twentieth century for an ongoing personal venture. Along with Massive Gap, these amenities have been additionally constructed inside numerous northeastern mountains.
AT&T has by no means disclosed the aim of those bases, in addition to a imprecise assertion of “communications,” however in line with a 2008 Information & Observer article, the websites have been initially supposed as nuclear bunkers for presidency and army officers throughout the peak of the Chilly Warfare. With the rise of the nuclear age within the Sixties, the federal authorities contracted with AT&T to run labeled communication networks at secret websites across the nation. Mission Workplaces was one such labeled program—the 5 amenities have been linked by a troposcatter radio system in order that authorities officers inside one website might nonetheless talk with the opposite 4 amenities and preserve a skeletal nationwide system for “continuity of presidency” (COG) within the case of a nuclear assault.
Probably the most publicly identified COG facility is the Greenbrier Bunker, a presidential relocation facility in West Virginia that now lies below an opulent lodge after being uncovered in a 1992 article and decommissioned, leaving little proof behind—aside from a phone switchboard with the phrases “CHATAM” and “HGRSTOWN” on it, linking it to Massive Gap and the Mission Workplace in Hagerstown, Maryland.
However even among the many specialised Mission Workplaces, Chatham County’s stands out like a sore thumb. The places of the opposite 4 amenities, that are all Washington, DC–adjoining, are extra logical. The Chatham County facility makes the least sense. It’s all the way in which within the distant woods of North Carolina, faraway from the opposite 4 neighboring Mission Workplaces—what makes Massive Gap so particular?
In a 2000 INDY Week piece about the site, former Pittsboro mayor—and former AT&T worker—Chuck Devinney had this to say about his time at Massive Gap: “I wiped all of it out of my head. After I went out the door, I by no means appeared again.” Reached over e mail, present mayor Cynthia Perry didn’t provide way more: “I don’t know any particulars concerning the Massive Gap,” she wrote.
AT&T media contacts didn’t reply to INDY requests for remark.
Rebecca Kastleman, an assistant professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia College, grew up in Chatham County and revealed a scholarly article referred to as “Big Hole: Excavating Intimate Histories of a Nuclear Homefront” in 2020. She says it’s the location’s very remoteness which will have given it a leg up as a nuclear bunker for army or authorities officers.
“Its distance from DC may need been seen as a bonus in sure nuclear eventualities,” Kastleman says over the telephone. “I believe the true query to ask is, why is there a direct line to the Chatham station from the Greenbrier Lodge? Who would the president want to speak with at Chatham?”
When you’re befuddled by the location’s historical past, its present-day state ensures nonetheless extra questions. The ability was rumored to shut in 2008, and it’s unclear whether or not it’s nonetheless lively. After I visited this week, I seen that the pavement was recent and the grass had simply been mowed. Validating my suspicions, longtime Chatham resident Daniel Fields says Massive Gap Street has remained surprisingly busy over time, regardless of its obvious abandonment.
“I’ve seen folks there over time, turning down that highway or turning out of it, vehicles engaged on the strains proper close to there,” Fields says. Matt Phillips, one in every of Fields’s childhood associates who lived within the South Chapel Hill–Chatham County space, says he recollects his good friend group’s rising curiosity round Massive Gap and the mismatched houses alongside the highway.
“You already know while you go to a minigolf course and stuff is clearly pretend and type of weirdly proportioned?” Phillips says. “Very comparable power.”
Within the INDY Week article about Massive Gap, twenty years in the past, native residents informed the paper that they witnessed unexplainable phenomena on the facility over time, like an remoted darkish cloud and sporadic lightning over the location on an in any other case sunny day. Tales like these have given rise to conspiracies about paranormal exercise and extraterrestrial communication, which have been solely expanded on a decade later when Fields says he heard a narrative a few truck with a Roswell tag parked in a driveway off Massive Gap Street.
As youngsters in 2008, Phillips and his associates would usually cease by Massive Gap Street on their solution to or from lunch at Allen & Son Bar-B-Que. These visits usually included gawking on the barbed-wire fence, although at some point, he says, they pulled up in his good friend’s Subaru hatchback—barbecue in hand—to an open gate. Phillips says the power seemed to be transitioning to new possession, as folks contained in the fence have been unloading objects out of the bottom entrance and vehicles have been driving out and in of the gate—a chance his good friend group took to drive in.
“We drove into the little parking circle, and I had the distinct feeling that everyone who was there clocked our automobile, noticed it drive in and be a civilian automobile stuffed with youngsters, and appeared straight at us,” Phillips says. “All the folks concerned type of mentally went, ‘Oh shit, Code Pink, there are folks right here who shouldn’t be right here’ and watched us make the loop, at which level I keep in mind freaking out and being like, ‘We gotta go proper now.’”
“If you drive up, you see that discipline that’s open on the high, and there was a separate time the place I noticed a bunch of parents in white lab coats with clipboards strolling round,” Phillips says. “I imply, it might have been out of any film, and I simply keep in mind considering particularly, ‘This doesn’t appear to be it has something to do with communication.’”
Over a decade later, in making an attempt to glean data from locals, I discovered that this stage of secrecy hasn’t modified. After I requested one employee at a close-by retailer what he is aware of about Massive Gap, he lower me off midsentence—“We don’t discuss it”—including that, although he had as soon as achieved a building job for the power and descended two tales deep, he’d needed to endure a background examine and signal an NDA about his time on-site.
Driving alongside Massive Gap Street, I hopped out of the automobile and requested one neighbor if she knew something concerning the facility. Her reply was computerized: “We don’t know something. AT&T bought it years in the past, and that’s all we all know.”
However the big AT&T brand on the entrance gate says in any other case. Is Massive Gap simply that—an enormous, empty gap, left with solely the mud of Twentieth-century historical past below its floor? Or is it nonetheless a hive of know-how and secret governmental affairs, working below the facade of a decommissioned facility?
The Duffer brothers could have as soon as requested themselves the very same questions. It’s well-known to Stranger Issues lovers that the experiments that have been achieved on the kids in Hawkins Lab are primarily based on an actual CIA venture in 1953 referred to as MKUltra, which aimed to develop mind-control strategies that could possibly be used towards Russia within the Chilly Warfare.
In fact, this darkish little bit of American historical past matches up effectively with Eleven’s telekinetic powers and Dr. Brenner’s use of her as a weapon, in addition to season 3’s plot of a Russian invasion in Hawkins. However regardless of the Duffer brothers’ transparency about what impressed Brenner’s experiments, there’s little data on how they dreamed up the lab itself.
May two younger, curious Duffer brothers have stumbled upon Massive Gap rising up or examine it and turn out to be fascinated with its thriller and conspiracy? Though the Duffer brothers have been unable to offer a remark for this story, the administrators have confirmed that that they had an obsession with movie from an early age, and Phillips says Massive Gap is most frequently explored by individuals who don’t stay proper subsequent door.
“I believe that particularly that space has type of been knowingly prevented by those that stay in North Chatham simply because it looks as if there’s nothing good that may come from that,” Phillips says. “So I can see why the Duffers would have that as some type of exploration level, particularly in a TV present that already has a lot native respect.”
Simply because the present’s fictional Jordan Lake is proximal to Hawkins Lab, Jordan Lake is within the yard of Massive Gap. The amenities in each Hawkins and Chatham are secretive and, regardless of some curious youngsters poking round, most individuals within the surrounding cities are inclined to avoid them. However the largest distinction is that whereas Stranger Issues permits us to uncover among the solutions behind the lab’s mysteries one season at a time, Massive Gap’s gate stays up and its facility stays, so far, impenetrable.
Stranger Issues inspiration or not, Phillips says the conspiracies and eeriness surrounding Massive Gap have been straightforward to imagine as a bored teenager—however even into maturity, as somebody who’s level-headed and never usually gullible, he says his feeling of apprehension hasn’t diminished.
“As I acquired into the world as an grownup and talked to extra locals about it, I believe all people has that comparable sense of ‘ick’ about it,” Phillips says. “I don’t assume that’s unjustified, and I don’t assume it will occur until there was one thing important to concentrate to on the market.”
Kastleman has a broader, and blunter, tackle what the power represents.
“I believe it’s actually crucial for us to grasp the area that army infrastructure occupies in our landscapes,” she says. “One of many issues that understanding the existence of this website can do for the neighborhood round Massive Gap is invite us to ask questions on its use—and to turn out to be conscious of the truth that the federal authorities and companies occupy area in our neighborhood which isn’t all the time identified to us.”
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Touch upon this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.
