QUIGLY REST HOME AND CREMETORIA:

     GATEWAY TO THE STARS?

The Quigly Rest Home as it appeared in a brochure from 1968.

     My Great Aunt Verbena Rowan, a remarkable woman of extremely advanced years, spent the last years of her life in the Quigly Rest Home in Kossuth County. I recently received a very disturbing letter from her in which it appeared as though most of her faculties were beginning to take leave. She wrote very deliberately of "joining the carnival." I was quite worried that she was nearing her final day. I made plans to drive to Kossuth and visit. I arrived too late, my Aunt had died the night before. I collected her few belongings and was given an urn in which I was told her ashes had been placed after cremation. I remarked that it seemed odd that as her final surviving relative I had not been consulted on funeral arrangements. The administrator told me that all was included in the contract of residence. All residents are cremated within 24 hours of demise, a private funeral is held, and then the mortal remains are released to any outside family to do with as they see fit. It was made plain, however, that they would prefer to keep the urns themselves in a private mausoleum , not open to the public.

     As I moved through the halls of the immense house, I caught hurried and concerned glances of ancient yellowed faces peering out of their doors at me, and a constant questioning whisper just out of earshot. I left feeling more than a little ill at ease. I had not visited Aunt Rowan as often as I should, and had never cared much for the brooding structure she had lived in for as long as I had known her. Our relationship was primarily epistolary in nature, and it was somehow very difficult to accept her death when she was no less present in my life now than she had been yesterday or for the last eight years since my most recent visit. I wished that I had been able to see the body; the closed urn of ash did not adequately form a sense of closure.

     I stopped in a diner to have some coffee and to look through her things. I found her journal, and here at last was something familiar, her handwriting more recognizable to me than her own face. I began to read and was immediately struck by the nature of the text. No mere collection of memories and nostalgic musings on the slowly advancing spectre of death, her journal was a history of the Quigly Rest Home and an in depth research on regular visitors to the elderly residents.

     My Aunt had been spying on her care-givers!

     From the journal, and other sources I sought out to corroborate, the big old house was originally built in 1867 by Albert Quigly as a place of residence for widows of the Civil War. Quigly himself is a rather unusual figure shrouded in Iowa's mysterious past. All his life he had been an avid collector of the queer folk tales elderly farmers told, as well as being an inventor of some prominence. He amassed a small fortune during the war for innovations incorporated by the Northern Army and in his guilt over profiting by such wide scale destruction, he invested a portion of his money into erecting a home to ease the suffering of those for whom the war had cost everything.

     As the years passed, it became clear that many of the widows had no other family. Quigly realized that few would notice their passing outside the home itself, and few would have outsiders to make funeral arrangements for the widows who passed the veil. In 1869, Quigly purchased land surrounding the house, including an area called Beacon Hill, intending to create a cemetery on the grounds. Beacon Hill is a rocky outcropping in the neighboring wood, and long whispered among locals to be the home of monstrous things. It was Quigly's favorite spot. The county denied him the cemetery permit, citing an ordinance which forbade the burial of human remains on residential property. Furious, Quigly sidestepped the rules and had a crematorium built on the property, along with a huge mausoleum to store the burial urns.

     Although County Officials were displeased, nothing could be done since no human remains were technically to be buried. They reminded him that in the absence of standard burial, bodies were not legally allowed to remain in the residence longer than 24 hours. Quigly responded by hiring his own undertaker named Horus Gagliostro, who would live on site and handle occurrences of death immediately. (It is interesting to note that a descendant of Cagliostro is the current Director of Funerals at Quigly. ) On April 30th, 1870, the first of Quigly's the widows died. My Aunt wrote that this was the event that changed everything.

     According to an account by Quigly's custodian Willy Lieble, which my Aunt viewed in the special collections library at Quigly, the burnt flesh of that first old woman, along with a "potentising mixture of Quigly's concoction utilizing a neutral powder, sugar of milk, and other homeopathic ingredients," came out of the chimney as a iridescent smoke, and came down upon the surrounding area like a fine rain in the wind. This smoke awoke strange things in the caves of Beacon Hill. Things not of the earth, but of interstellar space. Non-human creatures who had watched for centuries for some unknown purpose, and then crept deep into the earth to wait for this unusual call to consciousness."

     From this point forward, it seems, Cagliostro took over the duties of the chaplaincy as well, conducting strange non-denominational services in the woods near the caves of Beacon Hill. She recounted a shocking record of strange rites and ceremonies the elderly women were directed in by this odd man, and the exid forays the mortician and Quigly began to make into the caves themselves. New policies were adopted at the home, including the locking of all doors after dark, and an abrupt change in diet to a complete and exotic vegetarian fare in the cafeteria. Often, late at night, scratchings and coarse whispers were heard from the large meeting chambers below and a large addition of unknown purpose was constructed on the crematorium. No record of workmen being seen during the daylight hours added to a sense of unease as the construction on the building rapidly progressed. The two dogs who lived on the grounds were found dead one morning, and after that, no pets were allowed to the women.

     On October 31 of 1874, a traveling carnival came to the retirement community, and all the old women came out to enjoy the rides, freak show, and cotton candy. A stage show was held outside in front of the crematorium where strangely costumed actors played the parts of what were described as talking crawfish who traveled beyond the last curved rim of space and wanted to take the saddest and loneliest of our world on a long trip to theirs, where fear and death would be only fading memories. The widows leaned forward during the clicking, buzzing oration of the actors, tears brimming in their sad eyes as the paradise beyond space was described to them. They longed to swim in the soup of the Jupiter's atmosphere, walk through the ancient cyclopean cities of Pluto, and to journey on through the icy black void to worlds beyond.

     The creatures asked if the women would make that trip with them, and they rose as a group demanding to be brought along. A door was opened behind the stage by Cagliostro, and the women were led one by one up into the new section of the crematorium, then asked to lie down on large metal beds with hinged lids. These lids were clamped tight and locked. Long rubber hoses and cables were attached by the actors in their unusual costumes and Cagliostro with Quigly stood silently by. When the canisters were opened again, the women were gone, and no residue whatsoever remained to mark their presence on the earth. Willy described how the actors, assisted by numerous freaks, dismantled the machinery. He helped to carry it below ground to be stored in the caves after the carnival departed. This peculiar equipment was then brought forth twice each year, once on April 30th, and again on October 31. On each occasion the carnival returned to reenact their play, and after the show several of the widows were reported to have "passed away".

     I closed her journal slowly, and looked at the urn in front of me. I resolved to have those mortal remains tested. What I found was that the urn contained only ordinary house dust. With the police and the County Prosecutor, I returned to Quigly only to find the building deserted. Not a soul remained in residence, not a book remained on the shelf. We went to Beacon Hill and found that the crematorium was demolished and the entry to the cave had been dynamited, forever sealing what secrets may have been contained there. I can not say what the truth is behind this mysterious house and its grounds. I can not say that I believe my Great Aunt was magically transported to the stars rather than abducted for nefarious means. It is only slightly more comforting to imagine her walking hand in hand with a talking crawdaddy through the icy black streets of a Plutopian metropolis. Wherever she is, I hope that she will write.