Chapter Seven
THE HISTORY OF ALABASTER ISLE
Part I: Island
A plot of land was acquired, an island, by a small board of officials, and some private investors. As it turned out, this land, which had been uninhabited since long before New York was even New York, was technically not US soil.
You know what that means…
In the sixties, the board sent a lawyer, a subcontractor, and a surveyor to the island, to see what they were dealing with. They were pleasantly surprised to find a partial structure already standing. The makings of a large facility, though only a quarter of it had been built.
There was also a stone house, a game larder—like a root cellar only above ground—and a large tower that, from what they could tell, had no earthly reason for being there.
The lawyer was thrilled. He called the board members right away and told them the island possessed more than enough space for their facility, and that it even had something there they could use as a jumping-off point.
The subcontractor would get to work right away, bringing over landscapers and masons.
But the surveyor wasn’t as enthusiastic as the others. Really, he just wanted to understand why those things were there. Who had been on that island before them? And why hadn’t they finished the job?
As soon as he got back to the city, he began digging. And it took some time, long nights spent hunched over survey maps, census records, and historical society manifests. But eventually, he located something that chilled him to the bone.
When Dutch settlers came to the area in the seventeenth century, they found a family of aboriginal inhabitants of the Montaukett tribe. The settlers deemed the island too small and dangerous for colonization and left, only for King Charles I to order the island be given to a poet years later.
That’s right. A… poet.
This part wasn’t in the official history books—because…
well, yea. But the surveyor found writings dating back to the 1630’s which strongly suggested this poet friend of King Charles was actually his lover.
And the island was less of a gift than it was a simple ploy to keep him quiet and get him out of England.
Either way, there was no real record of exactly what happened next. All the surveyor knew was that, at the start of the eighteenth century, a wealthy aristocrat somehow inherited the island, naming it Alabaster Isle.
The aristocrat drew up plans to build himself a mansion on the island, adjacent to a museum to house his family’s artifacts.
But that never happened either, and there were no records indicating why.
There were, however, many articles detailing how the aristocrat was said to have died on the island, though no body was ever found.
Alabaster Isle sat, vacant and subject to the elements for years, overgrown and scarce, until a new group of New York businessmen purchased it in 1929. According to records, they were planning to build something there, though the surveyor was unsure of exactly what.
It took a lot more digging, and by that point, the surveyor considered himself a bit obsessed, for lack of a better word. He’d inadvertently tossed himself down into a rabbit hole of this mysterious island and its fascinating, if clandestine, history.
Eventually, the pieces of the 1929 puzzle came together…
The partial structure, the storage shed, the house, and the tower were all elements of an elaborate distillery, to be set up on this secluded island. An illegal operation, because, as we know, prohibition was alive and well at this time.
The surveyor was amazed. It was truly a compelling part of history. But more than that, he was curious as to why the distillery itself, like so many other prior attempted projects there, had never been completed.
In looking further into the businessmen, he found that they, too, had gone missing before finishing their venture. Presumed dead. No bodies found.
Sound familiar?
Construction work performed under the table, thus providing no paper trail to anyone who may have had information on what truly happened.
It was a mystery that reeked of tragedy. Lost souls, unfulfilled dreams, and behind it all… An island.
The final item the surveyor found in his research was an old black and white polaroid of the businessmen on the island. From the looks of it, before any construction had begun. And in the background, right around where the partial structure would end up, a small, makeshift cemetery.
The next day, the surveyor quit his job.
And so foraged on the team in New York, having found a new surveyor—one who was less concerned with the history of the odd location of the job, and more concerned with a government paycheck.
The FBI green-lit the project for their own purposes, and left the logistics to the officials in New York and the private investors, one of whom was a wealthy Manhattan developer and art connoisseur who sat on the board of the Guggenheim as well.
He convinced the others to agree to hire his friend as head architect on the project, who would go on to design the research facility.
A man by the name of John James Josephson III.
Josephson, born in Switzerland in 1933, moved to the States with his family when he was four, where they took up residency in the small town of Peabody, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston.
The son of a journalist and a haberdasher, Josephson became consumed by his mother’s work covering the Vietnam War, and even more swept up by the newly fashionable protest movement.
As was the time, Josephson also became a believer in free love, and subsequently a frequent user of psychedelics and hallucinogenic drugs.
He had enrolled in a post-grad psychology program at Harvard University when he met Timothy Leary—yes, that Timothy Leary—who invited him to participate in a research study he was conducting wherein thirty-two prisoners at a maximum security prison in Concord, Massachusetts were given psilocybin, a synthetic psychedelic drug like that of LSD, and then monitored extensively.
Oh, did we mention that the researchers would also be taking the psychedelics? I mean, this is Timothy Leary we’re talking about, so it only makes sense. Never one to deny himself a good time…
And neither was John Josephson, because he agreed. Rather enthusiastically.
The Concord Prison Experiment went on for two years, from 1961 to 1963. Two years of habitual psychedelic drug use and psychological research inside a prison…
The results of the experiment were more or less inconclusive—go figure—proving once and for all that Timothy Leary just really fucking loved dropping acid.
Shortly after, Josephson’s friend offered him a job designing an institution of his own.
Now, the purposes of this facility were widely unknown, to everyone who wasn’t FBI.
The only stipulations for the design of the building itself were that it have facets of a lab, a prison, and an asylum—though they were careful not to actually use that word—but most importantly, that its construction not go a cent over budget.
This would, of course, mean utilizing the small chunk of building that was already there.
Most other architects would be perturbed by such broad instructions and narrow financial limitations. But not John James Josephson III. No, he was excited. Thrilled, even, to be finally putting his formerly meaningless architecture degree to use.
He was just… so high. All the time, even when he wasn’t actively taking drugs, the years of consistent LSD use had most definitely burned holes in his brain, putting him on an endless trip through time and space.
And after having just spent two years getting high inside a prison, and the better part of his adult life being just an unbridled horny madman, who better than him to design a top-secret government-funded institution where scientists and doctors would be working… Right??
But despite the endless billowing of red flags attached to this project, the facility had been built. Its development and construction were finally complete.
When all was said and done, every last one of the contractors were either divorced, suffering from severe substance abuse issues, or both.
But the building was done, and John Josephson was happy.
His friend, the wealthy developer, inevitably left his wife, and he and Josephson bought a yacht they planned to sail to Cozumel. They’d barely made it to Cape May when Josephson jumped off the boat chasing a blue heron that wasn’t there, was sucked into the propeller and killed on impact.
But no matter! The new facility was finally up and running, and the FBI went to work hiring doctors under the guise of their top-secret research project, code-named Project Alabaster.
A team of four doctors, two chemists and three lab assistants were assigned to begin work on the island, fully unaware that this new facility had actually been built on an existing, partially erected structure from the 1920’s by a stark-raving madman and a slew of underpaid private laborers who just wanted to go home.
Surely, the team of Project Alabaster weren’t expecting anything too fancy. But the concrete building left much to be desired. Not only was it not at all what they’d been expecting, but it was mind-bogglingly confusing. They spent the first three weeks on assignment just trying not to get lost.
Nonetheless, they had a job to do. And that job was one so confidential, they weren’t even allowed to go home to their families until it was deemed acceptable by the FBI.
The stone house that had been built there in the twenties was converted into living quarters for them—more than enough space, but still not exactly homey. But they made do, because they had to.
Not only did the public not know what was happening on this island just five miles south of Montauk… They didn’t even know it existed. It was purposely left off of all maps, and anyone who’d ever seen or heard about it was bound by nondisclosure so strict, it was enforced by the CIA.
And they’d killed two of the most public and influential figures of the last hundred years, so you know… They’re not to be trifled with.
Based on the secretive nature of Project Alabaster, one can only assume something nefarious was happening on that island. And those assumptions would be correct. But, it was nefarious with the common goal of the advancement of science and human civilization in mind, which makes it okay.
During the two years that Project Alabaster operated on that island, twenty-five test subjects were brought over by ferry—a dock had been built, as well as a runway so that the government officials could pop in by charter plane when they wanted to see how things were progressing.
That never happened. Not once.
Most of the test subjects were, as the CIA would say, throw-aways. Meaning transients, the homeless, or those suffering and alone. And yes, they were human.
That fact wasn’t made transparent to the Illuminati-esque board of silent benefactors until the project was already in progress, though it’s highly unlikely they would have objected. But it was initially proposed as an animal testing facility, which is equally yucky.
Either way, it was a horrible place, using human beings as test subjects in experimental processes. Everything from cloning to disease research that the CDC wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.
The problem—or let’s say, one of many—was that the facility wasn’t built for such work. Sure, they had some equipment, but John James Josephson III had designed it as more of a penitentiary than a lab.
He’d modeled it after Alcatraz, with notes of the Blackwell’s Island—known today as Roosevelt Island—Women’s Lunatic Asylum.
Keeping with the theme of accessibility, and taking regular advice from the voices in his head, the facility at Alabaster was an eight-hundred thousand square-foot concrete anomaly with three levels and only one set of stairs.
Prison cells, group showers, one cafeteria, and an entire wing of rooms with no functional purpose.
It was only a matter of time before something bad happened. Inevitable disaster was sort of the running theme of Alabaster Isle, after all.
Two years into the project, there was a boiler explosion that not only killed several people and maimed several more, but also set fire to one of the labs, thus destroying much of the research and contaminating an entire wing.
No one was quite sure exactly how it happened, as seemed to be the standard for the island.
Nevertheless, the FBI pulled the plug on Project Alabaster, the facility was labeled a biohazard, and the entire island was condemned. Shut down, roped off, and left to rot as another immoral black mold-ridden page in our country’s dark history.
That is until nearly sixty years later, when the island was given as a gift, to someone with an equally evil force of energy.
Someone who would accept the key, and willingly reopen the gates of Hell.