If you know where to look, these woods — known to locals as “Hell House” — are full of crumbling artifacts of a Catholic seminary. St. Mary’s College called Patapsco park home for over a century before it closed down in 1972, but it wasn’t associated with darkness until it mysteriously burned to the ground on Halloween in 1997.

After the fire, only a few things remained: some foundations, staircases, a water tower, an empty pool, and the altar. Sometime during the Covid-19 pandemic, a local artist repainted the altar with black and white dragons. Once an altar housing a giant metal cross, this space and its surrounding ruins are now devoted to the dragon shrine.

Remains of this formerly-sprawling campus at St. Mary’s College are sprinkled all throughout the woods. As of 2024, the pool is still there — though filled in — as well as lots of small staircases and structures. The largest is a two-room, half-underground building that overlooks the river.

If traveling from DC, Ellicot City is a twenty minute drive from the BWI Rail Station (MARC Penn Line).

Enter Patapsco Park via Illchester Road. Climb your first set of stairs to reach the Illchester Railroad Tunnel, and opposite the Grist Mill Walking Bridge, you should find a second stone staircase. Eventually you will stumble upon some ruins — follow the trail of them to locate the shrine, the seminary foundations, the pool, and small altars along the way.

Keep an eye out for ruins of the giant metal cross. It no longer hangs from the shrine roof, but its frame has been said to be visible in woods during the winter.

Closed in 2021, this site — formally known as the Wilkins-Rogers Mills — was the last of many that turned Ellicot City into a milling town during the Industrial Revolution. Today, the building is still accessible from the street. There is a corrugated metal overhang that you can easily crawl under. External fire escapes and broken windows provide access to the full interior, though I haven’t tried entering myself.