The Hole That Swallowed Its Own Story

Deep in State Game Lands 221, where Paradise Township gives way to the woods outside Cresco, a creek has carved a narrow, rocky canyon. Locals gave it a name that doesn’t invite visitors: Devil’s Hole.

The legend came first. According to the Monroe County Historical Association, the name belongs to a lake that once filled the hollow, one the old stories swore had no bottom. Anyone foolish enough to swim in it, the tale went, would sink straight to hell. The lake is gone now. The flood of 1955 reportedly washed it away, and the water left no body behind.

What remains are the ruins. Walk the trail and the historical association’s records point you to them one by one: the remains of Seven Pines Lodge, swept out in that same flood. A power dam and powerhouse, washed away with it. A farmhouse. And a sanitarium built in 1910 that burned to the ground the very next year. Its foundation and chimney still stand, alone in the trees.

Then comes the one that nobody can explain. Up the hillside stand the charred remains of a big stone building, its double fireplaces stacked one atop the other, open to the sky. Some say it was a Prohibition-era speakeasy, tucked deep in the woods to hide from the law. Others say a ski lodge, pointing to a strange cleared strip climbing the mountain behind it. Fire and flood in the 1950s appear to have finished it off, though accounts differ on which struck first. Even Atlas Obscura admits the truth: ski lodge or speakeasy, “no one really knows.”

One more legend clings to the mountain. It says Seven Pines Mountain was named for seven early settlers hanged from seven pines. We found no record that it ever happened.

So, is Devil’s Hole haunted? Not a single ghost story we could verify. No phantom, no apparition, no witness on record. Maybe that is the eeriest part. A place with a bottomless lake that vanished, a lodge that burned, and a building whose purpose has been forgotten has plenty of ghosts. It just has no one left to tell us who they were.

Before you go looking: The ruins sit about a mile and a half from the Kurmes Preserve north parking area, along poorly marked trails with several stream crossings. This is state game land, and hunters are out in the fall, so check the Game Commission calendar and wear blaze orange. And be out before dark.