When my son texted me from a Connecticut fortress in the middle of the night with an alarming message, it set me on a quest to understand the bizarre lifestyle of its owner
I awoke one morning in the summer of 2023 to discover that, while I’d slept, my son Joel had been texting my wife and me a series of unnerving messages about a perilous situation he had found himself in, in Connecticut.
From what I could tell, as I frantically tried to piece together the night’s events, one of Joel’s friends had been invited to a party being held by a stranger she’d met that week on Tinder. So Joel and two others went along for the ride. But when they arrived, they found the man’s home so bizarre that Joel did something he’d never done before – he sent me the coordinates of his location and a photograph, just in case.
The photograph was of a vast medieval castle with a drawbridge, gargoyles and many – I couldn’t shake the sense that there were too many – spires, towers and turrets, reaching like skeletal fingers to the looming clouds above.
“I honestly have no clue what is going on,” read Joel’s second text. “This is very weird.” Then: “You drive down a road in the middle of a forest and then there’s this gate and it’s just a huge, massive castle.”
It was a few days later and Joel and his friends were sitting in my office, recounting for me the disquieting events that had occurred that night. It began with an invitation to one of Joel’s female friends: “Castle party Saturday! 3:00pm to whenever. Dress code: Formal. Tell your friends. 18+ to come, 21+ to drink.”
It was a three-hour drive from New York City to the pleasant town of Woodstock, Connecticut (160 miles from the more famous Woodstock, New York, of festival fame). Then their GPS took them out of town, on to a winding forest road, and finally to a set of imposing iron gates. They stared at the menacing castle that loomed beyond, urgently discussed turning around, but then the gates swung open and they found themselves entering.
Standing on the drawbridge were a man, a woman and a large black dog. The man was the castle’s owner, Chris Mark. He was in his early 60s.
“He had sharp blue eyes,” Joel’s friend Delaney said, “but glazed over.”
“And he had a cut above one of his eyes,” said Joel.
The dog was called Cerberus, named after the multi‑headed hound that guards the gates of Hades. The woman was blond and much younger.
Mark beckoned them inside. They crossed the drawbridge and entered the grand banqueting hall to discover … there was no party. The room was completely empty, all except for a small number of equally bewildered young people standing around awkwardly.
“I’m sorry, but where’s the party?” someone asked.
“Oh no,” Mark replied. “I’ve invited you here for a different reason.” The room fell silent.
“I’d like you all to take part in my reality show,” Mark replied.
