Daniel sent us this one — he wants to know what's actually extraordinary in and around Storrs, Connecticut. Not the obvious stuff. The things that even locals might not know about. And I have to say, Herman, given that you grew up there, this feels like a trap. Either you know all of it and we're about to get a three-hour lecture, or you missed half of it and I finally get to see you admit you didn't explore your own backyard.
Oh, I am ready for this. Storrs is one of those places — you drive through it, you see the UConn campus, a few strip malls, maybe a Dairy Bar if you know where to look, and you think that's it. But underneath that ordinary surface, it's genuinely strange. It's this vortex where industrial history, folk art, abandoned institutions, and regional sports quirks all got layered on top of each other. And the more you dig, the weirder it gets.
I like that. The kind of place where you stop for gas and three hours later you're standing in a nineteenth-century mill watching corn get ground by a turbine that predates the lightbulb.
That is not a hypothetical. That is exactly what happens at the Gurleyville Gristmill. Built in eighteen thirty, operated continuously until nineteen forty, and it is the only operating gristmill left in Connecticut that still uses its original water-powered turbine. Not a replica. Not a restoration with modern parts swapped in. The actual Leffel turbine from the eighteen sixties.
Wait — the eighteen sixties? So the mill was already thirty years old when they installed it?
The original mill probably used a traditional wooden water wheel. But in the mid-nineteenth century, turbine technology took off, and the owners upgraded. The Leffel turbine was a double-discharge design, patented in eighteen sixty-two by James Leffel. Water enters from the top, hits the curved blades of the runner, and then — here's the clever part — it discharges both above and below the runner. That dual exit reduces back-pressure and increases efficiency. You get more grinding power from the same water flow.
It's not just spinning a wheel. It's a carefully engineered pressure system.
Traditional water wheels lose a lot of energy to splashing and friction. A turbine encloses everything. The water is channeled, directed, and then released. The Gurleyville mill's turbine is about four feet in diameter, cast iron, and it's still sitting in its original pit under the mill building. Volunteers from the Mansfield Historical Society restored the whole thing in the nineteen seventies, and they still run it for demonstrations. You can walk in, watch corn get ground into cornmeal by a machine that was cutting-edge when Lincoln was president, and then buy a bag of the cornmeal to take home.
That's the part that gets me. It's not a museum piece behind velvet ropes. It's a functioning piece of industrial archaeology that produces something you can cook with.
The fact that it survived at all is kind of a miracle. By the mid-twentieth century, small gristmills were obsolete. Most were torn down or left to rot. The Gurleyville mill was saved by a local historical society that recognized what they had. Volunteers spent years clearing out debris, repairing the wooden flume that channels water from the Fenton River, replacing rotted timbers, and getting the turbine spinning again. All of it funded by donations and bake sales and whatever they could scrape together.
There's something deeply American about that. Not the bake sale specifically, though I respect the bake sale. But the idea that a handful of people looked at a crumbling mill and said, no, this matters, we're going to fix it ourselves.
It connects to the whole history of how Storrs even became a town. The University of Connecticut started as the Storrs Agricultural School in eighteen eighty-one. This whole area was farmland and small industry. The gristmill was essential infrastructure — if you grew grain, you needed somewhere to grind it. The mill and the university are part of the same agricultural fabric.
That's the industrial weirdness. What else you got?
Let me take you somewhere completely different. The Storrs Bowling Center. Specifically, the duckpin bowling lanes.
I've heard you mention this before. It's a Connecticut thing?
New England broadly, but Connecticut is one of its strongholds. Duckpin uses balls that are four and three-quarter inches in diameter — about the size of a large grapefruit — compared to eight and a half inches for standard tenpin bowling. The pins are shorter too, nine point four inches tall versus fifteen inches. And the balls have no finger holes. You palm them.
You just — palm a ball and hurl it?
And here's the real kicker: you get three rolls per frame instead of two. Because it's harder to knock down all ten pins with a smaller ball. A perfect game in duckpin is three hundred, same as tenpin, but nobody has ever bowled a perfect game in sanctioned duckpin competition. The highest recorded score is two seventy-nine.
Nobody has ever bowled a perfect game. In the entire history of the sport.
That's correct. It's a sport where perfection is theoretically possible and practically impossible. And the pins are reset by hand in a lot of the older alleys — no automatic pinsetters. There's a person back there, or sometimes the bowler does it themselves in casual games. It's a dying sport. There are only a handful of duckpin alleys left in Connecticut, and the one in Storrs is one of them.
That's the kind of detail that makes a place feel real. Not just "there's a bowling alley" but "there's a bowling alley where you play a variant of the sport that's almost extinct, with balls you palm, and nobody has ever been perfect at it.
It's not a tourist attraction. It's just — there. Locals bowl there. Students bowl there. It's ordinary and extraordinary at the same time, which is exactly what Daniel's asking about.
Wait, I want to go back to the scoring for a second. You said the highest game ever is two seventy-nine. What does a two seventy-nine even look like? How close is that to perfect?
It's agonizingly close. In duckpin, a strike is still ten plus your next two rolls, and a spare is ten plus your next roll — same scoring system as tenpin. To get to two seventy-nine, you basically have to throw eleven strikes in a row and then leave one pin standing on your final roll. That's it. The person who did it — a guy named Pete Signore Jr. in nineteen ninety-two — rolled eleven consecutive strikes and then left a single pin on his thirty-sixth and final ball of the game.
Thirty-sixth ball. Because you get three per frame, so a full game is thirty-six rolls if you never strike. And he threw thirty-five strikes and one near-miss.
And think about the psychological weight of that. You've just thrown eleven strikes in a row. You're one roll away from doing something no human has ever done. Your hands are probably shaking. The ball feels like it weighs fifty pounds. And you have to palm this grapefruit-sized sphere and roll it sixty feet with enough precision to hit a cluster of pins that are barely nine inches tall. He left one pin. The sport has been played for over a hundred years, and that's as close as anyone has gotten.
That is existentially devastating. I love it.
That's why I bring it up in the context of Storrs. You can walk into the bowling center on campus, rent a lane, and try it yourself. You'll immediately understand why nobody has ever bowled a perfect game. The ball feels wrong in your hand if you're used to tenpin. It's too light to power through the pins but too heavy to finesse. The pins don't scatter the same way. It's a completely different physics problem.
So we've got a working nineteenth-century turbine grinding corn and a bowling variant where perfection is a mathematical ghost. What's next?
We've seen the mechanical and the recreational weirdness. But Storrs also has a darker side, and a whimsical one, often in the same breath. Let me give you both. The Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry, and the Mansfield Training School.
Those sound like they belong in different universes.
They do, and they're about three miles apart. Let's start with the puppets. The Ballard Institute was founded in nineteen eighty-seven by Frank Ballard, who was a professor of puppetry at UConn. And yes, UConn has a dedicated puppetry program — it's one of the only universities in the United States that offers a degree in puppet arts. The museum houses over three thousand puppets from around the world.
That's not a collection. That's an army.
It's staggering. You've got shadow puppets from Indonesia — Wayang Kulit, some of them over a hundred years old, made from perforated leather and used in traditional religious ceremonies. You've got marionettes from Europe, hand puppets from across Asia, and pieces from the Jim Henson workshop. It's not a children's museum. The collection spans sacred art, political satire, folk theater, and contemporary experimental performance.
The misconception is that puppet museums are for kids, and the reality is you're looking at artifacts that were used in religious rituals and political commentary for centuries.
And the fact that this world-class collection is in Storrs, Connecticut, of all places, is because Frank Ballard spent decades building it and UConn gave him the institutional support to house it. The museum is open year-round, admission is free, and it's right on campus. You can walk in and see a Javanese shadow puppet that was used to tell stories from the Ramayana a century ago, and then walk thirty feet and see a marionette from a nineteen-fifties American television show.
How does a Javanese shadow puppet even end up in Storrs, Connecticut? What's the chain of custody there?
In a lot of cases, it's through Ballard's personal relationships with puppeteers and collectors. He traveled extensively in Southeast Asia in the sixties and seventies, built connections with traditional dalang — those are the shadow puppet masters — and acquired pieces directly from them. Some were gifts. Some were purchases. In other cases, puppets came to the museum through donations from performers who were retiring or families who inherited collections they didn't know what to do with. The museum became a kind of orphanage for puppets that had outlived their original contexts.
An orphanage for puppets. That's a beautiful and slightly unsettling phrase.
It gets more unsettling when you realize some of these puppets were never meant to be static objects in a glass case. A Wayang Kulit puppet is designed to be seen in silhouette, with flickering oil lamp light behind it, while a dalang manipulates it for eight hours through the night. Taking it out of that context and mounting it on a wall under fluorescent lights — you're preserving the object, but you're losing the performance. The museum is aware of this tension. They do live demonstrations and workshops, but there's only so much you can do.
The museum's origin story is basically one professor who wouldn't stop collecting puppets.
That's the generous summary, yes. Ballard joined the UConn drama department in the nineteen fifties and started a puppetry program almost as a side project. Over decades, he collected puppets from everywhere — purchases, donations, his own travels. By the time he retired, the collection was substantial enough that the university built a museum to house it. It's the kind of thing that only happens when one person's obsession aligns with an institution willing to say yes.
That's the whimsical side. Now the dark side.
The Mansfield Training School. Opened in nineteen seventeen as the Connecticut School for the Feeble-Minded. That's the actual original name. It was part of the eugenics-era wave of institutionalization — the idea that people with intellectual disabilities should be segregated from society, often for life. At its peak in the nineteen sixties, it housed over a thousand residents.
It was in Storrs?
Just south of campus. A sprawling complex of brick buildings on a hill. It closed in nineteen ninety-three after decades of scandal — overcrowding, abuse, neglect. A nineteen eighty-four federal investigation found that residents were being physically restrained for hours, denied basic medical care, and living in conditions that were described as inhumane. The state finally shut it down and moved residents into community-based care.
The buildings are still there?
Dozens of them. Brick dormitories, administration buildings, a power plant, a theater. The forest is slowly reclaiming them. Trees growing through broken windows, vines covering the walls. It's on private property now, owned by the university, and you can't go inside — but you can see it from the road, and it's haunting.
You mentioned unmarked graves.
Over a thousand patients are buried in the cemetery on the grounds. Most of the graves have no headstones — just numbered markers, and some of those have been lost to time. These were people whose families either couldn't afford a proper burial or had simply abandoned them to the institution. It's not just a spooky abandoned hospital. It's a site of serious historical reckoning with how America treated people with disabilities in the twentieth century.
What was the actual day-to-day reality like for someone who lived there? Do we have records from former residents?
We do, and they're difficult to read. Some former residents have spoken publicly about their experiences. The institution was designed to be self-sufficient — it had its own farm, its own laundry, its own power plant — and many residents worked in those facilities, often without pay, under the label of "vocational training." The buildings were overcrowded. In the nineteen sixties, some dormitories had fifty or sixty people sleeping in a single room. Medical care was minimal. Restraints were used routinely. And the worst part is that many of the people sent there didn't have severe disabilities by modern standards. They were poor, or orphaned, or had behavioral issues, or their families simply couldn't or wouldn't care for them. Once you were admitted, it was often for life.
It was a warehouse for people society didn't want to deal with.
That's the uncomfortable truth. And it operated that way for over seventy years. The closure in nineteen ninety-three was part of a national shift toward deinstitutionalization — the idea that people with disabilities should live in communities, not in segregated facilities. But that shift came decades too late for the people who spent their entire lives there.
This is less than a mile from where students are now walking to class and getting coffee.
And most of them probably don't know it exists. The university has used some of the land for new buildings, but the core complex just sits there, rotting. There have been proposals over the years to demolish it or redevelop it, but it's complicated. The asbestos remediation alone would cost millions. And there's the question of what you do with the cemetery. You can't just build over a thousand graves.
You've got the puppets — this celebration of human creativity and storytelling — and three miles away, a monument to institutional cruelty. Both in Storrs.
That's what I mean by a vortex. The place pulls in extremes. You can't understand Storrs just by looking at the campus and the strip malls. You have to see the gristmill and the bowling alley and the puppet museum and the abandoned hospital. They're all connected. The mill is part of the agricultural history that led to the university. The training school is part of the same progressive-era impulse that built the university — the idea that institutions could solve social problems, for better and worse. The puppet museum is what happens when a public university decides that art matters enough to fund a niche program for fifty years.
Duckpin bowling is what happens when New Englanders decide regular bowling is too easy.
You're sold on visiting Storrs. Here's how to actually do it. The Gurleyville Gristmill is open for demonstrations on select Sundays — you need to check the Mansfield Historical Society website for the schedule. It's volunteer-run, so it's not open every weekend. But when it is, you can watch the turbine in action and buy cornmeal ground on-site.
The Ballard Institute is much easier — it's open year-round, free admission, right on the UConn campus. Check their hours before you go, but it's basically walk-in. The Mansfield Training School is visible from Route forty-four, but it's on university property and you cannot go inside the buildings. Do not trespass. The cemetery is accessible and there are memorial efforts underway to properly honor the people buried there.
The duckpin bowling — the Storrs Bowling Center is on campus. You can just show up and bowl. Bring a few dollars, palm a ball, and accept that you will not bowl a perfect game because no one ever has.
The broader point here — and this is what I think Daniel was really getting at — is that this vortex mindset works everywhere. Every town has historical societies, obscure museums, abandoned sites, regional sports quirks. You just have to know how to look. Start with the local historical society. They're the ones who know where the old mills are, which buildings have stories, what's hidden in plain sight.
The Gurleyville Gristmill restoration was entirely volunteer-driven. The Ballard Institute runs on a shoestring. These places exist because someone cared enough to keep them alive. If you visit, donate. Buy the cornmeal. Tell someone else about it.
The question I keep coming back to is: what other vortex towns exist in America? Places that seem ordinary but contain this extraordinary density of weirdness? There have to be dozens. Small towns with a world-class folk art museum, or an abandoned industry that still operates once a month, or a sports variant that exists nowhere else.
The follow-up question is: who's going to preserve them? The gristmill needs constant maintenance. The training school buildings are literally collapsing. The duckpin alleys are closing one by one. These things don't survive on their own.
They survive because someone decides they matter. Same as they always have.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the nineteen fifties, marine biologists in Mauritius discovered that octopus chromatophores — the pigment cells that let them change color — contain a protein called reflectin that doesn't just reflect light but actually shifts the wavelength of light passing through it, meaning the octopus isn't just camouflaging against a background, it's actively changing the color of the light itself.
The octopus is editing the light spectrum.
That's — I need to sit with that.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. If you enjoyed this, leave us a review wherever you listen — it helps more people find the show. And if you've got a vortex town of your own, email us at show at my weird prompts dot com. We'd love to hear about it.
Until next time, go find something weird in your own backyard. It's probably there.
