So I was on a work retreat, and at the end of the first day, our boss took the company to a concert (about 15 people). The concert was a boring thing for old white people so most of us were pretty restless from having to sit around. Afterwards the higher ups go to some fancy VIP thing to get people interested in our company, but the rest of us had to get out and do something. We decided on minigolf, and the local guy in our group picked out a good place, but then we had to switch places to find something closer to where we were staying, so we picked out a random place called "Cartland".
It turns out Cartland is definitely haunted and/or cursed. Thankfully I took pictures and I think if I share them with you then I pass on the curse to you instead.
We go there in 4 cars, and right off the bat, my car's GPS took us to a nearby burger king, and another car got taken to a mcdonalds further down. I assume this is the spectral energies of the place interfering with our equipment.
This is the parking lot, the start (although it looks like the end?) of the minigolf, and a shack that sells ice cream which is literally inbetween the minigolf part and the sign advertising go-karts.
Please note that the go cart sign says that the lowest driving height is "around" 48 inches. I Feel like that should be more exact, probably, but I'm no go-kart expert.
Our leader goes up to the ice cream place and asks if they're still open (it's 8:40, and the place supposedly closes at 9). The kid at the ice cream place says "Oh, we're not related to the minigolf place. You need to go around the corner." I don't understand how the ice cream place isn't part of the minigolf place, because physically it is surrounded by the minigolf course, the signs for Cartland, and the various go-kart stuff behind it, but okay. She directs us to this path that looks like maybe it's for delivering things to the back of the ice cream place.
And it takes you to this very normal looking path, which also goes to the go-karts, and definitely doesn't have a skeleton hidden under the bridge.
This is going back into forest. I don't have any pictures of the back area but there was some dank-ass looking go kart and bumper car things we walked past. We go back to a shack and ask some teen if we can still play. He doesn't really care. We don't get scorecards or anything, and instead of letting us pick out clubs he just grabs like 30 clubs and dumps them on the porch in a pile. Very few of the clubs are of the same make. We make our way back out front and it does turn out that the exit of the minigolf place is also the entrance. I couldn't get a shot that shows this well but I did my best.
Where do you GO here? It is unclear. You are presented with a morass of possible holes and a bunch of stones that don't really make a clear path. You might think you should just go by the numbers but there are no numbers on any of the holes so you just gotta figure it out. There's a hanging bucket telling you to return the pencils, but we didn't get scorecards or pencils, and it's empty so I guess neither does anyone. This is the first impression: disorientation and confusion.
Once we figure out what the intended path probably is (?) we do the first few holes. I don't have a picture for this, but almost every hole has random-ass elevation changes, because the whole course is plopped on an awkward hill. Additionally, the turf is AWFUL and always slants towards every wall. Almost every hole is set up such that, no matter how you hit your ball, all your group's balls will end up in roughly the same place, which is against the back wall of the hole. When you try to push the ball away from the wall so you can putt, it will fall back against the wall.
This is minigolf hell. Now that we've figured out what direction we play in, we've realized that it's barely playable. Then we get to hole 6 (?) I meant to go back and count the holes. It didn't feel like there were 18 total.
The fountain water has tons of foam, which I guess isn't that abnormal for a minigolf place, but there was enough foam that it looked like a root beer fountain
But the back corner is when things get fucking wild. This is just there. I didn't go crawling to some out of the way fence, I shot this while standing on the golf green.
Just a dead unicorn statue next to a creepy shack. There's a sign you can't make out here but it starts with "for 1000 years, waterfalls unintelligible powering civilization." I love this dead unicorn. Here's another shot of it.
At the other side, the course comes up against, and partially incorporates, a house. (The red square here blocks out a co-worker who was too visible.)
There is no fence separating us from this house. It's got stuff in it. It looks kind of like someone lives there, but there's tons of stuff piled up at the windows so maybe nobody lives there (except the ghosts who are DEFINITELY living there.)
Someone joked that we were being watched from the upper window and I actually got startled because it was extremely plausible. We walk to the next hole and find this water fixture.
It's a bit hard to tell, but on top of that scaffolding there's a pipe. It comes out of the house on the right side of the picture, goes across this scaffold, and then right in the middle of the picture you can see a stream of the water pouring down from the pipe. At first, you assume this is some kind of accidental leak. But then you notice the scaffolding is to intentional, and the water is pouring directly into a stone basin that then goes through the course. It dawns on you: this is, somehow, an intentional water fixture.
The next hole goes around a corner (which also makes it a terrible hole because it's shaped like a [ that you can't see around) and we get to see the front of the house. They finally put up a fence at this part, possibly because otherwise people might just wander into the home as part of the course.
A nice shot of a bunch of flags that are just...there. I don't know what this is.
An abandoned golf club, at the point furthest from the entrance. This is evidence of a murder
THIS DOLPHIN. This dolphin leers over this pool and it's very bad to look at and walk around. It's really fucking high up, too, so it leers over you for the next several holes as you walk around it. Look for it in the background of a later picture because this thing is intimidating.
We play a few more holes, including one that threatens to make you hit your ball into the water. There's no way you should go into the water or even touch it, so I guess if you do that you just leave. Then we get to THE LAGOON.
This is not a camera trick, that's the color of the water. There's a hole that goes all the way around this (again, just a blind hole where you like, hit the ball and it ends up kinda near the hole but against the back wall because everything here is slanted.) Well okay the water is very bad but at least the whale is a little cu OH MY GOD HE HAS NO FACE.
WHY did they not give the whale a face. This is not okay. This is some slenderman shit. There's no painting of a face, no indentation, nothing, it's just a flat expanse of whaleflesh.
This seal is the most ordinary looking thing on the course and it looks absolutely terrified to be here.
At this point my phone was so low on battery I couldn't take anymore pictures (Or...was it TOO HAUNTED to take any more pictures? Possibly.) Anyway, a guy came out while we were halfway through, put down a beer and a flashlight on some of the posts, and started watering down random parts of the course. And I do mean random. After a thorough spraying of the wooden shack, he went on to sprinkle some of the plants (many of which were withered and dead in their pots), but not all of the plants. He also would water random parts of the fake minigolf grass. They also let on a group as we were leaving even though they were supposed to be closed and were already cleaning the course (?).
I think most of my co-workers also thought this place was wild, but they were a little confused as to why I loved it SO MUCH. Fuck them, this place is amazing, would absolutely go back again. I encourage you all to go look at the website. Every page is a treat :
http://www.cartlandofcapecod.com/.
Also go look up some reviews of the place. They're split evenly between people who hated the place and probably got injured and people who have stockholm syndrome from going there every summer for years. Here are two of my favorites:
This place is absolutely terrible my cart totally exploded and nearly killed me and my kid Pablo I sued them and working on a court case this month
My son was on the go cart track and as he went buy us the hardware from the shoulder strap came rolling out of the car as he drove by us!! The slick track was dry and sticky, the best was the attendant carrying an empty jug onto the track and making it slick again by dumping literally nothing onto the track because my son asked him to juice the track a bit so they could slide around.
