The Hexagon

On the outskirts of my town is a large, disused building surrounded by an intricate wrought iron fence. Above the main entrance of this building is a plaque that once read, “The Frieda L. Reagan Memorial building”, however the writing has long since faded from the display and the buildings official name is now only a distant memory. Instead, the townsfolk mostly refer to the imposing structure as ‘The Hexagon’ based on its distinctive shape.

The building was opened on the third of March 1903 by the towns’ mayor Howard Martin. Its architect was one Nicholas Ware.

The building has filled many roles in its time. It initially functioned as an asylum, but has also served as a prison, a POW camp, a barracks and a municipal office block. It reverted back to a sanatorium in 1969 before finally closing its doors in 2002 due to a lack of funding.

Official word from the local council is that the building was purged before it was shut down. All the inmates were transported to facilities in other areas of the country, back-up copies of sensitive information were destroyed and anything with even the slightest value was taken and sold in order to recuperate some of the buildings losses. Officially the building is an empty husk: it is condemned and waiting for a demolition crew that will never arrive.

Of course, the urban legends tell a different story. If the masses are to be believed the Hexagon is more active now than it ever was when it was open for business. All the locals know the stories of lights turning on and off in various rooms across the building and many claim to have seen ghostly figures or heard disembodied voices calling to them. The conspiracy theorists are in love with the Hexagon, too, and they have suggested it is now everything from an alien technology workshop and the next stage of MKULTRA to Lord Lucan and the Yeti’s holiday home.

The things that happen inside the building are not important and we will come to the inmates at another time, but the purpose of this particular article is to discuss the building itself. We will begin with the man responsible for inflicting it upon the world, Mister N. J. Ware.

Mr. Ware was a man consistently described as thoroughly unpleasant in all aspects of his life: looks, personality, mannerisms, odour and so on. In addition to being an unpleasant man, Ware was considered by most to be a completely untalented man. He showed a remarkable propensity for designing ugly, square buildings and his plans for anything more complicated were nothing short of hideous.

Only two of the elaborate blueprints put forward by Mr. Ware were ever constructed. The first was a mausoleum for one of the towns more prominent families. For this, Mr. Ware stole the blueprints for a public library in Cheyenne, Wyoming and changed the architects name to his own.

The second was the Frieda Reagan memorial. The details of its inspiration, conception and design are maddeningly scanty since the plans were drawn up in absolute seclusion. During the time that Mr. Ware worked on his design he was tended to by a single person; his butler, Farris.

Since Mr. Ware refused to speak to anyone regarding his plans, the newspapers turned to Farris for an insight into the design process. Farris, a trustworthy man about whom nothing bad could be said, went on record as saying that while his master had been designing the building he had gone without food and drink. He went on to say that Ware did not speak a word while he was designing the behemoth; he merely sat, hunched over his desk like an unwashed gargoyle. The only indication Ware gave that he was alive was the almost inhuman movement of his hand as he drew, accompanied by an occasional low, raspy, sinister chuckling. Farris described the laughter as the sort you would imagine a crazed madman would make while stalking and planning for his next victim.

Irrespective of his behaviour, Mr. Ware finished his task remarkably quickly and, after working on them for three days, submitted a fully comprehensive set of blueprints to the council planning office. Minutes from the subsequent council meetings suggest the plans were met with unanimous acclaim and that it only took a matter of days before the wheels were set in motion to begin construction of Mr. Ware’s masterpiece.

Although the planning process was finished quickly the build phase was not so lucky and the Hexagon’s construction was riddled with problems. For example, the ground breaking ceremony had to be postponed numerous times due to adverse weather conditions and three people died in freak accidents during construction. There were numerous other delays in construction, the most prominent of which being when workmen downed tools for a month and a half so they could help the townsfolk search for a missing child.

As bad as the conditions were on the building site, however, things were worse at the Ware estate. While Nicholas J. Ware was an unpleasant man to begin with he degenerated further and became completely intolerable during the construction of his masterpiece. He became a recluse, choosing to live and sleep in his study. In his seclusion he began working on countless projects that would never be completed. He continued to alter the buildings blueprints. He continued to laugh like a man possessed.

The absence of the architect did nothing to hinder the workmen, however, since the blueprints for the Hexagon were more than enough to show what needed to be done. Not only did they list impossibly accurate measurements, specific down to the millimetre, but they also included the precise quantities that would be required of each material. Every potential sticking point was addressed, which meant the workmen could turn to the schematics for help rather than asking the demented recluse for clarification.

In spite of the numerous setbacks the tradesmen continued working on the Hexagon. Construction was completed on the twenty-eighth of February 1903 and a party was thrown to celebrate the achievement. The festivities were cut short, however, when six gunshots rang out from the Ware estate.

The local police force (consisting of a constable and his two officers) assembled soon after the shots were heard and set off for the Ware estate to investigate the sounds. On the way they met Farris, bleeding and gravely wounded but alive. According to Farris one of the servants had made some manner of gruesome discovery and Mr. Ware had murdered the staff in order to silence them. Ware had killed two maids and his chef with a single shot each before turning his attentions to Farris who, upon hearing the sounds, had fled the manor and started towards the village.

Farris says that Ware fired three additional shots. The first two missed him completely, but he was not so fortunate the third time and took the full force of the bullet in his left shoulder. With his ammunition spent Ware had, according to Farris, re-entered the house, ostensibly to continue working on whatever horrific sight the maid had discovered.

Farris was accompanied back to town by one of the policemen and the two remaining officers continued onwards and entered the estate. Based on the information they had been given them the officers headed for the study to confront the architect.

Upon entering Ware’s study the policemen were taken aback. The walls and floor were covered with blood, as was Ware himself who was sat at his drawing board, chuckling and writing away as if unaware that anything was wrong. The grim centrepiece of the room was a human body lying across Ware’s desk, skinned from head to toe. The macabre trophy that had been taken from the body was resting on Ware’s bureau, covered in a script that the officers did not wish to read.

Ware was arrested without a second thought and quickly transferred to the local jail. During the time he was imprisoned Ware was incredibly unsettling and uncooperative. Reports suggest that he would not stop giggling to himself and, when pressed about any issue at all, he simply offered, “It’s not her,” as an answer.

Word of what the architect had done spread through the town like wildfire and it was not long before a mob of locals broke into the Ware estate. The lynch mob stole the few valuable items that were in the house before razing it to the ground.

Despite the fact he had murdered three, possibly four people, Ware was not imprisoned. It was reasoned that his actions and behaviours in general were not indicative of a well man and that he should be institutionalised, rather than jailed. Thus, when the Hexagon was opened, its first guest was its architect.

The body found in Ware’s office was never officially named, since all of its identifying features had been removed. In spite of this, the general consensus was that the body belonged to Frieda Leanne Reagan – the local girl whose disappearance had halted the hexagons construction some months earlier. Based on this assumption the townsfolk demanded that the newly completed building be named in her honour: a wish that was granted almost immediately.

Every copy of the plans for the building was burnt on the day Ware was incarcerated. The police called this a precautionary measure to ensure nobody else could study the monstrous building or recreate any part of it. The roll of skin that had been used as a parchment was not burned, but buried alongside the body it once belonged to. It now rests in an unmarked grave somewhere in the Hexagon’s grounds.

With every instance of the reference materials destroyed it took people quite some time to notice the series of bizarre patterns that had been built into the Hexagons architecture. Quite how it had escaped peoples attention during construction remains to be seen, but the plans for the Hexagon show a fascination with the numbers six and three.

The most obvious example of the pattern is that the building has six wings and stands three storeys tall, but the patterns run much deeper than that. For example there are thirty-six windows on each of the buildings outside faces. The windows are split up into groups of nine, which are made of three rows of three. Breaking things down even further each window contains six panes, which are held in place with six yards of lead.

It goes on; the number and layout of the rooms, the design and placements of the fixtures, the layout of paths across the central courtyard and the number of plants lining them, everything right down to the number and arrangement of the floor tiles follows the architects curious obsession with sixes and threes. Even the intricate anti-trespassing flairs on the fence posts fit the pattern: running along each post you can find three groups of three instances of the number three.

The reason for the unorthodox design was never explained. It was months before anybody paid attention to the architecture enough to spot the pattern and by the time people noticed it Ware had, according to the staff at the Hexagon, committed suicide.

Many people have tried to find a deeper meaning behind the architecture. I know I have. But it doesn’t matter how people approach the issue, nor what angle they examine it from, nobody has come up with an explanation as to how, or why, a terrible architect like Ware created something so intricate, magnificent and palatial as the Hexagon.

Certain people believe that the parchment of human skin contains the explanation. Indeed, multiple calls have been made to have Reagan’s grave opened so the public can study the morbid document. Exhuming the body is unlikely to happen, however, since no record was made of precisely where it came to rest and the only people who knew firsthand are long dead. Perhaps the most maddening part of all is the fact that nobody read the document when it was first discovered. Even in the early 1900’s my town was a very spiritual place and it was believed that reading the document would call forth some malevolent entity to finish off what Ware had started so the police simply disposed of it as quickly as they could.

Whatever purpose Ware had and whatever force was guiding his hand is unimportant, as is the hidden message hidden in the Hexagon’s architecture. What is far more important is what went on in the building while it was operational. Even more interesting than that is what goes on in the building today.

I will recount these stories in the coming articles. So for now, let us draw a line under the issue of the Hexagon and move on to its residents.