Cormorant Lake Station – Google Docs
Cormorant Lake Station
“Gateway to the Hollow Earth”
This town doesn’t appear on Google Maps; and when the aboveground portion does show up on the Internet, it’s usually mislabeled as Cormorant Lake Lodge, which is a Manitoban hunting fishing lodge about a mile to the southwest. Cormorant Lake Station definitely exists, though. Aboveground, it’s about twenty or so buildings, including a small hotel, a general store, and an auto repair garage that is far too large for the business it now gets. The town mostly stretches along the northwest shore of Air Force Bay; the only real way to get there is via lake ferry to the lodge. The locals are polite, friendly, and not particularly prone to secrecy.
That’s above ground. Below ground is what appears to to be an abandoned subterranean town, verging on city. Access is via a dried out pond; there’s a disused spiral ramp that bottoms out about two hundred feet below. The underground portion of Cormorant Lake Station is laid out in a grid pattern not unlike Manhattan’s. The inside is a spacious, suspiciously rectangular cave about a hundred feet high, with the spiral ramp at one end and an absolutely smooth blank stone surface at the other. Absolutely smooth. In fact, it looks like the stone flowed up from a hole in the floor, then hardened. You can still see the outlines of guardrails and another spiral ramp, going down. While the buildings are all deserted, the ventilation, lighting, and water systems still work. At a guess, about ten thousand people could live down here without too much trouble. There are a lot of shops, offices for companies that were active in the first half of the Twentieth Century, a quarter of consisting of small apartment buildings and townhouses, and what appears to be consulates for Canada, the USA, Great Britain, France — and Fascist Italy.
Breaking into any of the buildings is possible, but there’s not much inside. Some furniture, no treasures, and certainly no paperwork. However, there are a variety of calendars around; with a certain amount of trawling through buildings, a researcher could determine that none of them show a date after October 31, 1935. Other than that, there’s nothing.
And that’s pretty much it. The underground portion of Cormorant Lake Station, as noted before, does not appear anywhere on the Internet. There are print records about the place, but every time one of those records gets digitized somehow the details about the underground part of town get scrubbed from it. More oddly, nobody seems to care. Reporting the existence of an underground town in Manitoba that apparently served as a port city to the Hollow Earth doesn’t even get treated as a hoax. The media and the government will simply nod absently, then go on their merry way. They certainly don’t seem to have any current information on the place.
And good luck finding anybody still alive who worked or lived there, eighty years ago. The oldest person in the aboveground portion is seventy, and they don’t really remember any stories about what their parents and grandparents did below. And no, they don’t seem to be too concerned about that, either.