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Slack.com slash DHQ. I sat in the hard plastic booth in the McDonald's near the strip mall,

sipping coffee and waiting for Mr. Cromes to arrive. It all started as a paper for

college. Strague is such an iconic prison, existing for so long that it had taken a life

of its own. At some point, I guess it's become a book, the more I wrote, the more I realized

that what I had, it wasn't very entertaining. People don't want a technical history of

Strague. They wanted something that they couldn't get from a textbook. They wanted the

stories that hid in the shadows of that ancient place. And I was just the person to drag

them into the light. Or so I thought. The more I wrote, the more walls I hit when getting

stories from the inside. When I had lamented this lack of interesting stories to my grandad,

he had given me a friend's email address from his days in corrections. Grandad had had

a few good stories. Then I got in a few other guards and ex inmates to talk to me about

their time at the place, but it seemed to be hard to get people to talk about their time

at Strague. Strague cast a long shadow. And it appeared to be hard to stay out of the

shadow of that ancient place. There was a line from the book, which I was pretty proud

of. Strague is a local oddity, having existed in some capacity for nearly 200 years. The exact

history however is hard to find. I know that it had been a prison camp during the Civil

War and internment camp for a while during World War II for German and Japanese citizens

...