The Legend of Sullivant's Hill

Craig Wise

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From 1982 to 1990, I sold new cars about a half-mile from General Motors parts factory on Columbus's Hilltop. 

 

In my office, I displayed a collection of antique postcards of Central Ohio, which sparked many interesting conversations with my older customers. I heard many wild stories about early Franklinton and Sullivant’s Hill (The Hilltop’s original name).

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I often heard that this hill once hid many secret projects that used a network of underground tunnels. Some mentioned tunnels running from the now long-gone Hilltop Lunatic Asylum. Others were supposedly accessible from deep below West High school, which happens to sit on the former site of Camp Chase, the North’s second-largest confederate prisoner-of-war camp.

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However, direct knowledge witnesses were scarce. However, there were several that had direct information. One of these was a former maintenance man at the state mental hospital (The Lunatic Asylum). He said there were three abandoned levels beneath the basement and that there appeared to be more. He could not access further down because concrete blocks had been installed across the stairwells.  

 

An elderly hilltop resident told me that immediately after the Civil War, a row of luxury homes had begun construction on Sullivant’s Hill’s eastern ridge for its view of Columbus and Ohio’s finally finished statehouse. Before most of those villas were occupied, the state used Emanate Domain to buy them. Two new asylums almost immediately replaced them. Verified fact: In 1870, these two massive asylums (lunatic and imbecile) were issued every inch of land (about 1.5 miles) that overlooked Columbus.

 

Someone, I think this same fellow told me the Asylums were funded using unreported gold that General Grant and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton confiscated from Confederat President Jefferson Davis as he tried to escape. 

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However, the most detailed story came from an original secretary of that GM factory, which opened in 1945. 

She casually explained that from the Civil War to the 1920s, when aircraft became reliable, most of our country’s top-secret development projects and covert agencies were hidden on or under Sullivant’s Hill.

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She said that in 1944 President Roosevelt made an offer that GM could not refuse. They were to immediately build a 34-acre factory to permanently entomb the country's first underground spy complex beneath it. That gigantic steel-framed factory did open a year later (19450.

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She said the underground complex was initially built as a hidden weapons factory during the Civil War. Camp Chase also maintained two Union Army security battalions that chased everything away from the hill. The underground facility was built by convicts serving hard labor at the Ohio State Penitentiary.

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She added that about a month after the war ended, President Andrew Johnson (Lincoln’s VP) ordered almost all Union Army bases, including Camp Chase, closed and liquidated, which upset many Union Army Generals.

In 1870, when Ohio General Ulysses S. Grant replaced Johnson as president, he reopened the underground complex. Eventually, after it was electrified around 1875, it became the headquarters of the country’s first undercover spy agency, which she said was called “ORPHAN.”

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I was not overly impressed then, but I casually began noticing supporting evidence all over Sullivant’s Hill. This peeked in 2016 when I found this satellite imagery showing what seems to be ORPHAN’s entire complex being cleared and backfilled four months before the Hollywood Casino builders would have stumbled into it.  

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She added that before the complex was entombed under the new factory, it had become a junkyard of America’s antiquated secrets.

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Verified fact: That imagery was taken over a year after the GM factory was removed entirely. When the image was shot, the entire site was heavily guarded for a medication team to remove contamination that GM had dumped into four lagoons over 1000 feet from the underground structure. Zero development supposedly occurred during the winter of 2010. This image was taken in December 2010. 

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After finding this imagery, I spent weeks studying it to determine what else it could be. I found no other possibilities. I also figured out how it was built using Civil War-era railroad technology.

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Don’t take my word for this; I posted my findings and the imagery right here, so you can judge yourself.

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Now let's look at a jaw-dropping timeline of officially documented political and criminal events.