Landmarks
Frost Mountain Ski Resort
Frost Mountain is one of the top ski destinations in all of New England. Home to the Cradensburg Ski Jump Competition & First Aid Demonstration, skiers come from miles around to experience the fresh powder on our slopes.
There's no better way to make a memorable winter than to strap your feet to two waxed fiberglass slabs, hurl yourself down the side of a mountain, and mangle your left knee beyond recognition.
But don't just visit for the exhilaration of personal injury, come for the fashion and the fondue. Show off your innate winter fashion sense and your refined palate at Frost Mountain! Mullets and denim ski suits are very welcome.
Frost Mountain Ski Resort has its own Michelin-Star-Equivalent restaurant on site that proudly serves all of their dishes as "fondue" inspired. Try their potato and prune fondue or even their daikon radish fondue. We're sure your kids will love the pickle fondue. What kid doesn't like pickles?
...and Bingo Emporium
Come See the Opera House!
Constructed in the late thirties by a guy who just wanted to show his wife he could do it, the Opera house is home to the Cradensburg Theatre Group.
Live shows are regularly featured on the main stage except for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights when the Opera House is home to the town's weekly bingo games.
Come be swept away by the stagecraft of Cradensburg. Or win a TV.
*there is the issue of a small ghost who puts gum in the hair of anyone in seat 3c. Ice and peanut butter are provided free-of-charge to 3c ticket holders
Home to 21.6 Cemeteries!
A cemetery on every hill. One of the most affordable ways to pass the time in Cradensburg is to visit one of our 21.6 cemeteries or visit them all with your young children in a morbid sort of "collect-them-all" activity!
Each of Cradensburg's 21 hills hosts a cemetery with almost 400 years of dead bodies somewhere under the turf. It's fun to look at headstones and see how many years it took for Cradensburg to learn its lesson about typhoid, or to look for quirky things people said about their dead unloved ones.
We also encourage you to visit the two cemeteries that make up the .6 of our cemetery offerings. The Pet Cemetery is on Ambling Road, making up .5 of our cemetery count (as people frequently refer to their dogs as "half" a kid.) Also, feel free to visit the graves of the victims of the Sugar Shack Killer who are still interred at the Old New Sugar Shack on Dead Mist Hill.
Come see our covered bridge!
An Authentic New England Experience
It's a wooden bridge.
It has a cover on it.
It's a covered bridge.
You drive real slow on it.
It's pretty neat.
No, really. People like it.
The Cradensburg Town Library
Bequeathed to the town by the Cradensburg family in exchange for a tax break, the Cradensburg library is home to an immense collection of books, rare and otherwise.
Due to the fact that Cradensburg was unable to receive network television or radio signals until 1993, Cradensburg residents have maintained a pernicious love of reading. The library was the benefactor of numerous book donations from 1950-1989 and has developed a special approach to storing, cataloging, and retrieving books donated in that period.
There is a current book retrieval wait time of three to four months due to COVID restrictions, the dust situation, and the fact that the librarians just aren't feeling engaged with their work anymore.
Aside from the extensive collection donated at the end of the last century, the Cradensburg Town Library collection includes rare manuscripts such as the enigmatic handwritten manuscript "The Wailing Woman" written in the first person in what is considered to be one of the oldest examples of meta-fiction in the United States, written long before John Barthe but after the Canterbury Tales and Don Quixote.
Some historians argue that "The Wailing Woman" is not fictional at all, but a cryptic manuscript of pre-Revolutionary origin documenting a kind of occult procedure whose anthropological roots are unidentifiable.
"The Wailing Woman" and other rare manuscripts are available for viewing in the Timothy P. Churgeon Viewing Room. Due to the delicate state of the manuscripts and the fact that Google steals images, photography is not allowed without explicit permission by the library manager, who is dead, and hasn't issued an approval since the time of her interment.
A Depressing but Beautiful Bed & Breakfast
"A house with a heart all its own."
Salem may have its House of Seven Gables, but Cradensburg does you two better with a House of Nine Gables.
Also known as "The Old Churgeon House" located on Churgeon Street along the town green, the House of Nine Gables was built in phases starting with a single room home in 1650. As the Churgeon family grew wealthy, they built additions onto the home, presumably to get as far away from each other as they could manage.
Eventually, members of the Churgeon family went missing in the labyrinthine halls of Old Churgeon House. When the last family member disappeared in 1976, the house was taken over by distant cousins who converted it into a bed and breakfast.
Views of the house's heart are accessible only to paying guests.
Art! The Art Gallery of Art
When does an object become art?
Everyone knows it's when you put it on a wall and give it some dramatic lighting.
Art! The Art Gallery of Art is one of the most elite locations for Cradensburg tourists to visit. Once you step within the sleek modern style architecture, you will instantly feel important and cultured.
Home to a lot of art from artists you have yet to discover, Art! The Art Gallery of Art will reward you with the intangible sense of superiority in having seen so-and-so's deconstructionist piece before everyone else knew about them.
Get your tickets to Art! The Art Gallery of Art today!
What they were watching for, we'll never know.
Better Safe Than Sorry.
When the founders of Cradensburg established our town in 1623, the first thing they built was this watchtower.
Historians and visitors have spent hours imagining what this town's ancestors had been guarding against. It was long understood and documented by the founders themselves that the only humans for miles were a few friendly Abenaki villages. And still, under great labor and duress, they built and manned this tower.
Access to the interior of the tower is not allowed due to the presence of numerous traps. If you do try to trespass in this ancient, crumbling building, there is no known roll for initiative that will save you though a few armed with twenty-sided die have tried.
Site management would like you to know in advance that, yes, they are already aware that the site is mysteriously cold as death, and yes, they know about the dragging chain noises and hissing audible at the northern wall.
Just take your selfie next to the thing and be satisfied, okay?
Dead Mist Lumber Mill
You may not think of a lumber mill as a local attraction, but Dead Mist Lumber Mill on Dead Mist Hill will exceed your expectations.
Built in 1839, the Dead Mist Lumber Mill is one of the oldest continuously operating lumber mills in New England. While many of the facilities have been modernized, the face of the building has rejected attempts at renovation. Its mid-19th century historical characteristics are in tact and, over time, the façade has settled causing the building to look like a structural representation of the figure in the painting "The Scream."
Visitors enjoy attempting to take selfies in front of the lumber mill only to delight in the fact that the images always appear as nothing more than a ghostly swirl. A sign is present informing tourists that pictures of the Dead Mist Lumber Mill will not show up in their phones, but they're welcome to try any way.
Come see this in person, because that's the only way you're going to see it at all.
