The wondrous, heart-shaped bar at the Summit Resort. Photo by Pablo Maurer/@MLSist.

It’s around 12:30 on a Sunday afternoon, and I’m staring down the barrel of an M-4 assault rifle.

This is not something that’s ever happened to me before; I’ve never fought in a war, have scarcely ever been around a firearm and learned years ago to avoid law enforcement at all costs.

Yet here I am, standing in the mold-covered lobby of a long-abandoned honeymoon resort in the Poconos, with an assault rifle — more than one, actually — pointed directly at me. It is a situation I really hadn’t prepared myself for, and in the garbled mess of panic-induced, fearful thoughts running through my head, one voice makes itself louder than any other.

“What the fuck am I doing here right now,” it says.

While doing some research on the nearby Penn Hills resort a few weeks earlier, I’d stumbled across a gallery of pamphlets for various other destinations in the Catskills and Poconos. Among the usual suspects was an outlier, one I’d never heard of — Summit Resort, in Tannersville, Pa.

Buried in those pamphlets was a tiny picture of the lounge at the Summit, and in the corner of that image I could just barely make out the outline of a plush, vinyl-clad, heart-shaped bar. It sent my head spinning. I simply had to see it. To not do so was not an option. Against my better judgement, I phoned a friend and we scheduled a return visit to the Poconos.

You simply never know what you’re going to find when you arrive at an abandoned place. Many times you’ll discover that it’s been picked through and vandalized beyond recognition. Other times, you’ll encounter security almost immediately and think better of even entering. And more often than not, you’ll discover the place isn’t even there anymore, razed to make way for a housing development or shopping mall.

Summit, however, was an absolute jewel. Though poorly maintained — the resort has been closed for over a decade — we found the weekend getaway largely intact, its bucolic villas and bungalows largely untouched, its lobby still dotted with fake palm trees and ferns, its pool still filled with (now stagnant) water.

And that heart-shaped bar — that beautiful, heart-shaped bar — was just as I’d seen it in that pamphlet, its red leather soaking in every last bit of light my flashlight projected at it. It was glorious, the centerpiece of the Arabian Nights-themed “Scheherazade Night Club and Kismet Cocktail Lounge.” My friend and I went to work setting up our cameras.

Abandoned places are very, very quiet ones, and the Summit Resort was no exception. You really don’t realize how noisy the average building is, even at rest, until you’re in one that’s been vacant for years. Things you don’t typically hear — everything from your stomach grumbling to your own breath — become very loud. And so you can imagine how dismaying it is to hear something that sounds like another person’s footsteps, and to hear them approaching you.

That’s what I heard at the Summit Resort, as my friend and I were photographing the bar. At first we thought it might be a rat, but when I heard the unmistakable sound of a car door slamming, I knew we were fucked. Scurrying out of the second-floor lounge, we made our way back to the staircase, thinking we might discover that the unexpected visitors were simply other urban explorers. We were, of course, wrong. Seven or eight law enforcement officials — local police, Pennsylvania State Police, and a very hungry-looking dog — had gathered outside, assault rifles in hand.

We descended the staircase, heading through the lobby and arrived at another doorway. At this point, both of us had raised our hands and were making our presence known. Neither of us had any illusions of avoiding the inevitable. “We’re just taking some photos. We’re photographers,” I proclaimed, like that really fucking matters when you’re rambling around someone else’s property.

We stepped through the doorway, and were met by the gaze of a state police officer, his assault rifle trained on my head, finger on the trigger, his eyes trained directly on mine. In the second or two before he told my friend and I to get on the ground, I honestly thought I might die. It’s no fun to have a gun pointed at you. I really don’t know what else to say about that.

Very slowly, I hit the floor. I felt a knee in my back, and felt the cuffs go on. I heard one of the officers muttering something in German (I’ve since learned that police dogs are trained to respond to commands in that language) and felt the K-9’s breath a few inches from my face. My friend and I were both pulled up and searched, then marched out into an adjacent room after one of the officers inadvertently set off a motion detector (part of the property was apparently still in use.)

The officers explained to us that they’d responded with such force because they suspected we might be copper thieves or meth heads. “You drove four hours to photograph an abandoned building?” one of them said, incredulously. “Don’t you have girlfriends?” Another officer flipped through the photos on my camera, eventually stumbling across some of my shots from Grossinger’s, taken several weeks before. “This isn’t your first time doing this, huh?”

My friend and I could easily still be in jail right now. It would not have been a stretch for the police — who were simply doing their job — to charge us with breaking and entering (which, I might note, we did not do; many doors at this place were wide open) or any other number of offenses, many of them felonies. What they chose to do instead was take us to the station and issue both of us citations for trespassing, essentially little more than a glorified speeding ticket. For that, both of us are very, very thankful.

We were cut loose, but one of the officers had one last request. He wanted me to return the favor.

“When you write this story,” he said with a smile on his face, “you need to tell people not to go to the Summit Resort.”

DO NOT GO TO THE SUMMIT RESORT.

A piano at the Summit Resort’s lounge. Photo by Pablo Maurer/@MLSist