William Fitzpatrick has lived on Pine Hill his entire life. He grew up in a white house near the top and eventually moved just streets away. 

“We grew up in the white house over here,” he explains, pointing just down the hill from where he is standing. “Oh wow. It’s a very densely populated neighborhood.”

Driving through the neighborhood off of I-84 in Waterbury, is not unlike most of the city’s densely packed residential areas. Large, multi-family homes crowd the winding side roads where some families have lived for generations. But it has changed a lot over the decades, streets were bulldozed to build out that highway between 1961 and 1963, and Scoville Manufacturing, which ran a one-mile section of the neighborhood was torn down and replaced by the Brass Mill Center in the late 1990s. But Fitzpatrick also grew up with a unique and long-standing attraction in his backyard: Holy Land USA.

The 18-acre religious attraction has become the stuff of local legend in the nearly 70 years since it was built. The massive, illuminated cross that stands on the top of Pine Hill can be seen for miles by travelers on the interstate or State Road 8, and the tiny, worn-down buildings that make up the core of its structures have landed the location on lists of the country’s most haunted places.

The reality of Holy Land, though, is less one of ghosts and goblins and things that go bump in the night. It is one of religious fervor, community spirit, and one man’s determination.

In the 15^th, 16^th, and 17^th centuries, it wasn’t exactly feasible for members of the Roman Catholic Church to set out on a pilgrimage to the holy land of Jerusalem. Instead, Catholics established Sacri Monte – sacred mountains – which endeavored to provide a similar experience. These small monuments, sitting atop mountains in Piedmont and Lombardy, reproduced locations in Jerusalem, depicted scenes from Christ’s life, and offered believers a spiritual and educational destination a little closer to home.

Holy Land USA is, in many ways, its own version of a Sacri Monte, though it was never so grand as those in the north of Italy. It was the brainchild of Waterbury lawyer and devout Catholic John Baptist Greco, who opened the park in 1955.

From the miniature replica of Jerusalem to Bethlehem to the stations of the cross and even the pyramids of Egypt, everything was created inexpensively, even for the time, by repurposing old industrial equipment or household items.

“Most of the stuff he built, if you can picture … that’s an old hot water heater there,” says Fitzpatrick, pointing to the building that at one time read “Herod’s Palace” after the ancient King of Jerusalem. “He put cement around it. Then he put doors and windows. Most of the other buildings are duct work  for buildings.”

Fitzpatrick currently serves as Holy Land’s Volunteer Coordinator and says when he runs into the occasional tourist, they are usually there to see Holy Land as a type of large-scale folk art.

“That’s what he was known for,” he explains, pointing to what seem like sturdy, if rundown, pillars through the small city. “Even like the pillars that were here, he took an old telephone pole wrapped some mesh around it and [encased it in] concrete.”

Looking closely, the badly chipping paint reveals the concrete below, which is crumbling in spots to betray a layer of chicken wire wrapped around a much thinner center wood pole.

Putting together this large display became a community project in the 1950s, bringing together the Catholic community – particularly Italian-Americans in Waterbury. This was even more the case after Greco created the Companions of Christ. He begged and borrowed and sought out donations of goods and labor to build his city on a hill.

“It wasn’t built with money,” jokes Fitzpatrick,. “But he went out, so he was quite the beggar.”

And he knows first-hand. Fitzpatrick’s family includes generations in the concrete and construction business. Among their projects was an old Sears store in Waterbury that is no longer standing, and Greco hoped they could also help him with some work on the hill.

“We had the office on Industry Lane,” Fitzpatrick recalls. “Johnny Greco walked in, he says, listen, can you spare a couple of bags of concrete? Before he left the office, he got us to take this form, bring it up to Holy Land, pour it. We brought it up there, we turned it upside down, and then we put the statue up on top.”

The plinth that his family created is still a major feature in Holy Land’s walking tour and is still home to one of the only fully intact statues.

Even the iconic cross was part of a community project. The first cross, which was much shorter than the current 50+ foot one, was held up by guidewires. At some point – though Fitzpatrick says he doesn’t recall exactly when – it was cut down. Greco returned to the community for a replacement, and Ralph Giuliani, the owner of Modern Sign Company, erected a new, bigger cross.

Once Holy Land was built, thousands flocked to see it for decades, bringing in around 40,000 guests each year. John Greco maintained and operated it for the rest of his life.

“Disneyland opened three years before this place and this guy was using it as, almost a rival to Disneyland,” says Nick Colabella, the Digital Marketing and Graphic Design Coordinator for the Mattatuck Museum. “And when it’s coming out, a lot of people are comparing them, comparing the two, Disneyland to Holy Land. But really, the place was intended for education only and to be a place of worship.”

The Mattatuck Museum acts as a keeper of the town’s history, housing art and artifacts from the Brass City, including the official Waterbury Button Museum. In October of last year, they sponsored a walking tour of the site with Colabella acting as guide.

Unfortunately, that success was not guaranteed once Holy Land lost it’s creator.

In 1984, Greco closed Holy Land. It was supposed to be temporary, and he reportedly had plans to revitalize the nearly 30-year-old space and reopen it for a new generation of visitors. That never happened.

John Greco died at Monsieur Bojnowski Manor nursing home in March of 1986. He was 90 years old.

“I think John Greco had a lot of people who respected him in the community,” speculates Colabella. “And when he passed maybe the love for that place kind of just slowly dwindled because he wasn’t part of it anymore.”

Greco left the grounds to the Religious Sisters of Filippi, an order of nuns who had a residence next door to Holy Land. The sisters, while maintaining the grounds somewhat, never set about a major revitalization project and instead closed the park to outside visitors in all but a few cases.

Without ongoing maintenance, Holy Land fell into a state of disrepair that went largely unmitigated for another few decades. In that time, it became a popular target for vandals. Statues, like that of Jesus with a missing arm on the cross at Calgary, and two beheaded camels at Bethlehem, were partially destroyed. They are no longer part of the display. 

“The cross has like barbed wire fence around it. You can’t go really within even like five or 10 feet of the cross,” says Colabella. “And it’s high up on a platform. So that is pretty safe from vandalization, but the broken down buildings, people draw all over them.”

The abandoned and run-down look of the park has become its signature for the last few generations of locals, turning what was once a bustling religious attraction into a creepy roadside oddity. Roadside America, an online and print compendium of the small and strange along the nation’s highways, added Holy Land to its pages in 2010, warning visitors to make sure their tetanus shots are up to date before venturing beyond the locked but accessible gates.

Colabella says that Holy Land’s mystique as a potentially haunted – and definitely creepy – site is still very much a part of the ongoing interest of locals.

“Everyone who showed up [to the walking tour], a couple people were very religious and interested about the history, but a lot of people who came were kind of just like, ‘Ooh, we get to go to Holy Land. I hear it all about this scary place and now we get to go on a guided tour,’” he recalls. “So people were moreso interested in kind of thinking it’s this crazy weird roadside attraction.”

Despite the interest in the walking tour, Colabella says he gets the impression that most locals aren’t keen on visiting on their own though some from the nearby neighborhood still use it as a place to take a walk on a sunny day or to bring kids on a day off from school.

“I think people are afraid of it,” he says with a matter-of-fact tone. “Or they don’t want to go anywhere near it, probably because of the incident that happened up there.”

The “incident” Colabella refers to occurred 14 years ago, on the night of July 15^th, 2010.

That evening, 16-year-old Chloe Ottman and her friend Francisco Cruz (who was 19), climbed the hill to the base of the illuminated cross. Ottman’s body was later found in the woods nearby.

Cruz was arrested and admitted to police that he had raped and strangled Ottman under the cross before disposing of her body. Ottman’s family agreed to a plea deal and Cruz was sentenced to 55 years behind bars.

The murder brought new attention to Holy Land, which had already been closed for 26 years at the time of Ottman’s death. Years before, in 2002, some Waterbury residents argued that the park should be bulldozed and replaced with a more welcoming community park and many already saw the location as creepy and uninviting.

Police investigating the murder did not believe Holy Land itself posed any threat to the community or enticement to criminals.

“This is an isolated incident,” police Capt. Christopher Corbett said to the media at the time. “This is not indicative of any widespread problem up at Holy Land.”

Over the decades since its closure, many groups and individuals have attempted to revitalize the property in one way or another. In 2001, the Hartford Archdiocese approved a $10 million restoration project with a starting fund of $250,000. Volunteers arrived at the site for months to clean up the brush and trash.

Those plans, though, were put on hold indefinitely less than a year later, when the superior of the Filippian nuns had to go on leave for shoulder surgery. The plans were supposed to be resumed when the new superior caught up on her duties but years of false starts eventually stalled the project completely.

Local artists and leaders with the Church – including Rev. Augustine Giusani, who had been placed in charge of the restoration by the Archdiocese of Hartford — later thought the park could be memorialized in a small way by relocating statues and structures to an offsite location while the rest of the park was destroyed. Those plans never got far either. Rev. Guisani died in 2008.

In 2013, however, Holy Land saw its first real glimmer of hope and its first new change of ownership in nearly three decades. Neil O’Leary, then the mayor of Waterbury, and local businessman Fred Blasius, petitioned the sisters to purchase the site and were successful.

They set up the site as an official non-profit and erected a new LED cross to bring the site “back to its roots.” The cross now changes colors for the Catholic liturgical calendar and for various awareness campaigns, like Breast Cancer. 

Fitzpatrick, for his part, has been involved in restoration projects at Holy Land for decades and still leads the charge on a dozen or more projects every year. He has overseen large scale landscaping to remove overgrowth on the park’s structures and to remove trees that block the view of Holy Land from the highways.

He and his volunteers have repainted buildings, hung new signs, and have attempted to replace plinths and statues – though they are repeatedly stolen. 

“The whole last supper, it was all three-dimensional plaster,” he explains, pointing out a building set way back up the hill. The plaster relief has been replaced by a two-dimensional poster. “Over the years, people just chipped away at it and they wound up taking them.”

Fitzpatrick says he doesn’t let the vandalism get to him and refuses to focus on it because “that’s how they win.”

As a troop leader for the Boy Scouts of America, several of his scouts working on their Eagle projects have done work at Holy Land. One cleaned up Solomon’s pool near the front entrance while another fixed up the Peace Circle that sits near the base of the main cross, at the site of the original.

“This is the Tower of Babel,” he says pointing to a photograph of a small stone tower. It’s set well back from the walkway and can be easily missed by a casual observer. “So, another Scout made a walkway through with stone, and then a lot of the stones were missing and he restored the Tower of Babel.”

To fund these projects, they rely on donations, either directly or through an annual fundraising dinner. Those dinners raised $80,000, paying for a newly paved walkway throughout Holy Land’s sprawling estate. 

But much of the work is done by volunteers and with donated supplies and equipment. Nearly every time Fitzpatrick listed a project he’s hoping to complete soon, he also mentioned a friend or community member who he planned to ask for help – or who had already committed to lending their services. His own son, a concrete contractor, built the concrete base of the new cross using $55,000 of his own money.

“Even though it looks dilapidated, we have done a lot,” he says.

Since the sale and the start of renewed renovations, there has been a growing interest in Holy Land as a place of Catholic worship. Fitzpatrick says he sees people coming to pray near the cross sometimes and finds palms people have left after Palm Sunday every year. Local priests have also begun saying some masses at the site, something that was popular when Holy Land was in its heyday. There was even a group who went up to watch the eclipse this past April.

It will take years and a concerted effort to bring Holy Land back to the place it once was, but Fitzpatrick seems determined to once again allow it to serve as an educational site.

“I just wanted to become a teaching tool again,” he says, recalling the way it was when he was a kid. “That’s what Johnny Greco did. He gave tours.”

“It would be cool to see it the way it looked at its peak,” says Colabella. “It would also be cool to kind of memorialize Greco and what his ideals were and the reason behind making it. The Italian American community is what built that place and I think there are a lot of Italians around here and other people who would also appreciate it.”

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