This Substack just gave birth to a podcast!
Welcome to Legends of the Lost—the podcast where forgotten stories get a second chance to haunt us.
I’m your host, Nina Alvarez: writer, researcher, and woman dangerously obsessed with local mysteries. This is Season One: The Bluff Point Ruins—and it all starts with a dig. A dream. And a man who vanished before anyone could ask the right questions.
So grab yourself something cold. It’s June, it’s hot, and things are about to get strange.
Podcast Transcription
Hey there, you've just pressed play on Legends of the Lost Season One: The Bluff Point Ruins. I'm Nina Alvarez—writer, researcher, and person who absolutely can't let a weird local mystery go. Today we're kicking off things with a story that's haunted me for years: the mystery of the Bluff Point Ruins and the man who tried to dig them up.
Now if you've been following along on Substack, you've already heard whispers of this place. High above Keuka Lake, there once stood a strange stone complex: walls, embankments, circular clearings, massive slabs. Nobody knows who built it. The Seneca, Keepers of the Western Door and one of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, said the stoneworks were already ancient when their ancestors arrived. They don’t claim them.
So yeah, we're starting there.
Grab yourself something cold—it's June, it's hot, and you're gonna wanna be comfortable. Let's head to the hills of the Finger Lakes and meet the man who tried to bring a lost world back to life.
SCENE 1 – A PLACE BUILT OF STONE
Picture it: a high bluff overlooking a crooked lake, wind howling through the trees. And once upon a time, 14 acres of mysterious stonework. We're talking full-on ancient geometry: walls and raised embankments, stone clearings in perfect circles, monoliths stuck in the earth like teeth. The kind of thing that makes you stop and go: wait, who built this?
Early settlers took one look at these stones and said, "Well, that'll make a damn fine cellar floor."
And just like that, the ruins became farmhouse foundations. Purpose? Gone. Story? Scattered.
Then in 1880, a geologist named Samuel Hart Wright and his son Berlin came through and actually paid attention. They surveyed what was left, drew maps, took notes, and came to one bold conclusion: this site mattered.
Berlin Hart Wright would later write about it in detail. Their report in 1880 ended with a plea to the state: someone should come back and study this place—professionally, with resources. Protect it before it disappeared forever.
No one listened.
For nearly 60 years, the ruins faded from memory. Until a man with a radio voice, a haunted theory, and a shovel showed up and decided to answer that call himself.
SCENE 2 – THE EXCAVATOR APPEARS
His name was Gilbert T. Brewer.
Gil wasn't an archaeologist. He wasn't a historian. He was a newspaper man. A dreamer. A World War I veteran who once spent six months bedridden after tear gas exposure—and during that time, developed some pretty wild theories about who got here before Columbus.
In the winter of 1938, Gil came across a recent article about the Bluff Point Ruins written by Berlin Hart Wright—the same article we just heard a clip from. Something clicked.
He started writing about it. Talking about it. He even created a radio show about it.
That spring, with permission from the landowner, he put together a team of local men and boys. And just like that, they started digging.
What they found was weird.
Brewer described walls over eight feet wide, laid at precise angles. Beneath those walls? Layers of processed pottery. Granular iron rust. And what a chemist later identified as high-grade charcoal.
There was talk of a metal seal. A strange platter. And even what he thought might be the entrance to a chamber—something ceremonial, maybe even sacred.
Then came the carvings.
Gil took home a chunk of stone with faint marks on it. Cleaned it up. He noticed a pattern. He made a rubbing. Then another. The same symbols kept showing up: triangles, squares, and the outline of a veiled woman. Brewer became convinced it was Isis—the Egyptian goddess.
He floated theories about ancient Europeans crossing the Atlantic. I mean, he'd been doing that for a while. The Norse. The Etruscans. Pagans. Something lost to history that had chosen the Finger Lakes as its final stage.
Most professionals, of course, thought it was nonsense. And still do.
But Gil kept on digging. And dreaming. And talking.
And for a brief moment in 1939, the story took off. Not just local headlines. National headlines. Buzz.
He gave a talk at the Yates County Historical Society, holding up his rubbings and his findings and calling for more funding.
But you know, the world changed very quickly as we headed into World War II. The money wasn't there.
And everything went radio silent.
SCENE 3 – THE GHOST OF GIL BREWER
After 1939, Gilbert all but disappeared from public life.
His excavation ended. His strange findings—the stone rubbings, the supposed metal artifacts—all vanished. And so did he.
I've been researching the Bluff Point Ruins for over a decade. And for most of that time, Gil Brewer was a ghost. A man who surfaced briefly, claimed to find something extraordinary, and then slipped into the fog of forgotten history.
No one knew what happened to his collection.
No one knew what happened to him.
Until 2022.
That summer, I decided to try something different. I tracked down—using Ancestry.com, Newspapers.com, and you know, just the joys of sleuthing—a possible living descendant. She was a blogger. I sent her a message through her site.
She wrote back.
Amanda Johnston—Gilbert Brewer's great-granddaughter—did not at first recognize his name. But after talking to her family, they confirmed it. Yes. Gilbert T. Brewer was her great-grandfather. And he had been sort of erased from the family lore.
Amanda's aunt only remembered this: that Gil had died in a mental facility for veterans. His wife and daughters and son had lived apart from him in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Amanda and her family members started digging through old boxes. They found letters. And one of them mentioned the excavation.
She wrote to me, "You've sent our family down a rabbit hole we didn't even know existed."
Her note moved me so deeply. I'd spent so many years chasing this story. And suddenly, it was alive again—in the hands of a family just discovering their place in it.
And this is just the beginning.
JOIN THE DIG
In the next episode of Legends of the Lost: The Bluff Point Ruins, I’ll take you further into the life of Gilbert Brewer: his strange ambitions, his disappearance, and the tragic turn his story took—as well as what Amanda had to say about what she knows about her great-grandfather.
We’ll also revisit the ruins themselves—what we still don’t know, and what clues may be hiding beneath those wind-swept acres.
Until then, keep your eyes open. Your maps unfolded. And your curiosity sharp.
Because sometimes the past is only buried—not gone.
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