I don’t know how the man does it.

Everywhere you see Androscoggin County Sheriff Eric Samson out and about, he’s all smiles. He’ll shake your hands up and down and ask you how you’re doing.

If you need information from him, by God, he’ll hand it right over if it’s in his power to do so. No problem, chum. Anything else I can do for you?

Samson is the most affable and capable sheriff I’ve ever worked with, and yet it’s a wonder to me how he’s not spending his days punching walls and weeping quietly in the fungus-plagued break room.

That’s right, I said “fungus plagued.” Have you been in the 170-year-old Androscoggin County Sheriff’s Office in Auburn lately?

Spend some time roaming those damp, fetid halls and exploring its various cramped, stanky rooms and I guarantee you’ll be taking a shower — a long shower with the world’s roughest loofah — as soon as you can manage it.

Every corner you turn in that ancient place feels like disease. Mold grows wild in places, clinging to walls like some Stephen King horror waiting to reach out and grab you.

Stained ceilings drip with water so dank and discolored, you don’t even want to think about it. Other areas have just gone a greasy black — from rot or mold, you can never really tell because who wants to stand there poking at filth that looks like it might sprout eyes and probing fingers at any moment?

Now and then, sewage comes bubbling up from the floor. Sewage! In a place where people gather and work and eat their lunches!

Some parts of the floors feel spongy under foot. Maybe its just rotten wood under there, but you don’t want to think about that much, either, lest your imagination get the better of you.

Toilets on upper floors have a tendency to rain down into the rooms below while victims of heinous assaults are being interviewed there. A detective will apologize for the bleak conditions and offer the young woman a towel before urging her to finish her sad story.

Dubious odors blow out of vents. Everything you touch feels coated with … I don’t know, something. Who wants to dwell on it while you’re wiping your hands on your pants hard enough to cause friction burns?

There is so much that’s sickeningly wrong with that old building, I could sit here all day telling you about things that I’ve seen, smelled and — God help me — touched there. Forcing people to remain in that dismal place in order to make their daily bread seems cruel and unusual to me, but you know politics.

Last week, county commissioners rejected a $29 million bond package that would have allowed the sheriff’s office to escape that swampy prison inside the much larger Androscoggin County Courthouse and Jail building at 2 Turner St. and move to the former Evergreen Subaru building on Center Street in Auburn.

You can imagine the sheriff’s inner turmoil when he got that news. For more than five years he’s been trying to get his people out of that dismal ruin. He has efficient plans and a new building ready to go — the Evergreen Subaru building that commissioners bought for $4.5 million in 2022 with federal COVID relief funds. In his heart, Samson must have believed that surely THIS time it was going to happen.

Yet there Samson sits, a Maine sheriff confined to a workplace so abysmal, it would make the old Thomaston State Prison look cozy by comparison. Like Sisyphus himself, our sheriff seems doomed to fruitlessly toil in a dank and dismal place.

“Not to mention we don’t have the square footage required to operate,” the sheriff said.

So not only is the building unhealthy, unsafe and dripping with slime, it’s too small to boot.

When Samson talks to me about the matter, he’s clearly glum and yet he’ll still make his remarks without resorting to the long strings of four letter words to which he is surely entitled.

If he had his way — and some county commissioners agree — the matter of the new Sheriff’s Department would be given to voters to decide. But nope. The can was kicked down the road again and so for the foreseeable future, the sheriff and a whole cast of county workers remain confined to quarters so grotesque and antiquated, it’s a credit to them that they get any work done at all.

Me, whenever I have to go into that building, I pretend I’m on an episode of “Scooby Doo,” sent to this ghastly and ancient ruin to investigate a haunting from the mold people.

“There’s a fungus among us,” I say to Scooby, tossing him a snack to earn a gaspy laugh from the mutt.

Then my arm brushes against a slime-coated wall and the fantasy dissolves, displaced by the cringing feeling that if I don’t get out of here and into a shower pronto, my arm might blacken and wither from some exotic, slime-based disease.

Really, it’s that bad. Perhaps to raise the money they’re so concerned about, county commissioners should turn that old building into the next big Halloween destination and collect big bucks from the thrill seekers.

Bring your disinfectant wipes and bleach, spook chasers. You’re going to want them.

Mark LaFlamme is a columnist and crime reporter for the Sun Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].