Snooping in abandoned houses

In My Humble Opinion
1

Anyone ever poked through an abandoned house? There’s one directly behind ours. I hadn’t ever paid much attention to it before, always walking by the front of it. This morning I took the ArmadilloPup down the alley that runs behind our house, which I had never had occasion to travel before. I passed this backyard with a three-foot chain link fence. The grass was about waist high, there was a gutted van parked in the yard, and an ancient trailer thingie. From the back, you can see the roof of the house is sagging and rotten, and the porch is falling off the house. Out of mad curiosity, we walked around the block to the front of the house to see which house belonged to this yard. Like I said, I’ve never paid much attention to it before… from the front, it looks like a typical run-down house, the kind you see a lot of in this area. The lawn hasn’t been mowed in quite some time, the porch railings are falling down, that kind of thing. There’s a huge, beautiful mulberry tree in the front yard. From the sidewalk I could see in the windows that there’s no stuff, no furniture or curtains in the house. It’s pretty easy to see no one lives there anymore, and probably hasn’t for quite some time. I went up the driveway to peek in the window and see that the house is empty except for a stove and a fridge in the kitchen.

And, um, there’s a manifesto of some kind on the wall. Like someone took a sharpie or a black crayon and started writing at about eye level, the letters get large and crooked as the text gets down to about hip or knee height. I can read parts of it, it’s a letter to someone named “Derrin,” and includes bits like “the dope sold in this house your father made” and something that I think said “I know it was fun to abuse strung out junkies like me [faded] you tried to kill the boys…” Something about taking the kids and escaping, I think. Something about not being afraid of jail because she knows she needs help.

I wonder if there’s any way to find out what happened there? I went around the side, some of the windows are boarded up. The garage behind the house, which I thought was a back porch when looking across the yard, is knee deep in junk. Car parts, computer parts, furniture, garbage, tons of junk all covered in a layer of black grime. It looks like it’s collapsing upon itself. I didn’t go in, just peeked in the doorway.

I didn’t go inside, and I didn’t try the doors. I’d love to go back and try to take a photo of the writing on the wall, but I don’t know how good a picture I’ll get shooting through dirty glass. Mad curiosity makes me want to try going in to poke around inside, but knowing my luck I’d get arrested for breaking and entering on a house that looks like no one’s lived in in years.

Has anyone looked through abandoned houses? What did you find?

2

I’ve done a fair amount of this in my life. Most recently, a house marked for destruction was just begging for me and Mr. Kalhoun to take a walk-thru. It was an old farmhouse that was occupied within the prior 5 or so years. There was some crappy furniture and really, REALLY bad wallpaper. It looked like kids had been drinking beer there fairly recently. There was nothing good to scavenge. My husband lived in a number of old farmhouses before he bought our house. When they were ready to be demolished, he’d take doors, doorknobs, door latches, and that sort of thing. We have quite a few doorknobs laying around. We still have a couple doors, which I was going to make tables out of, but they’re too deteriorated.

3

Actually this is one of my favorite past times. My wife and I have gone into many old dilapidated houses of one variety or another. There was a time when I’d buy old run down places, do a quick fixerup basically, make it look pretty, nothing over say 5k worth of work, and resell it at a profit.
The best property we got and scavenged was an old 19th century Grist Mill. I scavenged some wonderful peices including old Beer signs, an old tiffany lamp, some wrought-iron spikes I use for various things, and old 50 pound wooden pully system, a Sleigh, and the best of all, an old Model T Ford, I found in the basement, behind several hundred tires.
After some environmental cleaning and scavenging, I turned a 98K grist mill on a 1/4 acre lot into a 175K, would-be biker bar…now it’s a small quaint little Irish Bar…type thing!:slight_smile:

4

I have often thought about such things myself, Phlosphr. How did you go about acquiring the skills to actually be moderately successful at fixing houses up?

5

Well to be honest Olent, I have most of the tools needed in my shed to make a house look presentable. With the Mill, I had two large dumpsters outside the week after I bought it. I cleaned out everything I wanted, hired a crew to fill the dumpster’s and sold much of the remaining interior stuff. Then a cleaning crew came to dust up, clean the counters, walls, etc…etc…then I went in with my industrial spray painter (rented from Home Depot) sprayed everywall and ceiling ivory color. waxed the floors and had the plumbing, electrical, and any structural damage brought back up to code. 10k in the instance of the Mill. Then a bit of work to the yard, cut out all the old rhododendrons and vines from the front of the building…and resold it. I had a few friends in on the job, it was quite fun and we finished in two weekends.
Made a good penny on that one. Email me if you’d like more info…

6

I’ve also been through several abandoned places. My husband has a “thing” for them, you might say. The coolest place we ever went through was an abandoned sanitarium that has since been torn down. It was this gorgeous brick building, with patio areas on each end of the roof. We went through each of the floors, which were strewn with a lot of junk, mostly old clothes and books. Lots of the windows were broken out. There were still some hospital beds and wheelchairs there too. Obviously it had been used as a party spot, which we found sad. There was some scary-looking writing and symbols in red spray paint on the walls. I did not go into the basement. I was afraid there was going to be a morgue down there, and I didn’t want to see it. Now I can’t remember if that’s what was down there or not (my husband and a friend did go down there). We took some pictures while we were there too, and were happy that we did because it was torn down just a couple of years later.

7

In college (many years ago) there was an old lady that lived by herself in a house without electricity. After she died it became popular to dare people to go inside. When my turn came, one of the few things left was a large trunk filled with old letters. I picked up one and read it. It was written by a young lady in Charleston, SC and told how her family had sat out on the veranda and watched the shelling of Ft. Sumter. I really wanted to slip it in my pocket, but felt that would be stealing. Years later, I found out that all the letters had been destroyed without being read. :frowning:

Be careful, I once fell thru a porch while investigating an old abandoned house. :eek:

8

When I was in high school in the early 60s.

We lived in the country in a fairly depressed area so there were a lot of old farm house kinds of places around. It was a lot of fun. The girls would get scared (or at least act like they were) glom onto your arm and let you feel their boobies, which was the main attraction for me.

9

I’d heard rumors of this old house for about a year. The story went something like this: Some guy went nuts and shot his wife in the face. Then he killed himself. Uhh, yeah, that’s about it. So years later (I have no idea when this happened), some kids decided to snoop around. After that, the rumors got going and more kids went.

You know how these things get started.

Anyway, by the time I heard the story, there was a message written on the bathroom mirror, in what people assumed was his wife’s blood, that said, “I love you”. The bathtub was coated in blood, the gun was still in the house, etc.

My brother and I decided to head out there and, lucky us, his girlfriend knew right where it was. So the three of us (and this other guy who scared the shit out of me once we got there) went. We found a bunch of old letters from some chick asking about the kids (we’re guessing he had at least one boy, and one other kid of unknown gender), the job, blahblah. Mostly uninteresting. I found a poem written by someone named Jack (or James? I don’t remember now), who we all agreed must be this man’s son.

We went into the bathroom, at which point “this other guy” scared the shit out of me. The house had a sort of horseshoe shaped wall, a curve you couldn’t see around. He jumped out at me and I started bawling. Dick. Anyway, those rumors turned out to be complete bullshit (no surprise there), so we dug around some more.

Bowling trophies, an old mattress, and LOADS of papers littered the living room floor. On the far wall, there was a smudge. I’d hear about this smudge but pretty much figured it was bullshit, like all that talk about the bathroom.

Nope. In what I suppose could be called the middle of this smudge was a tiny piece of bone with a long strand of dirty blonde hair hanging off of it. I almost don’t want to post this because it sounds so unreal. That’s okay; I would never have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. In recent years I’ve considered going back. I’m not even sure the house is still there. I hope it is.

10

I suppose this will surprise no one, but I explored an abandoned and boarded-up psychiatric facility building on the grounds of Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens.

Even lived in it for most of a summer ('86) as a more-pleasant alternative to sleeping in the halfassed house for homeless mentally ill folks sitting 1500 yards away, where I was officially a resident until I moved into the SUNY dorms the next fall.

Pix

11

When I was in girl scouts we used to do a bit of breaking and entering. Once on a hike in eastern KY we discovered the “Danner” place, long since abandoned, and we went with our counselor to have a look see. The place had obviously been vacant for quite a while, as we found calendars from 1958 and 1962 on the kitchen counter and preserves that were preserved…well, God knows when. This was in 1978, by the way. There were still dishes on the dishrack–my guess is that the owner dropped dead of a heart attack and had no relatives who wished to deal with the property, so once he/she was gone it was just left the way it was.

Then a little later on the hiking trip we came across the Glenville KY Retirement Home. But nobody was retiring there. The place was empty and we went in. It was just a small ranch style house but we found a scrapbook from a WWII veteran in the garbage can! It wasn’t a particularly exciting scrapbook–the person who put it together didn’t see much action but…jeez Louise. We did take it back to camp with us–maybe it resides in the hands of the eastern KY girl scout council now.

Oh well, send your kids to girl scout camp or boy scout camp because the kids will learn a lot, although it may take them 25 years to understand what they’ve learned and by then they may also have learned a few things you didn’t want them to learn.

12

I would love to see the photos–unfortunately I got a full screen of this stuff:

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13

Did you get merit badges for it?

14

Mixie, I’m clueless — they look normal in my browsers, and I’m also able to download them and open them in as files. Try right-clicking the links and saving to desktop and see if that works better than left-clicking them.

15

I’m envious. I’ve always wanted to do this, but there don’t seem to be any abandoned places around here.

Maybe we could base a Dopefest on this.

16

Guin - that would be a wonderful! I’d love to go. However, many of the houses are on private land so the legality may be in Question. Heck…I don’t really care…It’d be fun!

17

We’ve never gone into an abandoned house, but Gunslinger and I spent yesterday afternoon at an abandoned wreck of a school. It was the black school during the time of segregation. There was an abandoned house across the street that we took pictures of from outside, near the road, but we didn’t want to go on the property itself. We might have if there hadn’t been two other, inhabited houses next door and across the street, who could call the cops on us; the situation being what it was, we wanted to remain legal as far as possible. (Gun’s press pass probably wouldn’t help too much if we were trespassing in a way that was obviously not newsworthy.)

We’ve also explored (this time WITH trespassing) the sites of several old motels and an abandoned miniature golf course. We’re always on the lookout for new places to explore. We might check out the old railroad hospital in Marshall, TX soon.

Pics of some of the places we’ve been

18

racinchikki - Very cool pics!
Living in CT I stumble across small abandoned homesteads and such from many many years ago. Some dating to the 17th Century. Those are a little more difficult to spot…mainly a crude well and dug out foundation.
However, for those who have seen Blair Witch Project there are many houses that look like it dotting the country side of back country CT. One wouldn’t think they would be there as thisis such a small state, but there are plenty of them.

Unlike when I lived in AZ, most of the abandoned houses out here are not housing any transient squatters. However, when I stumbled upon a back country settlement in AZ, [whilst rock-hounding by myself] I was promptly chased away by 2 very angry older guys squatting there. They chased and threw rocks for a good half mile…I was amazed they kept after me even when I ran down the hiking trail.
Half of me had the mind to go back and see what they were hiding/protecting (i.e. a large vein of gold or amethyst or some other precious metal or mineral)
I was out looking for jasper and agate…Weird experience whatever way you look at it.

19

I got 'em that way–what a great place!

20

There was a fairly ornate Victorian house at Greenlaw’s Corner in Northport, Maine that was famous as a local landmark. There had even been a photo of it in National Geographic, in an article on the Maine coast, sometime in the mid-seventies if I recall. It hadn’t been lived in for many years and was wonderfully picturesque, greyed wood gingerbread falling at all kinds of crazy angles into itself. Making it even better, the land around it had become a cow field dotted with slim white birches; so that apart from the grass and the sky, much of what you saw was monochromatic: the birches, the cows, the silver-grey wood.

I went through it once, when I lived nearby. It was solid enough for the most part, as long as you navigated the fun-house angles carefully. I even managed to get up the stairs and into the attic, where there were trunks of ancient clothes and books, and a basket with hundreds of religious tracts, circa 1908. One souvenir I helped myself to was a brass cylinder-phonograph horn; the other was a small oak shelf with cast-iron brackets, which I had for years in my kitchen.

No one seemed to know when or why the house had been abandoned, but it was so far gone in the early eighties, when I knew it, that it seemed it must not have been a very old house when it was vacated. Some people from Massachusetts bought it around 1984, and had the fire department burn it down; apparently all they wanted was the acreage, which I guess was considerable. Most folks in the surrounding area weren’t too pleased by this, as they’d been watching it decay gracefully for years. Wish I had a picture of it to post. It really was lovely.

Phlosphr, I don’t know where you are in Connecticut, but I grew up in the Tolland area, and I know just what you mean about the number of abandoned houses (in that area, at least). There was an 18th-century inn I discovered in Stafford at one point about twenty years ago. It had pretty much fallen into its cellar-hole, but the front wall was still very much intact and included the most beautiful Georgian doorway with a leaded fanlight, still whole. I tried to buy it (the doorway) but the geezer who owned the property, and who lived in another decrepit old house up the road, didn’t want to hear about it. A few years later, the inn had been demolished and the cellar-hole filled in. I’ve always hoped that doorway wasn’t destroyed too.