I live in a mostly rural county in southern Maryland (St. Mary’s county, if that means anything to anyone.) We’ve lived here 17 years and over that time, I’ve noticed a lot of houses, mobile homes, and even businesses left to rot. I can’t help but wonder what led to the decaying buildings.
I guess that former residences belonged to someone who either had no relatives or none nearby, and upon their passing, no one knew or cared. I suppose one day, the county will condemn the property and sell it for back taxes (unless that’s already happened and the new owners are just letting it sit.)
There is one, tho, that a local told us the background story. It was a bar once upon a time, but it’s been empty and deteriorating for at least 25 years. Apparently, the owner had a bitter divorce and was required to give his ex half of the proceeds of the business. So rather than pay her, he boarded up the building and let it sit. In the last 3 or 4 years, it’s really gotten ratty - sections of the roof have fallen in and the boards over the doors and windows are rotting. The guy who told us the backstory is in construction and he said that building and the one next to it are now scheduled to be demolished for new commercial construction. I’m wondering if one or the other of the divorced couple is/are now dead.
Mundane, pointless, and I figured I’d share, thinking maybe someone else has similarly fascinating tales to tell.
Some 20 years ago, an old farmer (widowed) died. He had 5 children, but only one had taken care of him in the last years, even manning the farm. He had a farm of his own nearby and wanted to add the land to his own, but the others siblings were away and wanted to sell the house as holiday home or even to make an hotel.
So basically they couldn’t make an arrangement and while lawyers fought, the house was not maintained and in 5 years was a ruin.
The farmer finally bought the land, but the price the others siblings got was not even close to repay the lawyer’s bill.
Many years ago a buddy and I went ghost hunting one night. We both worked for the newspaper and we decided if we got caught, we’d say we were doing a story (yeah, I’m sure that would have worked).
We went to the Belleview Biltmore, which was creepy AF when it was open and running. Seriously, the Overlook’s got nothing on that place. Wondering around in the dark was the best kind of scary fun.
There was also the burned out shell of a retirement community, the ruins of which stood for years before they finally rebuilt it. It was so disturbing, I wouldn’t look at it when I drove by. I never knew the story behind it, but it just filled me with sorrow and dread when I saw it. That was the least fun part of our evening.
Back when I first moved here, the remains of the original skyway bridge disaster were still lying like a corpse next to the new Sunshine Skyway. At the time I wasn’t aware of the accident but the sight of the ruined bridge disturbed me greatly. Now most of it is cleared away with just a bit left for a fishing pier. Still hate to go anywhere near it or the new bridge for that matter.
I’m absolutely fascinated by abandoned buildings, ghost towns, and the like. Indeed, I wanted to do my Master’s thesis on the economic and geopolitical forces that contribute to the downfall of towns both big and small. My proposal wasn’t approved but I still love the subject.
Houses create a similar fascination in me. Once in a while someone out for a hike here in the PNW will come across the foundation or still-standing fireplace of a long-abandoned cabin or house and post the picture to Instagram or Facebook. Those pictures are so curious to me. I can’t help but wonder how many people lived in each of those particular houses, wonder if kids raised there, or how many warm nights were spent around the fireplace that now sits as an empty shell far from civilization, or how much laughter and sadness and the basic ups and down of life were experienced under a long-gone roof.
I have a long commute each day to work on a narrow backcountry county road. I pass a beautiful house that sits on the edge of a huge meadow that itself is on the rim of a large valley. The view is absolutely to die for and the house looks wonderful: two stories, big windows, a wrap-around porch facing the valley. There’s a small apple and peach orchard in the back yard and a small barn / shed on the edge of the property. It looks like the type of house I would love to live in… but it’s empty, boarded up. Some of the siding is missing and in the pre-dawn darkness as it slowly looms out of the fog it gives off a decidedly creepy vibe (kind of like the empty house at the end of The Blair Witch Project).
The house my mother grew up in sat abandoned for almost two decades, slowly being left to decay. I’m told a distant cousin of hers has recently bought the land and is slowly rehabilitating the house but I have not been back to see it for myself. In that case it was poor financial management that caused the family to lose the property. While there are a multitude of reasons, I’m sure, for houses to become old and decrepit and ultimately abandoned, money is likely at the root of most of those reasons.
As I cycle round the country lanes south of London, there’s a piece of the countryside where I ride past a lot of these:
Here’s another one, just over the hedge:
You can zoom in on these images.
I’ve actually posted about these before. I can cycle for quite a few miles along what was, 80 years ago, a Stop Line. There were three Stop Lines built between the south coast and central London, defensive lines whose purpose was to delay an invading German army.
The Pill Boxes pictured are the obvious remains - they were built to be hellish strong, so they’re not going anywhere; equally, at the end of the war they were of no use and were simply abandoned. If you’re in the right place, they are still pretty numerous. In use they were manned by the home guard - those too old or unfit to be conscripted. I read of, or saw in a documentary, brief detail of recent military modelling performed to try to establish if the system would actually have worked. Answer: probably; it would have slowed invading forces enough to allow the navy to get from Scapa Flow to the English Channel and break up the German supply chain.
I wonder similar things. You have to know that as the house was being built and dreams were being dreamed of life in that new home, they can’t have imagined that some day it would wind up rotting away, neglected, and empty. Very sad…
Long ago, when I had a Press Pass, you would be surprised how powerful a tool that was.
Wouldn’t help with anything serious, but trespassing without an owner complaint? Back in the day, assuming you were polite to the Officer, it likely would have got you escorted out, with a warning. If you weren’t doing damage or anything, even kids might get the same treatment.
We went down into some abandoned tunnels and stuff from WW2 out in Palos Verdes When you got deeper, very spooky.
I pass through Beatty, Nevada on my way to Burning Man and on the east edge of town is a sign for El Sueño, Resort - Hotel - Casino. I’m doubting even a foundation was put down because like Ozaymandias,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
El sueño means the dream in Spanish and I’ve wondered whose dream lasted long enough to get the sign up, only to be crushed by reality.
Do you mean White’s Point? I recall a girl scout campout there where one of the girls’ dad came along and took us on a hike through old bunkers and (I think) an airplane hangar. I was going to mention it but it’s not really “abandoned”, as it’s part of a park and is open to the public.
Viceland had a really good series…it looks like you can buy episodes on Prime but not sure where else you might find it. Rick McCrank (skateboarder) visits places like abandoned malls, the Salton Sea, and more.
He also did a program about Route 66 that was excellent.
I read an article 5-10 years ago that noted a lot of people didn’t default on their mortgages in the subprime boom quite like you might have imagined. In those days when interest was low, some builders were doing some very shoddy work and moving on to the next shoddy work. One man took a bath in his tub upstairs and when he came back down to talk to his wife, the ceiling collapsed…they hadn’t hooked the tub drain to anything, so on first use it filled the space below it, which was the ceiling above the dining room. The contract required that he go to arbitration. Many couldn’t afford to repair the place AND continue to make payments; they ended up walking away.
Out here in rural New England there are endless stone cellar holes, remains of small water mills, and of course, rock walls, in what appears to be untrammeled forest. The story of these is simply the story of colonization, stripping of the topsoil by deforestation, and the opening to Europeans of unspoiled land to the west. Around the turn of the 19th century there was a mass exodus from the poorer hill farms here.
The public radio program This American Life ran a story (link is to the transcript; the audio story is here) about twenty years ago about some kids who found an abandoned house in New England and what they eventually learned about what happened there. It’s kind of a long story, so difficult to summarize but about what you’d expect; people died, the estate wasn’t settled and the house decayed. Ironically, what the kids took from the house survived while the house and all of the contents went to the dump.
Last week an urban explorer found 89 boxes of cremated remains in an old church. Some of the families contacted had what they thought were their loved ones remains at home but there is a box with that name on it. So who knows who got what?
A kind of famous one is Nicosia International Airport in Cyprus, which has been abandoned since 1974. The short version is that the airport ended up in the middle of a war zone when Turkey invaded and now it sits in the no man’s land dividing the Greek and Turkish portions of Cyprus.
Many of those mortgages were also issued to people who had no business having them; the people involved just wanted the commission and they exploited a lot of people.
Back to our regularly scheduled programming.
My brother likes to post unusual properties for sale on Facebook. This one showed up yesterday; it’s in a small town south of Fort Dodge, Iowa, and I suspect that whoever purchases it will do so for the lot, because the stained-glass window is pretty much the only thing that’s salvageable. He captioned it, "And on the 8th day, the Lord said ‘Let there be mold!’’
I’ve lived here almost 10 years, and there’s a large storefront in a small strip mall a few blocks away that has been vacant the whole time. Lookin in the windows, it appeared to be some kind of outlet store, and only in the past couple years have the contents been removed. Somebody has been paying rent, etc. all this time.
Yes, part of it, but my Dad was stationed at that Nike Missile base, and he gave us directions to a few other places, which are now in that park, there were two gun emplacements, one of which is Battery Bunker The Fort MacArthur Museum Association: Battery Paul D. Bunker
Before the park was open, you could get pretty far into the tunnels. I doubt you can now.
There were two total ruins in the Hollywood hills we used to explore, one if which was supposedly Houdini’s- stairs, walkways, paths to nowhere, etc., then another around the corner, which someone said was Wrigleys, but I doubt that.
You could always find a seance, sabbat or black mass on Halloween.