Oooh Lordy, what I wouldn’t have given to go through that trunk!
Where was the rest of it?
Here’s a whole ghost town within a day’s trip for you.
Good idea for a dopefest!
Here’s a whole ghost town within a day’s trip for you.
Good idea for a dopefest!
…dang double posts…
Anyway, I found something else everyone might like to see.
When I was younger I did quite a bit of this. I used to like going into houses that were under construction as well. There are cities all over the world that are known for extensive tunnel systems and people do quite a bit of exploration through them. I’ve always wanted to go traipsing through an abandoned sanitarium or somesuch, but with my luck I will end up running into a gang of street toughs who will use me to feed their rabid chihuahuas. Or something.
Olentzero, there were a few trunks and much of the clothing seemed to be in pretty good condition because the trunks had remained closed. I particularly remember that one of them had three or four black silk dresses heavily decorated with jet beads, which I guessed were mourning clothes from maybe the early 1890’s. The silk had decayed a little, mostly where it had been in contact with the walls of the trunk; but otherwise they looked quite fresh. A trunk of men’s clothes, mostly wool apparently, hadn’t survived well at all because of moths.
As for the phonograph, I never did find the machine, though believe me, I looked!
Way back when I was about 16 (1986ish) me and a couple friends used to do a lot of wandering a few miles in any given direction. We lived on the fringes of town, lots of older unoccupied houses, many with very faded or falling apart “for sale” signs. We used to look around, mostly out of curiousity. We never broke into anyplace but found many an open door or exterior basement access.
We did this alot for about a year, found a few trinkets but never anything of value.
We did alot of this wandering at night. We carried a flashlight but we only used it if we found something of interest.
Until one night…
We found a house, no cars, no lights, looking pretty decrepit. We strolled up to the front door which was ajar and walked in. There was a couple old torn up overstuffed chairs and a bunch of magazines strewn about, newest one was like 8 years old.
Upon further exploration there seemed to be a bunch of old clothes strewn about in one of the back bedrooms. Picked up an old tattered looking jacket and found a wide eyed and TERRIFIED little boy of about 8. We both screamed at the top of our lungs and I bolted from the room with blinding speed, nearly running over my friend on the way down the hall. We flew out the front door and hid behind an overgrown hedge in the yard. A woman who we couldn’t see well in the dark came to the door and yelled “We were here first, find somewhere else to sleep!” and slammed the door.
This killed my “urban explorer” habits for many years. Never have gone looking since.
I like to. I also like old cemetaries. I found one once with a shart rock fence just off the highway close to Trementina NM with all the the sandstone headstones in Spanish with the same dates of death on them (1903 I think). Must had been an epidemic. I chased a cow out of it and put some stones in the entrance to keep them out.
Oh. My. God.
Please tell me they weren’t burned down with the house!
I would have been carting them out of there.
I’ve snooped through a couple. One was a mobile home, really. Abandoned when the owners disappeared right before a meth lab raid. Just a lot of junk lying around, dirty magazines, half empty soda bottles, really ugly afgans.
The other was very cool. It was a pretty old house for the area, the ceilings were very low and the kitchen hadn’t been part of the house originally. The husband passed away and the wife couldn’t care for the house and property so she was whisked off to a retirement facility of some sort. As far as we could tell, she took a few things, no more than you’d take if you were going on a long vacation, and everything else was left behind, as though she’d be returning any time. Only this had happened a good ten years ago. Make-up, perfume, hair brushes, even clothes still laid out on the bed that she must have decided not to pack. Everything was horribly dusty, chewed upon, some stuff knocked over, water stained, and lots of evidence of mice.
Everything you can imagine was still there, from the time the house and outbuildings were built it looked like. There were rusted old cars from the twenties, a truck from perhaps the forties, and which car had seats that folded flat to make a bed? One of those. They were all in horrible shape. Another building held farm equipment and old refrigerators and stoves. I remember one refrige had the motor thingy on top and a couple of stoves were woodburning. There were all sorts of preserves down in the cellar, many had burst and I couldn’t tell you what were in the others, with the exception of some ketchup that still had readable labels.
No matter how neat the place was, cleaning it all up would have been a giant headache, never mind that my dad could barely stand up straight in most rooms and so we passed.
Guinastasia, as far as I know, everything in that attic was burned along with the house. I was tempted to cart off more than the horn, but I’d recently been stopped by the local police on suspicion of I-don’t-know-what, while leaving nearby woods with a big bag of yummy back chanterelle mushrooms I’d discovered growing there. The cops weren’t nice, so I didn’t want to see them again. But I’ve always regretted not salvaging more of the great stuff that was in that house.
Sorry, black chanterelles.
Oooo I’d love to do this. Nice to my halls of residence at Uni was an empty school (with a wasps nest, with escapee wasps in my room, and one in my pillowcase first thing in the morning! :eek: ) But there was too many people about and too high a wall to get over to have a look.
Saying that, my Grandfather died recently, I have got the chance to go through his old stuff. Will be interesting. My mother found my grandparents love letters from the beginning of the war.
How did I write nice instead of next?? :smack:
I had the incredible privilege of breaking into and exploring the old, abandoned Ohio Penitentiary in 1990. I went with a couple of guys from work, one was named Jimi, and the other one’s name I forget. It was the most amazing experience, and one which will always be a precious memory. We got in by scaling a short section of barbed wire/chainlink near the prison offices, then slipping through a basement window into the office area. The prison offices still held some furniture and papers, IIRC.
Then came the dramatic cellblock building. The cellblock was about five or six stories high, with white paint peeling off the bars in shreds. When we tried the cell doors, they still locked :eek: . That was the spookiest place I’ve ever been in - just imagining the misery, terror, and evil that must’ve lived there for so many years, made me think I could “feel” the spirits of those who’d lived and died there. The cells were incredibly tiny and made of concrete and iron. Iron beds/shelves were still inside.
We missed “Old Sparky” (the real live electric chair that was supposed to have still been there up until the late 80s) by about a year, if you went by the Columbus rumor mill, but the mill had also speculated that vicious Dobermans were running loose on the Penitentiary grounds, and that definitely wasn’t true. We did go into the “Death House”, though, about 50 yards away from the cellblock building.
We entered every single building on the grounds that we could get into. The Ohio Pen was like a little city, since it held so many prisoners. The chapel was still in pretty good shape, with pews (again, IIRC), but the White Supremacists had found their way in there at some point and spray painted “WHITE POWER!!” and swastikas behind the altar. The infirmary was full of old metal hospital beds. The Penitentiary also had its own fire department building. The boys even climbed the guard tower. A couple of times, helicopters passed over, and we fell into hiding, thinking “they’re after us!!” (yeah, right)
Another amazing thing about the Ohio Penitentiary was its walls. Built of brick and/or stone, they were about 8-10 feet thick and enormously tall. There was no hope of escape for those whom the walls were intended to enclose. Just looking up those rough walls made me lose hope. We were there all afternoon, poking around, looking at things, and wonderfully enough, Jimi took pictures. I can’t even begin to describe all the sights and experiences of that day, especially since it was fourteen years ago (I can’t believe it!). At some points, just being in the atmosphere of a maximum-security prison made us feel disoriented and strange. Without actually experiencing being locked up, we did have some of the emotions and thoughts that (we felt) may have occurred to prisoners.
That was amazing. Soon after the adventure, I moved out of the Columbus area, prior to Jimi’s developing the pictures. (I know this is far-fetched, but…) Jimi, if you’re a Doper, you know who you are and you know who I am too (hopefully), so I would hope that you would e-mail me and let me know whatever happened to those inevitably amazing photos you took. I will pay generously for copies, and I’d love to hear from you!
I think the Ohio Penitentiary was torn down to make way for a sports stadium, or some such thing. That’s nice, but did they have to pick that particular wonder of historical significance? Bastards!
Any other Dopers get to break into that awesome place?