When I was in high school, I was part of a somewhat reckless group of risk-takers. As soon as one of our group got access to a car (it was a 1987 IROC Z28 Camaro) we spent many an after-school afternoon on various adventures out in the sticks, which usually amounted to pyromania, petty vandalism, insanely dangerous driving, and other things that I probably should not have been involved with.
One day during our pretty loosely supervised photography class, in which we did absolutely nothing (I took photography again the next year and actually got good at it, but this year it was a jerk-off class) one of my friends told us a story that he had heard. The story was that there was an “abandoned lab” out in the woods on an old country road heading towards the lake, and that there was a lot of weird, crazy shit in this so-called lab. This guy claimed to know exactly where it was, so we cut class and went to the parking lot to embark on the journey to the “lab.”
It was a hot and sunny day in late May. We went in a big group. The guy with the Camaro was using his dad’s truck that day so some of us piled into the back of it. My friend Bryce took his Suburban, and some people went with him. I rode with my friend, whose real name was Dennis but whom everybody called Bacon, in his land yacht Olds 88. He was playing a Grateful Dead cassette and that was the first time I had ever heard the song “Sugar Magnolia,” by the way, which I instantly liked. We drove in this three-vehicle convoy down the old country road, and eventually stopped at the bottom of a steep hill with a scary-looking, ramshackle house at the top of it.
We climbed up this hill and into the front yard of the house. My friend led us through the yard, past the house, and into the dense woods, down a slightly sloping ravine. There was a stone building in extreme disrepair. “Here’s the lab,” he said. I thought, “OK, how crazy could this be?”
The first thing we saw inside the lab was “666” painted in red on the wall. “Oh, come on,” I thought. “Some high school kids just like us probably painted that. Big deal.” Then I saw the animal fur. There was a disconcerting amount of animal fur all over the floor. I couldn’t really tell if it was the corpses of animals that had died, or if it was actually skins that someone had skinned off of animals. From how it looked, I suspected the latter. There were also glass vials everywhere, scattered all over the floor, on workbenches, on shelves, etc. “Hmm…I guess it actually was a lab.”
Then we walked out into a little courtyard area. There were what looked like the remnants of huge stone chimneys. Circular enclosures coming up out of the ground, maybe four and a half feet high. I wasn’t really sure what they were. Inside them, there were piles of glass jars. Inside a lot of the jars were HUGE dead bugs. I don’t know what the fuck kind of bugs they were, but they were huge. Some of them seemed like they were six or seven inches. They looked kind of like crickets or grasshoppers, and that’s the best description I can give since I don’t know the first thing about insects. But they were HUGE FUCKING BUGS. Some of the jars also contained dead rats.
After we left the lab, we went into the house on the property, figuring it to be abandoned. There was stuff everywhere, boxes of junk piled high as the ceiling, piles of junk gathering dust all over the place. Our natural response was to smash a bunch of it with baseball bats. (Later we heard that someone actually lived in that house.)
I never found out what that “lab” actually was. We went back to it a second time, but there was a car in the driveway of the house so we turned around. (If you’re the person who lives in that house, by the way, I’m sorry for breaking into your house and smashing a bunch of your stuff with a baseball bat. I’ve changed, really.)
There might be more interesting things that I’ve done, if I searched my memories really hard, but this incident stands out in how vividly I remember it. The freedom, recklessness, danger, stupidity of those times!
