Halloween of course is the time where we face our fears, or at least our retarded getups and slutty womenfolk, which isn't so bad especially when they pull off a Sarah Palin. ........... ah yes....... Well anyway, while that's all well and good, I still believe Halloween should still primarily be about scaring the living shit out of you, and I figure now is as good as time as any to face one of them.
Now if I were to go on and on about some of the things I'm really afraid of, it'd just turn into a depressing bore, and if I depressed you I wouldn't be doing me job. But there is one thing I find genuinely unsettling that is also fascinating and I think worthy of giving a good look at.
I'm talking about :thunder strikes: ABANDONED BUILDINGS.
Abandoned buildings are really cool, but also really creepy. They're inherently creepy. If you're in an abandoned building, it means that someone went through all the trouble of building one, then inhabiting or working in one, and then one day... gone in a flash. Everyone left, like an audience that accidentally stumbled into a showing of an Uwe Boll film. It means that you're in an area that everyone decided was better to run away from.
So when you get right down to it, aside from the actual dangers that an abandoned building has (rotting floors, shoddy walls, deranged hobos living in them, the fact that a lot of them seem to be in New Jersey), abandoned buildings are a representative of the creeping horror that sometimes befalls places.
Before you consider this concept alien, keep in mind that some of the most famous buildings in the world are really just abandoned buildings. Angkor Wat is abandoned (sorta). The Pyramids are abandoned, though they were pretty much designed to be off-limits anyway. The Coliseum is perhaps the quintessential abandoned building. Imagine Giants Stadium 150 years from now, assuming they don't demolish it. Oh who am I kidding, of course they will. Just hope the Jets are in it at the time etc. etc.
Of course, none of those places really feel like abandoned buildings. The most dangerous things about them basically amount to German tourists, which can be pretty bad, admittedly, or the occasional Italian-American tourist gal, a gal I want to do outrageous things with. RETURNING TO THE TOPIC AT HAND, the Coliseum may be impressive, but it's not scary. It's history. And history is only sorta scary.
Modern or nearly modern abandoned buildings are a whole nother matter. A whole nother? Really? Anyway, unlike the places mentioned above, these places are not kept up and nobody wants to see them, which makes them prime spots for spook hunters. Why don't we take a look ourselves?
This deligftul snap was taken in Kings Park, NY, not far from me grandma actually. This is a former mental insitution, and there are a LOT like them around the country, but particularly in the northeast. Buildings like these are one of Ronald Reagan's lasting gifts since he didn't think that spending money to keep insane people in asylums was really worth it.
Most of these buildings are right delapidated, but they are still standing and, intriguingly enough, are partially furnished, as if the inmates and workers were just taking off for the weekend. One of my favorite pictures of these places, which unfortunately I have not been able to track down for this entry, is of one such hospital room, its floor littered almost completely with what looked like little pill containers. Why were there all these pill containers on the floor like that? I don't know. But there you have it.
Not to leave the ladies out of it, here's another prominent theme in abandoned building exploration (hereon known as "urbexing"): hallways. This photo came from Worcester Park, an abandoned mental health facility in Massachusetts. Perhaps you've been? Hallway shots always strike me as particularly fascinating because hallways are places where people HAVE to be. A room in any given building can be empty, but there always have to be people in the hallway going somewhere, right? Hallways are also good for channeling wind into scary noise to SCARE YOU TO FUCK on windy days, so they have that bonus.
But hospitals aren't the only thing that's been abandoned. As the economy continues to slither towards depression, expect to see more of these: abandoned malls. In fact, there's an entire website devoted to them. Heree's another creepy motif for you: a place of commerce, of people going to and fro, shopping for tennis shoes or ginger snaps or whatever it is ragamuffins buy these days. The noise of people eating, talking, playing arcade games (oh wait, this isn't 1989!!!), of mall cops engaging in savage brawls with skateboarders in front of a Krispy Kreme.
Well, no more. The story of malls closing down is actually rather morbid. First one store closes. Then another. Then another. Before long, entire sections of a mall are nothing but closed stores, shuttered to keep people from rummaging through... the empty shelves I guess? After a while, it no longer becomes economically viable to keep a mall open, and they eventually turn into this.
A good abandoned mall will still have some signage in tact, a reminder of bygone days, of some proprietors holding out until the end, until all that's really left of civilization is a Prada 50% off sale sign, now collecting dust.
(50% off for Prada is still like $300 by the way.)
There are still other kinds of abandoned buildings, but by now you get the picture. The only thing scarier than an abandoned building, though, is of course abandoned towns. Ghost towns.
Above is actually one of the world's biggest ghost towns in the making: Detroit. Imagine Detroit as an abandoned mall writ large, except the suburbs are Walmart, steadfastly holding strong while Trader Joe's and Crate & Barrel (pours a bottle of liquor on the ground) die off. If you think I exaggerate, remember that many of Detroit's skyscrapers are literally sprouting grass. They're that unkempt because nobody is using the damn things.
The quintessential ghost towns can all be found in Arizona and Nevada and New Mexico, i.e. old gold rush towns. But those sites suck because most of them were built with dinky wooden structures that fell over after the last panhandler farted, so there's nothing much to see at all. Actually, ghost towns are pretty rare; well at least a ghost town that's still in tact.
So where are the good ghost towns? Well, old Baghdad is still there, kinda. Jonestown, Guyana is mostly gone so it's probably not even worth the trip.
Ah yes, there is one really big one, and mostly new at that:
Our old friends the Soviets were happy to provide us with one. You know what this is. Someone claims to have taken a bike tour (look here for more info) through it, but even if her story is utter shite, the photos are not. This is perhaps the best raw ghost town on the planet, a view of an entire people disappearing overnight, in many places dropping whatever they were doing. Except not to read, but to get the fuck outta dodge.
Gunkanjima (Battleship Island) is another fascinating place that is mostly in tact, though that becomes less so with each passing year. Gunkanjima was basically a floating coal mine in operation until 1974. People not only worked on it, they also lived there. If you're ever heading back to the Pacific and have time to kill in Japan, you can take a boat out to it as the island reopened for visitors this year.
A more obscure place is Centralia, Pennsylvania. There's hardly anything left of Centralia, actually, except roads that look like this. No, the drivers weren't that bad nor did they keep forgetting to take off their snow tires. The roads, much like everything else that was in the area, were rended under thanks to coal fumes. Centralia was built on top of a coal vein, and when the vein caught on fire, sulfur and CO2 and all sorts of happy shit seeped up through the ground, poisoning the area.
Fortunately nobody died (I think), but naturally the area was uninhabitable, and will be for a few centuries because coal fires are impossible to put out. It turns out that there is not a blanket large enough to smother it, unless everyone in the country wants to make a quilt big enough to cover PA. Hmmmm, actually, now that I think about it, that doesn't sound like a bad idea...
Today Centralia looks like that. You can get a better view on Google maps, actually, but this is the gist of it. Empty suburban lots. I'm not even sure there's a single structure left standing, but there are still roads available. Sometimes I wonder if people attempt to use it as a shortcut when passing through.
Another famous ghost town is the area around Love Canal. The story is baasically the same as Centralia's though, and no, Al Gore was not the inspiration for it. He was the inspiration for the Love Story, get your lies straight. There are a few more ghost towns rendered so by environmental circumstances, but they all basically look like this today.
I don't know what it says about the state (actually I do know and I'm just trying to be noice), but New Jersey has an awful lot of abandoned sites in it. It's a pretty good starting place for urbexing, a "target-rich environment" as we say in the militurry.
The closest I've been to an abandoned building (aside from driving past Kings Park's mental ward a few times) has been in my own town. A house down the block-ish had its inhabitants abruptly take off, leaving behind a rusty ol' house. Actually it wasn't rusty, bricks don't rust you fool. YOU FOOL. The inside was almost totally empty and the outside was remarkably unkempt. I don't think the owners gave much of a rat's ass, which frankly I think is great because if I (we) ever get a house, you can be damn sure I'm not doing any siding, no roofing, MAYBE I'll clean the gutters like once. And don't get any ideas about adding a new wing, we're not doing it. Honey... no, honey, I said no. NO.
Alas, the house was only abandoned for like a week before someone new came in. Now they're renovating. Actually I think they're done renovating. Who cares. For a while the entire front lawn was dead and it was great and we had fun and shit. The house and I, I mean. We had fun. You can't take that away from us!!!
Where will the future's ghost towns be? I can't say for sure, but Detroit is already on its way. With my help, it could be the biggest urbexplace in the planet. Dubai is another candidate now that people realize that building a theme park in the middle of a desert is a less than ideal idea (a lettandealea, if you will). Las Vegas is another candidate. Basically any city that's going to be fucked royally hard by even the slightest bit of climate change, so all of the southwest USA is on notice, as is Florida and New Orleans.
The problem is that abandoned buildings and such are not that accessible. I mean sure, a determined soul can break into an abandoned building, as many have, but it's illegal to do so and there are usually fences and wild animals around to deter you. And exposed metal. Oh my God they're all tetanus factories! Ewwwwwwww...
Nevertheless, a good birthday gift (ahem ahem) I think would be a trip to one of those places, just to wander around in a world that people decided to flee from. I'd just like to see what people leave behind, because you can tell a lot about people from what they leave behind. If you had to flee your home right this second, what would you leave behind, knowing that future archeologists like the famed Indiana Jones would be rummaging through your shit, looking for the Arc of the Covenant in your stash? (Note to Indy: If you're reading this, it's in the other seat-box thing. Next to the basement fireplace. Just lift up the seat. You'll know what I'm talking about. Basically don't look through my shit though. It's... um, it's really boring. Really really boring. Yeah.)
(In lieu of an abandoned building, I would accept a certain photoshoot of you in a certain football jersey of a certain football team, particularly of a certain football player named a certain Eli certain Manning, certainly. Ahem ahem.)
Well there you have it, kids. Did that creep you out? Well don't be scared, it's not like there are ghosts in them. I mean, why the hell would a ghost hang out in Asbury Park? You're a goddamn ghost, you can go anywhere in the world, and you're just gonna hang out at an abandoned movie theater? Okay, ghost man, I'm not gonna tell you what to do, but...
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