Wes Mantooth

When I was younger (around 14 or 15) I was really into doing the whole ghost hunting thing...yup long before it was cool to do on TV! Anyway after about a year of this I realized I thought the paranormal was pretty much bunk and what I really enjoyed doing was poking around old abandoned buildings. It was just plain old fascinating, like opening a time capsule or peering into a once vibrant world that no longer existed.

For awhile before I really got to busy to pursue it I spend a lot of my free time with friends hiking around looking for abandoned buildings. Old farms, potato houses, schools, power plants,Nike sites, hospitals and houses were all fair game.

So is anybody here into this kind of stuff? Have any great stories about it? Photos? Any great abandoned places you'd like to check out? I'd love to hear about it if you feel like posting it.

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My all time favorite abandoned place to visit was Loring AFB, a cold war relic sitting in the middle of nowhere in Norther Maine. The largest SAC base in the US and the first defender against a soviet attack, it for a time held (or so I'm told) the largest stockpile of Nuclear weapons on the face of Earth. It closed down in 1994 and for a short time afterwards was just a ghost town, it really was just abandoned...the run way was being used for drag racing until nearby towns realized they should start sending out police officers to patrol the area. Needless to say for somebody interested in exploring abandoned buildings, this was as close to heaven as you could get.

The base itself was pretty fun to explore (really an abandoned city, houses, power plants, rec centers churches, stores) the but the abandoned weapons storage facility was down right amazing. At the heart of the storage area was a concrete building that went down below the surface to reveal a labyrinth of hallways and massive vault doors where they did capsule maintenance. A short ways across the forest was the Mole Hole (another off limits area), a bunkhouse surrounded by a massive fence that housed fighter pilots on alert for in coming attacks. In the event of one these were the very first responders, I can only imagine what it must have been like in there during the Cuban Missle Crisis or Able Archer.

There was just something so surreal about wandering around a place that at one time you'd have been shot for stepping foot in (the concrete and steel gun towers are still there). I wish I could find my old pics from some of my visits there in the mid 90's, I'd love to post them. I'll see if I can maybe find some online if anybody is interested, I know I've seen them before.

Here's a wiki passage on the weapons storage facility (the last passage deals with a particularly creepy and frightening urban legend about the base...I'd love to know if its true):

The Nuclear Weapons Storage Area at Loring once operated as a separate, top secret facility. Originally called Caribou Air Force Station, the remote area to the northeast of Loring’s property was the first U.S. site specifically constructed for the storage, assembly, and testing of atomic weapons.[1]

A parallel ribbon of four fences, one of which was electrified, surrounded the heart of the storage area. This area was nicknamed the “Q” area, which denoted the Department of Energy’s "Q" level security clearance required to enter.

In June 1962, the Atomic Energy Commission released its custody and ownership of the weapons to the Air Force. The personnel and property of Caribou Air Force Station were absorbed into that of the adjacent Loring Air Force Base.

On the nights of October 28th and 29th in 1975, there were two sightings of unidentified helicopters breaching the base perimeter in the area of the WSA just north of Loring AFB. One of the helicopters reported landed within the weapons storage area. (463 Nuclear Weapons Specialists stationed within the fence cannot confirm this)

Now a days the base is full of businesses that have moved in to utilize the old buildings, others have been torn down and some are just sitting there beyond repair. You can still go out there and wander around, as I'm told the weapons storage area is still intact but the storage bunkers are being used to house flax and I believe the woods surrounding it are a wildlife sanctuary now. Still pretty cool but nothing beats how amazing it was to walk around out there right after it closed. If you google map Limestone, ME you can get a pretty good look at it from above (a little northwest of the town), the storage area is off to the northeast of the runway. Its hard to see but you can still make out the fence lines if you look closely.

On a side note the area around the base was peppered with old Nike sites (Nike missile launch sites) that were pretty darn fascinating in their own right.

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