Vacated spaces.
 

We live in a townhouse/duplex thing, with four 2-bedroom apartments in one building. Our neighbours (two girls) moved out recently w/o paying their last rent and left their apartment with doors unlocked and just stuff all over the apartment.

My wife let me in on the fact that they left the doors unlocked, and out of curiosity I peeked in. There was junk all over... abandoned clothes, computer parts, little furniture pieces...

Now, I don't know why, but I checked the place out a couple more times in the following days. It just fascinated me a lot. I have always found vacated apartments and houses fascinating, ever since I was a kid. Especially ones with some miscellaneous items left behind. Evidence of life.

Kind of like peeking into someone's life there, after the fact. I dunno.

There was a certain 'danger' element to it I guess, knowing I should not be there.

Not sure why I am writing about this.

I guess I am wondering if other people have ever experienced similar fascination, or whether I am just some kind of nut in the making.

One time a friend and I were driving in central Utah, about an hour and a half from Salt Lake City where we lived. On the side of the road, in the middle of nowhere, there was a white stucco building with Miami Vice pink and green trim. The sign said, "Dr. Thayne's Healthouse" and below that, "Where your results is our product". Literally, just like that. Results is. Little parking lot sprouting weeds between the cracks.

We parked there and took a few pictures, and when we went around back, we found a back door open, so we went in. Inside there were some abandoned weight machines, a bar with a few broken stools, and against a wall, a whole row of those 1950's style belly-jiggler machines that look like overgrown blenders. We took a bunch of pictures inside before moving on.

sounds like the voyeur in you is coming out.....

I am in the RE business and have been in that situation many times. It is a little voyeuristic but it makes you realize that everyone's 'stuff' is the same. Some clothes, some furniture, sometimes music, books, etc.

Sometimes I wonder that when people leave stuff behind is this really what they are running away from. That leaving all their stuff behind is somehow cathartic and that by leaving the stuff they can leave the problems also. The proverbial 'new start'.

Now you want freaky......go into the home of someone who has died. Not violently in the house but from an accident or heart attack while away. They did not know that would be the last time they would be leaving that house. Walking around that house will give you the willies. (((shiver)))

You need to get yourself to Pittsburgh to check out "In the Dwelling House" presented by The Mattress Factory Gallery.

http://www.mattress.org/index.cfm?ev...d=70&c=Current

It's a dilapidated old working class home that's been turned over to an artist. You're given a hard-hat and a flash light and then left on your own to explore it and discover its secrets. Very cool.

I think it is inherent in human nature to explore the unknown. Any space not your own, is unknown.
It is also human nature to be curious about the nature of others, and to examine the signs of their existence.
There are several websites dedicated to the exploration of abandoned/disused spaces. Urban Exploration.

I balance this with the respect of other peoples property.
Rather, I attempt to. Or did. I rarely get such opportunities these days.

Sounds cool to me.

Even when the space is familiar, it can be interesting.

Almost 20 years ago I worked in a startup that had its own small building in downtown San Francisco, though in a part off the beaten track. They ran out of money and went out of business; one Friday afternoon our venture capitalists came in and laid us all off.

Several months later I was passing by the old place on foot and, for old times sake, tried the door. The outer door opened. The inner door opened. I walked in. Everything seemed just as we'd left it on the last day (well, somebody'd taken out the computers). When I flipped the wall switch, the lights even came on. But no one was there, upstairs or downstairs.

It was so strange, seeing that phantom office where I used to work, lying untouched and unlocked months after the fact. As if it had been completely forgotten by the world even while thousands of cars drove by each day.

I considered nicking one of the swivel chairs, but resisted :-).

No, you're not alone in that fascination.

So, they wear thongs? :)

Perhaps you might be interested in Urban Exploration.

It's what people call exploring abandoned spaces - missile silos, factories, housing complexes, subway and steam tunnels, etc.

I used to do it quite a bit when I was younger.

I did a lot of this while skipping high school. :)

I was working for a theatre festival in Edmonton, and one day we went to a recently closed down bar/nightclub to salvage some booths to use in the temporary lobby we had set up.

Imagine your typical rock/sports bar with lots of mirrored and neon beer signs. Inside was pretty skeezy, but the original 4 story building was a fine piece of Art Moderne design. The whole thing was soon to be converted into condos.

Anyways, it looked as if the owners of the bar had simply left in a huff. The manager's (?) office was trashed and the place was a mess, with furniture and cutlery strewn everywhere. After working away with crowbars and whatnot to get the booths out for a couple of hours, we used our break to go exploring.

The second floor was really dark because most of the windows had been drywalled in. We where depending entirely on flashlights to see and it was pretty creepy, so we bashed out some of the drywall blocking the windows to let light in. It was another club! The walls where painted entirely black with glow-in-the-dark paint spatters for effect and the rooms were bare. I guess there used to be only UV lighting in the club.

The third floor was more conventional; a series of small office like rooms and flourescent lighting - all in beige. While most of the rooms where empty, a few had mattresses in them. Prostitution? Who knows, but it all seemed pretty suspect.

The fourth floor was taken over by pigeons. The whole space was stripped back with no walls, and every large window was exposed and open. There must of been hundreds of pigeons milling about and the stench of guano was pretty strong. Yet, somehow this was less stifling than the floors below.

This was about ten years ago, and I'd almost forgotten. We worked pretty hard to get those stupid skanky booths out, but it was well worth it for the adventure.

Old vacated buildings (and some newer ones too) have always interested me. There is a place here in Utah called Nine Mile Canyon that my family used to visit when I was in high school...a long dirt road back in the middle of nowhere with several old abandoned houses. I finally talked my parents into stopping one time and exploring inside one of them. There wasn't much inside but a bunch of rotted boards...but it was fun anyway!

Yeah, I had friends who did that in San Francisco. They were also into climbing tall structures that weren't abandoned, like the Bay Bridge and Golden Gate bridge. One night I'm sitting home and this one guy calls and says, "Want to climb Sutro Tower with me? I've done it before." Sutro Tower is that big spidery TV tower on top of a mountain in the middle of SF, and there were gangways inside the big hollow legs, so danger was minimal. So we were out there that very night. Unfortunately, we set off the perimeter alarm and had to skeddadle. So we explored a gigantic, abandoned temple instead, and later did an abandoned railroad hospital.

This guy had pictures of himself on top of the towers of every major bridge on the east and west coasts. All climbed illegally. He's now a respected local historian and preservationist -- and I'll let him stay that way! :-)

My uncle, when young and in school, had a friend who worked as a security guard at what is now again the Biltmore in Miami. Between its times as a hotel it served as a VA hospital, though when his friend worked there it had ceased to even be a hospital. So his job was to make sure no one broke in to steal the stuff left over from its hospital days, and my uncle would often accompany him on his rounds. The building was supposed to be haunted, so one night they took several anatomical models and strung them up inside a corridor so that when the door to the corridor opened, the dummies would fall on the person who came through the door. My uncle and his friends invited a female friend to join them on the rounds that night and urged her to go through the door. She went through the door, the dummies fell, and she fainted dead away. It frightened my uncle and his friend so badly they swore to never pull that kind of prank again.

My uncle has lots of cool stories about the Biltmore.

Personally, one of my favorite vacated spaces is Fort Casey. It's an old fort on Whidbey Island in Washington, and it's so interesting. There are some rooms of the fort you cannot get to because of the water level, but as the water ebbs and flows you can get into different parts of the fort. It's so eerie. Most of the fort has no lighting, so it has to be explored by flashlight. Similarly, Fort Stevens in Oregon is a very cool place to explore.

The company I previously worked for was in a large office building with another company. One weekend, the other company just bugged out. Skipped town or something. They left TONS of stuff in their office space. They had clear glass on their doors and we could see in. One day, there was a realtor that came by trying to rent the space out, and they didn't close the door all the way. Me and some of the girls snuck in and nosed around. They left furniture, including some REALLY nice office chairs that cost around 900 each. The refrigerator still had several 12-packs of sodas and juice and stuff, coffee, boxes of plastic flatware, cleaning supplies. We loaded UP!!!!! What were they gonna do? Have us arrested????