Where You're Madder Than I Am: Part II

I know. A month. Summer is just crazy. I’m putting in a lot of 70 hour work weeks these days.

First off: I’m moving my professional wedding work off of this blog, and will be posting it solely on my website blog from now on. It serves the most purpose there. I’ll be using this space just for my own personal work, whether that’s abandoned stuff or anything else I’m in the mood to shoot. On that note, here are a few more super old photos I haven’t had time to finish until recently!

The thing about exploring old buildings is, it can be very personal. Every single place I visit has its own vibe. Some of them are incredibly peaceful. Some of them are sad. Some, very rarely, I don’t really connect with much at all — I respectfully take my photos and leave, content with one visit being both hello and goodbye.

Once in a while, a place I do connect with becomes so much a part of me that I feel called there. And I can’t explain to you the slightest bit why, but being there shuts something up in my head. That’s how I feel about here.

Why is this place different for me? I dunno. It just is. Maybe it’s in part because I never feel like I’m in an abandoned building here. Or alone. This place isn’t empty. It’s alive and breathing.

The stuff left behind here is surreal and near the extent of being disturbing. Biohazard waste left in garbage bins. Blood and organ tissue samples piled on stockroom shelves. Fluid in the pumps in the morgue. Filled scripts on the pharmacy floor — chicken-scratch doctor’s writing prescribing Lithium, Haldol, Xanax.

A much-beloved wheelchair that has probably been sat in more times by explorers than patients, at this point.

The underground tunnels are a labyrinth, and they were flooded in several inches of stagnant, disgusting water. We used them anyway. What’s legionnaire’s disease between friends.

(Nobody got legionnaire’s disease.)

The autopsy table has also probably had more explorers on it than patients.

Hydrotherapy tubs are a pretty common find. A huge waste to see them all left like this.

We’re in my favorite building now. This is where the heart of my connection lies, for some ungodly reason. Whatever it is that has attached itself to me, it lives right here, in these hallways.

I love this hallway so much. So much. I remember standing here looking down, completely spacing out, listening to the wind slam doors on the floors above me like I was waiting for some unknown thing to slither out from behind that cracked beige door. The smell in here isn’t mold or mildew or rot — it’s antiseptic, alcohol, disinfectant. Chemical. Hospital.

I went right back shortly after I took these photos (which are from the dead of winter, for the record). I can’t seem to stay away for long.

‘Tiiil then.