This is the exploration that almost made me stop exploring. I probably should have left this building alone. Someone has responded to the last fire collection I put up something that echoes what I felt here. (And I have another one where a fire happened in my backlog, but it's one of multiple buildings; I don't know why so many fires happen around here.) They said something along the lines of how buildings that were abandoned due to fires depressed them. I think we all have our lines, places we won't go or categories we won't touch.




This is a place I go by every two weeks or so. I noticed it was burned out, then I noticed it was boarded up, then I noticed the window was open. When it did one of three snows this winter, I went in. The absolute level of... loss, hit me. The questions hit me. Most of the places I go in, I have a lot of answers about what happened to the people inside by the time I left, or I don't need them. (In most of the burned out places, I go by them often enough that just the fact they're getting cleaned out suggests the people got out.)



In this case: I was able to look up the person's facebook, considering how new the burned out place was. It's not stalking if you spend less than five minutes on it, right, right? (No, that's totally creepy.) The one person whose name I was able to find connected to the house is fine, and there was no immediate, clear, mourning posts in that facebook search, looks like everyone got out okay. So with everyone's guilt alleviated some--mostly mine--here's the rest of the collection.



These buildings are everywhere. I wasn't surprised to find one in the backyard. It has to do with living in a farming area. One of the buildings on my to-do list after my sprain is healed--I re-sprained it yesterday, so I have to reset that clock, boo--is just a collection of silos by some sort of garage. With the outside photographed, eager to get out of the storm, I headed inside. Why did I want to do a winter exploration again?







Standing right here, that's where it hit me. Just how haunted it felt. My UrbEx folder has 32 sub-folders. But this was the first one that got me. I wanted to go home, right then.

Was it the crutch sitting on the couch? The golf clubs in the garage? The collection of movies in the snow, some of which I also enjoyed?



This?

I headed up the stairs. I would only take photos from the first few feet from the stairs, using my long lens, due to how clearly unstable the floor was. (Some of it had already collapsed.)





I retreated back downstairs to the room that was most intact. This was where I found surviving papers that led me to the information in the first few paragraphs. I found a wedding book, purses, boots, jewelry. It was definitely a young woman's room.



Hi there, smiling Buddha. (Creepiest thing here to me.)

I hear ya. Another explorer and I were in a similarly burned out house last year and looked through a gaping hole in the kitchen floor, only to find the family dog half burned and lying dead in the basement below.