This one is more for the write-up than the pictures, since very little actual exploring was done, but I wanted to get this out and I don't know where else to do it. For veteran explorers, this is probably nothing all that interesting, but for us, it was a taste of something different.
Those that have seen my pics and have been to Kings Park know that almost everything I've posted has come from there. After a recent trip turned out to be pretty lame (they were doing a bunch of demolition), my friend and I decided to try someplace different. I hadn't heard of the place before, but he'd done some research into it. In hindsight, I
think someone here may have talked about it recently, though I can't remember exactly where. Anyway, off we went.
Unlike KPPC, this was private property. No Trespassing signs absolutely EVERYWHERE, and we knew if we walked around, there'd be no denying that we'd seen them. Apparently someone fairly famous owns it, though I'd never heard of him. There was a kids' soccer game going on at a field on the property, and I decided to ask two women heading back to their car about the place. They told me that the signs were new, because they're getting ready to knock it down. After waiting a while, we decided to go for it and walk around the campus.
Walking around the main building was, as you can see, your standard sanitarium fare. However, we could see there was more to the property, so we walked through the trees to the right of the building, and found this:
Just a normal, modern suburban street in the woods. The ground was littered with black boxes, which my peripheral vision assumed were empty take-out boxes. Except for the occasional sound of chirping birds, it was dead silent. Despite being the most pristine environment we've explored in, it all felt so wrong. Walking down this street was one of the eeriest experiences we've had while exploring. The doors on the left-most house were open.
The condition of the interior was what you'd expect from the outside - it didn't look abandoned, it looked
vacant, like the furniture (most of it, anyway), had been removed that morning. I tried the sink to see if the water was still on, with no luck. I don't have any pictures of the interior, because when J and I turned a corner to go upstairs, he stopped and said "...dude." I turned and asked what was up, and he pointed toward the ceiling at the bottom of the stairwell. There was a smoke detector, and after staring at it for a few seconds trying to figure out what the big deal was, the red light blinked.
The power was still on.
It was probably fine, but we were spooked. We'd never explored a place with power, and if someone's paying the electric bill, could we have tripped an alarm when we came in? We decided to play it safe and get out of dodge. We walked up the street, and immediately cancelled said out-of-dodge-getting when we saw this place:
The sun was setting, and we hadn't brought a proper flashlight, so we had to make this one quick. We walked down an exterior basement staircase to an open door. This staircase was covered in more of those black boxes (which Google later confirmed were animal traps), as well as a few glue traps. The basement itself was nothing to write home about, but here's a few pics for the heck of it.
As we reached the limit of what we could explore without a flashlight, we again made the decision to scram, but we still had one more surprise for us on the way out. As we passed the main building, I thought I'd get a few more shots... and saw some electric lights on inside.
Like I said, for most folks this is probably nothing special, and if you read this far anyway hoping something more interesting might happen, sorry about that. Coming from KPPC this was just such a bizarre experience, though I have no idea how common this is or how close we did or did not come to getting caught.
