The journey continues with another tiny cottage spotted by a highway.



The place had become quite a jungle with lots of burning nettles.



But in the end I managed to find a way inside. It was a very primitive cottage with just one room.





The fun fact was that there were three stoves in the cottage: a traditional wood powered stove, a baking oven and one very old and small electric one. They must have loved cooking.

All in all there wasn't really much more to see here. So I'll move on to other locations.



Here we have another mental asylum. This old mansion is protected.



While this newer part isn't and will probably be demolished.



Behind the mansion was this building, which I thought was a part of the mental asylum. It later turned out, this wasn't the case. But we'll get to this story later.



A room completely filled with files. I would have loved to see what was inside.



Now this is kind of funny but only in Finnish: the sign says that Ex is a state with danger of explosion.



The newer hospital building was the shape of a letter E with the wings facing a lake.



Would you look at that: an abandoned minigolf course stored here.



The old and new parts are really different. Although the 1960's building is pretty classy, I prefer the old one.

Unfortunately the vandals hadn't been very active here. So no entry this time.



Here we have a former elementary school. This beauty was built back in the 1920's.



The story is identical to the mental asylum. Here's the newer part of the school built in the 1960's. It will probably be demolished.

The school was in the same town as the mental asylum. Like I said, the vandals there are incompetent, so moving on.



I next found my way to another former mental asylum. After the hospital was closed in 1997, a company was founded to develop the area. The development has actually been so successful, that all premises of the former hospital are full. They have even built more buildings to the area.

This building is a former apartment house of hospital staff. When the hospital was closed, the houses were sold to private investors. This particular one was immediately resold to a Spanish lady, who applied for permission to renovate it in 2003.

No renovations happened, and the owner wasn’t exactly too eager to pay the bills. In 2009 both electricity and heating were turned off because of unpaid bills. The owner then paid the bills. There were still tenants, but in early 2010 the town forbade the use of the building as unsafe. The owner had started the renovations, which had been interrupted, and the fire safety of the building was compromised as a result.

New life moved in – birds. Since 2014 neighbours started complaining about them as a health hazard. It was also feared, that broken glass would fall on kids, who had started to use the yard as a playground.

The windows were shut with plywood around 2017 or 2018. Both the town and the investor, who renovated the house next door, have been trying to buy this one, but the owner asks for too much. Meanwhile the house stays as it is.



And next we are at a regional hospital, which was shut down and demolished pretty soon afterwards to make way for apartments. There was a way in, but unfortunately there were also pretty drunken sounding noises coming from inside, so we decided against entering.



The final location of that day was very remote.



It was an old epilepsy hospital closed down decades ago.



I didn’t expect to gain entry, as I had earlier read that all doors had been covered already a few years before.



Although the road leading to the hospital was in a very bad state, somebody was regularly driving around it.



Unfortunately I couldn't find a point of entry. I later heard through other urbexers, that they have encountered one or two shady, drunken or drugged men while approaching the hospital. The men have apparently been aware that somebody has been approaching, so the camera surveillance is real. The men have been furious and have been cursing and screaming that there is no business entering the hospital. They've chased people away by driving towards them in a car, and it has been generally impossible to discuss with them.

I'm happy that I didn't encounter them.

Today I'll present to you quite a special location.



This is clearly a former store of some kind. It is in a very central location in a village, which has seen its better days. Despite this, I found absolutely nothing about it on the internet, so I just named it the House of Colors. You can soon see why.



I entered through an early 1990's looking sauna department.



It soon turned out, that the place had been converted into apartments. Perhaps this photo gives first hints about the name I gave the location.



This kitchen has been here for a while, though.



The most recent items were from 2011, so perhaps the place was abandoned around then.



The last inhabitant has had quite an interesting taste in interior design. In addition to the target on the floor, there was also a portrait of a Native American chief on the wall.



Upstairs we go then.



Beautiful pastel colored walls.

Exploration finished, nothing special to see here. Except...

...that it was a murder scene.

When I published these photos in a Finnish urbex group, I was contacted by someone, who spent their childhood in the village. They linked me a thread with old newspaper articles, and the pictures confirmed the story.

Back in the 1990’s the room with the target on the floor was a barbershop. The lady working there also lived upstairs with her adult daughter, who had moved back home because the lady’s former boyfriend was aggressive and threatening. In October 1995 the man arrived with a shotgun and shot the lady twice. He was arrested later that day and convicted for murder.

The house is known by the locals as ‘Whoosh Hotel’. Often people who lived in it had issues with substances in their life, and the police were a frequent visitor. There are rumors about another killing happening in the building as well.

edit: More as always: https://desertedfi...se-of-colors-2020/

Welcome to the former main street of a quiet Finnish town.



This here is the headquarters of a former workers' co-operative. Around 2010 the first two floors were occupied by a bar, and there was a dressmaker in one corner of the building. Even a part of the apartments still looked like inhabited.



Just a few years later the place was abandoned and the owner completely vanished. There was a fire in one of the apartments and another in the restaurant, the town shut access to the building.

At this point it had been abandoned around 7-8 years. Unfortunately for me, there was no way in.



Here we have a former Shell service station. Opened in 1964 and closed around 2000, it next housed a machine rental company. Abandoned for some years now.



No luck here, either.



Next, a few days later, we take a detour via the Fish Finger School I introduced to you some time ago. It looks like they've started to clean up the area in anticipation to demolishing the buildings.



I was with the same friend as the previous time. This was as close as we got to the main school. That was when we heard voices. We saw a van parked right next to a door and heard people moving inside. Time to make another quick escape.



As the trip to the school came to nothing, I took my friend to see a few more locations I knew. At this point it started raining.



When we reached this place, we were soaking wet and grumpy. We went to buy a bottle of wine and some sushi and decided to call it a day.



By now it was almost Mid-August. My friend said she had never been to an abandoned building before, so we tried to visit a mental asylum I found early in the summer. No luck.

This photo has been taken at a nursing home also featured earlier in this thread. Still no luck.



To get her at least somewhere, I took her to the cottage, which was one of my first successful entries in this thread.



Bingo!

So another useless dump of unsuccessful explorations before a major location? Nope. A very important bridge in my Tour De Finland 2020.

Just to recall, I bought the 700 euro, 25 year old Volvo to visit all current and former municipalities of Finland in one summer. Since the beginning of May I had worked weeks and spent weekends driving around the country. Amazingly the car had taken me through half of all the municipalities.

In Mid-August I would start my three week summer holiday. The plan for the three weeks? To visit all the remaining places in the Western and Northern parts of the country.

I packed clothes for three weeks and drove to the unknown.

Thanks for the new entries!

That wee cabin with 3 ovens is crazy !!
Although I must admit I would love a stone bread oven

Thanks for sharing, until next post Cheers!

Cheers! The story goes on, as I've made it my mission to keep this thread on top of the category until everyone knows about my adventures!

(haha, just kidding.)



This looked promising.



This looked even more promising.



Well, turns out that it wasn't that promising after all. The place was mainly a storage for ancient unused construction material.



I would never have heard of this place had it not been to one of my most active Instagram followers, who sent me a link to a news item. It was about two 14-year-old boys seeing smoke rise from an abandoned building, running to a nearby store and buying water bottles to put out a pile of newspapers, which someone had lit. Their actions probably saved the building.

Built in the late 1940’s as the kindergarten to the kids of the workers at a nearby factory, the building has been sketched by the famous architect Alvar Aalto, though he didn’t design it. After its kindergarten years it served as a community centre before being abandoned in 2012. It is listed as a valuable building, while everybody is wondering what to do with it.

Meanwhile I was wondering how to get in, but couldn’t find a way.



The only thing I managed to find, was this. Even less promising.



A former leather factory. Still no luck entering. I however remember the place from my childhood. Back in the 1990's our family friends lived in this village. That was when I and their child made newspapers using WordArt and an inkjet printer. When I grew up, I became a journalist.



A former tuberculosis sanatorium, which later served as a rehabilitation hospital. It was abandoned only between 2018-2021. Nowadays there's a hostel and some small businesses.



And another former hospital from 1938. It is considered a local landmark, but the city wants to demolish it.

After this random dump of unsuccessful adventures there will again be another, more successful one. I promise!

A railway track closed in 1985. Since then several bridges along it have been demolished, and it actually doesn't lead anywhere anymore.



The stations were closed earlier, this one in 1981. It is protected, but has been so badly vandalized, that demolition permit had been applied for.



Well, the vandalism was pretty bad.



A striking feature of it was, that all fireplaces had been destroyed. Every single one of them.



Frankly the entire insides of the station was in ruins.



There had originally been one apartment in the building for the station staff. It was probably where the stove was.



There was a small warehouse next to the station building.



Which looked like somebody had been living there.

But nobody lives there anymore. The station and the warehouse were demolished in November 2020.

More as always: https://desertedfi...n-noormarkku-2020/

Driving closer to yet another center of a small municipality, which had lost more than half of its inhabitants in the past 50 years I spotted an old school. At first I thought it was just another old village school, but something made me turn around and have a second look. I really can’t tell what it was, I just got the gut feeling.



Not only was the building abandoned, it was in a very bad shape and had in fact partially collapsed.



Needless to say it was a very beautiful old secondary school.



A storage room



For some reason or another I refused to go upstairs.



Instead I found the school kitchen.



The gym. I have never seen anything in such an awful shape.



Moving on to the corridors of the newer annex from the 1950's.



Vintage curtains. According to some sources the school was abandoned way back in 1987.



More corridors.



The chemistry classroom.



An earthquake.

A lot more as always: https://desertedfi...ional-school-2020/

There has recently been news about the municipality starting proceedings to take over the property. They have tried to contact the owner several times with the order to demolish the decaying and hazardous buildings, but the owner hasn’t been reached. The most likely outcome is, that the municipality will take over the buildings, demolish them and build chain houses on the lot. The detail plan already allows this.

Already tired of my never ending stories about bizarre and failed business ideas and real estate businesses? No? Good! Here’s another one.



This here is a former nursing home. It was originally built in the 1940’s as a municipal home and enlarged in the 1960’s to a new use. The building visible in this picture is the 1960’s part, the older is behind it.

The building’s use ended in 2018, when the town built a new nursing home. After that the town tried to sell this one. The older part was protected, but they rezoned the area to remove the protection status to attract buyers.



Here we have the old, 1940's part.

Finally they found a buyer. Some Russian guy, who would pay 5000 euros for the buildings to make it a camping center. The town thought about the deal for a long time, but eventually agreed.



Just before I took these pictures in August 2020, the potential buyer cancelled the deal citing Covid-19 as the reason. The buildings were then sold to a seamstress from a nearby city with a little more than 1000 euros. She wanted to bring her business there and eventually live in the buildings.

A friend of mine was from this town and she arranged her family member to do some scouting for me in 2021. I got the message, that some lady and a horse were living here.

Flash forward to 2022, the old nursing home was sold again to a company from the same city as the buyer was. The company was managed by a man, who had previously been condemned for a killing.

In late 2022 the building became nationwide news. The company was about to sell the buildings to three Russians for 15000, a large profit. The Defence Ministry blocked the sale. The nursing home is close to a large garrison, and after Russia’s invasion to Ukraine the sale to Russians wasn’t considered to be of a national interest.

The owner has a year to get rid of the buildings or they will be auctioned. I visited again in the summer of 2022, but freshly appeared signs saying it’s a private property prevented me from taking a closer look.

Enjoying the new entries and yes, good thing you did not venture upstairs of the school

On my earlier tours I had spotted a rather large sawmill, which didn’t have any lumber piles on its yard. Instead the yard was slowly turning into a forest.

I didn’t have time to go check out the place back then, but as my tour of all Finnish municipalities took me to the neighbouring one at this stage, I decided to take the opportunity to go have a closer look.



The sawmill went bankrupt in 2006 and the company controlling the assets was dissolved in 2012. The logo is still on the wall.



The building was surprisingly primitive.



The break room.



Pollution.



Like I said, small and primitive.



Machinery.



Window.



The use of colors has been pretty bold.



How do you drive this?



Or this?



There was a huge field next to the sawmill. On the other side of the field were several storage buildings.



Not much to see here.



There was one further production building, but there was no way in. I guess I will have to return at a later date.

More, as usual: https://desertedfi....com/sawmill-2020/

This beauty here is the former secondary school of a small town. It was originally built in 1950 and enlarged already back in 1959.

It was a private secondary school, which was run by an association. For a long time they tried to get the permission to arrange high school education. This was granted in 1961. Immediately a new building was added to the lot. This brought the school a gym, and classrooms for arts and natural history. This even brought water closets to the school so the kids didn’t have to use a privy anymore.

Another building was further added in 1976. In the early 2000’s all the buildings were in a bad shape and were completely renovated. This didn’t help with the air quality and moisture problems. The high school moved away in 2019 and the secondary school moved to the newest, 1970’s building. The rest was abandoned. Now the town is building a new high school and a new secondary school.

The buildings had been abandoned for a year. Electricity, air conditioning and alarms were on. And yet here I am standing at the door about to go in. This is possible because of Tinder. I matched someone, who knew someone, who had access here and helped me obtain permission to enter.



When the school was closed, absolutely everything was left as it was. Nothing was broken, there had been no vandals, no nothing.



Music books.



Even all the music class equipment was still there.



Three former Finnish presidents. When I took this photo, two were still alive. Now only one.



The teachers' study.



A fairly strange stairway.



Moving on to the new side.



The physics class.



The staff toilet was occupied.



An untouched classroom.



European maps and guitars.



The corridor was leading to the final section of the school still in use.



The arts class.



Gym number 1



Only in Finland: a Sauna in a secondary school building.



Gym number 2.



So long.

A gallery of around 120 photos: https://desertedfi...ary-school-2020-2/

What an incredible school to have explored with all still intact and un-violated

Those stairs though I wonder how many students went head over heels down those bad boys? LOL *I for one, would of been ass over tea-kettle for sure

Enjoyable entry, thanks for sharing.

And so, my dear friends, the problems begin.

After racing around 10000 kilometers around Finland in a 700 euros car has finally backfired.



The fuel pump had had enough. The car was towed to a workshop, which wowed to fix it by the next day. And they did. I was up and running and ready for new locations at 10 am.



And standing at another mental asylum's gates. Which didn't open.

At that point I got a call from a friend asking, if I knew a tar factory nearby. I didn't, yet.



There it is.

And more photos from the tar factory: https://desertedfi.../tar-factory-2020/



So after tar making ended, the factory started making barbecue coal.



But it was still quite a primitive plant.



The tower.



Dutch barbecue coal. There was even export.



The offices.



Tabloids from the 1990's.

But after leaving another big, plastic chassis part in this location, I really started to wonder, if my car was up to this challenge.

Set. Good stuff!

Trusty Volvo! Love those cars.

Looks like you'll need to get into that asylum!

Posted by randomesquephoto Set. Good stuff! Trusty Volvo! Love those cars. Looks like you'll need to get into that asylum!

Me too! This was my third big Volvo after another 850 and a V70. Can't imagine driving anything else.

We'll get back to the asylum. I promise! ;)

And the journey goes on.



In the middle of wide open fields I spotted this old, school looking building.



They've really saved in renovations here.



An open window! Promising.



And something, which looked like an old living room. No matter how much I tried, I couldn't get in. As covid was raging, I hadn't done anything else apart from sitting in four months. I had gained weight and lost muscle and simply couldn't push myself in. How sad.

I had no chance but to move on to the following village.



Again looking promising.



A closer look revealed men at work inside throwing things outside.



The neighboring house had already been surrounded by a fence and even an excavator was on the lot. It looks very much like this is the very last chance to even get external shots of the buildings.



Not that there would have been much to photograph anyway.

A later research on maps shows, that they were indeed both demolished.

A local friend of mine told me later, that the other one of these housed a kindergarten. What they had been and why they have been demolished remained a mystery for a long time before I accidentally visited this same municipality again last summer and asked a local. He said them being the former health care center.

And indeed he was pretty correct. The other building was the former doctors’ house, the other one the local child health center. Or at least that was, what they were when they were built. Their later use remains a mystery apart from the kindergarten.

I originally spotted this dairy plant back in 2008, when I didn't even do urbex. I forgot all about it, but amazingly enough it was still there. Even better, there was an open door.



The machinery looked old. I believe, that the place has been abandoned no later than the early 1990's.



Love each other, the text says. An important message.

x

Oil barrels.



The boiler room.



A corner with random pipes.



Just another room.



Upstairs we go.



Upstairs there were small apartment rooms for the dairy plant staff.



The light was pretty much perfect for photography. The following photos are my absolute favorites so far.



A deeper shade of blue.



A green room.



A grey room.



A white room.



Another grey room.



Summer outside.



The upstairs lobby.



A very old newspaper on the wall.



One final room.

And of course more photos here: https://desertedfi...airy-plant-2020-3/

The story of the dairy plant is pretty strange. Several people have expressed their wish to buy it and restore it, but nobody knows the owner. Even the town authorities don't know it. They are planning a new school to the village and the lot of the dairy plant was one option. During the process they decided to find out the owner.

The school will eventually luckily be built elsewhere.

Nice additions !

My favorites are "summer outside" and "love each other"

Cheers to next adventure

Wow, 5000 views for this thread. This just encourages me to publish more.



This building was a bit strange. It seemed like an ordinary block of flats, but it was located on the outskirts of a small, rural village. Also on the same lot with it was this one:



It looks to be in a good condition, but in reality it was almost collapsing. There was also a camera above one of the doors.

It needed quite a bit of detective work. But turns out, that the latter building is the former power station of a long since demolished sawmill. As the other building is on the same lot, it is probably something related to it: maybe the old office building of the company, maybe the canteen or staff apartments, who knows.

When I returned the following summer, the power station was demolished.

Wait a second, a return? I'm not giving spoilers here, am I?



And so the morning dawns to yet another ridiculous story from real estate business in decaying rural Finnish villages. Ready for it?

This is yet another former mental asylum, which became a regional hospital in the 1990’s and started treating even other patients. It was deemed surplus in mid-2010’s.



Again the staff apartments of the hospital were in a separate building connected by a shelter to the main building. These two were built in the early 1950’s, another building was added in the 1980’s. The newest one wasn’t abandoned, but was still used by some social and health care facilities.

But what happened to the older hospital buildings is yet again a unique story. The municipality put them up for auction and a buyer was found surprisingly quickly. The premises were sold for less than 5000 euros and the new owner intended to rent them out to social and health care use.

That was until he found out, that another division of the municipal administration had cut off the water to the building and started removing, toilets, taps and sinks without the knowledge of the division conducting the auction. The new owner called it off.

The building has been for sale since, but I’ve seen no news of a new owner.

And next we land to the scene of another murder, one of the most famous in Finland.



In May 1953 Kyllikki Saari, the 17-year-old daughter of a local farmer family went missing after attending a religious event. After that she wasn’t seen.

A search was initiated three days later, but nothing was found. Even the following search attempts yielded nothing. As the villagers realized that something quite out of ordinary had happened, they started filing reports. Other stated marks of a struggle and a bike dragged sideways on the dirt road nearby, others started talking about a cream-colored car, which wasn’t local.

It wasn’t until late July, when some local people, who’d gone berry picking, found Kyllikki’s bike in a swamp. The condition of the bike and the fact that it hadn’t been found earlier raised suspicions that it had been brought to the swamp much later than the disappearance. It started becoming evident, that this was no accident.

Nothing happened, all leads vanished. In October they decided to do another search and found Kyllikki’s shoe with a man’s sock stuffed in it. A day later one of the seekers found a dry pine, which was sticking from the swamp. He grabbed it and it came off revealing a horrible, rotten smell.

That’s where she was half naked, killed by a blow in the head. She was buried right next to the municipal church with 25000 people attending from all around the region. It was the size of a presidential funeral.

A memorial was erected in 1987 on the site where she was found.

During the years there have been several suspects ranging from the local vicar to a ditch digger. Several researchers claim to know the culprit, but officially the crime remains unsolved.

Here's more about the subject: https://en.wikiped...iki/Kyllikki_Saari

And after that we return to the world of crazy real estate deals. After the story of the mental asylum, which was sold until the new owner realized, that its toilets had been demolished, we tell an even more bizarre story.

It seems that these stories are customary to old public buildings, like schools, factories and hospitals. This is no wonder. They are large buildings, often publicly owned and located in places where the market isn’t doing that well. They are often sold to companies hoping to make investments in travel or social and health care.

And as with the previous one, we are again talking about a mental asylum.



The hospital was built in the late 1950’s or early 1960’s. It was closed in the early 2000’s and that was when the bizarre story starts.



The town bought the hospital from the hospital district for 200 000 euros and sold it about a year later to a company, which was specialized in helping autistic children. Already a year later it was revealed that the company was in financial trouble and the heating to the hospital was cut off due to unpaid bills.

Eventually the company went bankrupt and its owner was convicted of several financial irregularities. Meanwhile the hospital had been sold to an investor for one euro.



The buildings stayed empty, were badly vandalized and decayed quickly. In 2017 the town decided to buy the hospital again, this time for 20 000 euros. They considered the building worth nothing but demolition, but thought that its location next to the hospital was strategic.

That was three years before I took these photos. So far nothing had happened. Apart from the fact that the doors and windows received new boards.

There was no way in, so there was not much more to see either.

And this is where I end this report. Perhaps there will be more success in the next one ;)

So, here we are again:



This is the place, which sparked my interest towards the abandoned almost 14 years earlier. The place, which came to my nightmares every night, which I entered drunk 11 years earlier and which became my first ever full exploration 10 years earlier. Every now and then I’ve returned, gone in, stayed a while and left. The previous time was years ago.



Back when I last visited, the place still had doors. Now it’s just a mess.



It was so strange to be here again. I knew this place by heart and yet it just wasn’t the same.



One of the few doors still actually intact inside the building.



A look to the dark first floor corridor. There were offices in here back then.



The top floor. The leak on the roof has grown substantially in size.



Back then this was an apartment with furniture still in their right places. Now it’s just a mess.



A look at the tower. The leak on the roof on the left has grown substantially and parts of the roof have rotten and fallen off. Somebody has found the access to the roof and left it open, which means, that it has been raining freely inside the building probably for years.



The roof had already started falling in on the third floor corridor. It was evident by now, that after 30 years of abandonment, the era of this building had started to reach its end. The previous year a motion had been made in the municipal council to ‘take care’ of the place meaning probably, that the municipality should buy it and demolish it.

While wondering what would come first: a natural collapse or municipal interference, I started thinking, that I should return once more with my camera and photograph the building from basement to attic like i did back in 2010. But now was not the time for that.