04/07/05
Oak Knoll Veterans Hospital


I think this last trip into the main structure proved to be the weirdest yet. I mean REALLY weird. Entering was quite uneventful. Past all the derelict boiler and electrical equipment. Pass right on by the first floor and up the first set of stairs, where we run into two women smoking cigarettes with those head lamps on a headband kind of deal. Seems this would be mandatory gear for the residents of this post apocalyptic hotel.
“New in town?” the skankier of the two asked.
“Uh, nah, just passin though” I mumbled. Burzum said something but I wasn’t paying much attention, wondering if they were going to try and bum a smoke off me.
We continue on up the stairs to the third floor where we have a guy standing in the hallway access door, with the requisite head band light thing, just staring at us. On we press, and quickly, before they decide it’s easier to just kill the both of us and stash the bodies somewhere in the sub basement.
“Oh there you are.” we hear one of the women say to the weird guy. Actually, I don’t really know that he was weird, but since he lives in an abandoned hospital, I kind of drew some conclusions.

We get off at the 5th floor, the stairwell being too populated for our taste. Wander thorough a couple rooms, find an open window and get onto the 5th floor roof. Here we see a large metal corrugated building that probably houses some HVAC gear. I creep up the stairs and start to peek through the large door, into an area that looks like a living room. Well, a living room for bums. You know, cardboard and milk crate furniture, that sort of thing. Considering the amount of people we have already run into, I’m not willing to go into this structure and wake someone up. We walk around the roof a bit, find some places where your feet sink into the roof, and Burzum starts setting up the tripod. We light up the building real pretty like with red and blue lights, take a few pictures and go back into the hotel….errr, hospital.

We wander around the 5th floor a bit, very boring, probably just patient rooms, hallway after hallway of identical small rooms. We get near the main elevators and the stairway that leads to the roof and start taking more pictures. One of the doors for the elevator shaft has been forced open and you can see the elevator car 2 or 3 floors up. Down goes the tripod, out comes the camera, and the only thing on my mind is falling down the elevator shaft onto some bullets. We pull out the colored mags and start panting the elevator doors. Painting and snapping away. Wait, what was that? Lights in the stairwell. Voices. Singing? Not very good singing at that. The light comes, the light goes, the voice unaware of our presence. We stood there for a couple minutes unsure of what to do. We wanted to head to the roof, and not run into anymore people. I finally figured, fuck it, what are they going to do if we run into them. Headed on up, they got out on the 7th or 8th, not really sure, we continued to the roof, had a little celebration, then started back down.

On our way back down we got off on the 8th floor, and started to wander, what I really remember about this floor was wandering into a room that looked like an emergency room. A large tiled room with stations where you could see oxygen hookups, a mounting point for lights and the rails the curtains hang from on the ceiling. There was also a large nurse’s station along the middle of one wall. Upon closer inspection I note that people have taken ceiling tiles, random bits of metal from the room heaters and covered all the windows in this room. Kind of half expecting to find a meth lab and totally expecting to find someone sleeping we retreat back to the stairwell and continue our descent. We get back out on the 5th floor, wander around some more and find a room with a huge air conditioner. You know, the kind you can walk inside of. Back to the descent.

About the time we get back to the basement Burzum suggests we look for the morgue, and I couldn’t agree more. We wander all over the basement level, find the pharmacy, records storage, and a lot of messy rooms, one with a chalkboard, and chalk!
Yeah, I left a special message. We found what appears to be a sub-basement. You drop down a little hole near the elevators on the basement level and there is about a 3 foot crawlspace that Burzum said ran under the whole building. I wouldn’t go in there because I was scared shitless of it, if you’ve ever seen Creepshow, you’d understand. Burzum, in what I thought was one of his stupider moments hopped on down there. I made sure to inform him that it might be his grave because I wasn’t coming down there. Luckily I think the fear of a grizzly death in the bottom of an abandoned hospital got hold of him and he came out rather quickly.

We didn’t find anything that looked like a morgue, so we went up a level to the second floor, which is actually the ground floor. Wandered around a bit, found one of the back entrances. We were getting ready to take more pictures down this hallway when we see a bright light down the south hall. ‘What the fuck am I looking at?’ I mumble as my brain tries to process what I’m seeing. From what I can tell most of the hallway is 4 to 6 inches deep in random crap except for a zigzagging trail through it, and at the end where the hallway meets another hallway I can see a person sweeping. Sweeping? The place looks like a friggin war zone, what good is sweeping going to do? It was at this point we figured we had enough and it was getting late for us working fools. So we head back down to the entry point and just as we are getting ready to enter what’s left of the huge air system we see yet another person coming into the building. He’s got nothing but a cigarette lighter so we light his path and let him come on through, since there is really only room for one person to make it through there. As he exits the equipment on the inside, he takes a good look at us and says, ‘You guys trippin?’, ‘No man, just exploring’ we shoot back. As we turn to leave I notice the man is carrying a Coleman lantern. Making me feel extremely unprepared with my 4 flashlights.

We exit the building and climb out of the pit we are in. We stand there, look at the sky for a moment and then realize that the last two hours have been one of the more surreal experiences for either of us. I don’t know, I think that last guy we ran into was right.


mrsleep
4/12/05

P.S. I think it’s amusing that skank is not in the microsoft dictionary