A narrow asphalt road leading somewhere from a regional road.
Why would anyone be here? Unless they actually knew what there was out there.
I knew.
Almost ten years ago I had taken a theatre ensemble to a show in a town I barely knew. One of the people knew I was an urban explorer and took us for a walk to a recently abandoned mental asylum.
Back then it was still intact, there was even electricity, as the exit lights were on. However I had heard that that wasn’t the case anymore.
The place was indeed a mental asylum. Opened in 1956 it was closed in 2010. It was empty for three years before being bought by a child care company. The hospital suffered heavy vandalism while idle, but all damage was repaired, and a child welfare unit was actually established there.
This company went bankrupt in 2015. The estate maintained the place keeping heating on and using plywood to block windows destroyed by increasing vandalism. They gave up in the spring of 2016 and since then the place has been without heating, completely neglected. In the end it was bought by a local entrepreneur, who owns some other historically important buildings in the town, which are fit for demolition.
As is this one. Vandals have found it again and done their share. Nine years earlier I stood on that entrance with a theatre group. Now I’m back with my camera.
It looked as if people were just throwing stones at the windows for fun. And although the main entrance was locked, it also seemed, that it wouldn’t be too difficult to access the building.
The first photo inside the building taken through the smashed main entrance windows.
A lot of used spray cans. However no large graffiti pieces were visible, so I guess that the local aspiring street artists used the place as a practise ground for their first sketches.
I tried to do a walkaround of the building but it was impossible because the back side was so overgrown.
I returned back to the door closest to the parking lot. The sign warns about camera surveillance, but I have serious doubts.
And so I am inside and ready to enter ward three.
It is clear that the building has been empty for a long time. The roof hasn’t been peeled by vandals, but rather by temperature changes.
Basically the building was a large rectangle arranged around one corridor in two floors and a basement.
The rooms were mostly empty. The place had been used after the hospital years, so it was pretty impossible to guess, what had been in here.
Of course the tiled walls were an indication, that this space had more to do with auxiliary things or operations than patient rooms.
This, I guess, had been a patient room with two beds. As the window is intact, I believe the water on the floor has come straight through the roof and second floor.
This is the end of post 1. But there’s a lot more to see.