Another slightly more exotic area was the area of the executives of the company. This cabinet was behind the canteen.

A former meeting room.

Red fabric and dark wood were the dominant colours of this area of the building.

If I’m not entirely mistaken, this was where the CEO sat.

The third floor had beautiful parquette floors apart from the canteen. Second floor was all plastic and first floor was ceramic tiles.

Another lobby. There was still some company stuff like art, which hadn’t been moved to a new location.

And this, I think, was my old office for a while. It’s unrecognizeable now.

One of the offices had had a new floor done not so long ago.

And this was the classroom upstairs. Here I began my career with this company with the summer editor training.

Another big office room upstairs.

Thanks and goodbye, says the blackboard. And yes, we had a ball pool.

Another look at the executive lobby. It was called the Harris lobby and it was named after the company, who delivered the first printing press to this location, when it was new.

Another look at the mess left behind in the editorial office. The final weeks involved a massive cleaning opereation, where we emptied the closets and cupboards from everything we didn’t need anymore.

The clock still displayed the correct time. It indicated I had only spent around 20 minutes in the building.

The metallic signs displaying where to find different departments were distributed to the people who worked those roles.

I moved these photos to the computer and looked through them. I thought they were bad, even more disappointing than the ones from The Working Class Girl and The Worker Gal.

I had been used to photographing with my school’s Canon 5D’s, but after graduation I had been forced to use my own 1000D. It wasn’t nearly as good, in fact it was lousy. It performed extremely badly in dark and gloomy places, which abandoned buildings often were.

I lost my passion. I came home, stuffed my 1000D in a cupboard and never took a single shot with it again. Photography had been such an integral part of my urbexing, that I considered my career in it over for good.

On the third floor was some sort of a representation lobby, which was far more luxurious than the lobby downstairs. During the last days of the building’s use all kinds of stuff distributed for free to the employees were located here.

The corridor looks much scarier than it used to be. To the right was the kitchen, to the left was the balcony seen in the previous post. Up front is the canteen.

And the canteen. This was where we had lunch every day.

There was still electricity in the building, but I didn’t know where the switches were. I had never needed them.

A look towards the kitchen. I had only been at the door, as it was customary, that the first one in the morning meeting took yesterday’s coffee pots back and brought fresh ones.

The dust on the floor was an indication of some demolition work done. The kitchen appliances had been removed and apparently sold forward.

For me this was the most exotic part of the house. I had been everywhere in the building except for this room.

I didn’t know they needed that many fridges to feed us daily.

The canteen was operated by an independent company. It was open for other companies in the area but not really for the public.

To be continued.

The demolition of Kaleva Print was just the beginning of changes on the premises. The headquarters of newspaper Kaleva was still located in the older part of the complex, which was still standing. Every morning we went to work to a building, which had an intact facade, but the backside was a massive water filled hole and the back wall had formerly been offices.

The company bought a new location and started building there. When the summer ended, a date was announced: we would be out of the old offices by early December.

A frantic operation to clean up 51 years of newspaper history began. A part of the stuff was directly donated to museums, a part was sent to the new premises. There was an auction to sell some of the more valuable stuff, and one lobby became a take what you like -place for the company staff.

I took this photo when I went to work to this building for the last ever time. Built for the newspaper in 1966 to replace its previous headquarters, the building had been expanded twice. The early 1980’s expansion was the one demolished in 2016, the late 1980’s expansion is still behind this building.

The following day we were already in the new location. I called the company’s property manager and asked for permission to go and photograph the old building before it was handed over to the construction company. He agreed, and on the 100th birthday of Finland I went in.

I was used to entering to the warm smile of the receptionist. Now it was dark and empty.

I had planned to wake up early and photograph in daylight, but we celebrated independence day so heavily that I only got out of bed at 2 pm and it was closer to 3 when I finally got to the site. It was already getting dark, and there was almost no natural light inside the building.

This used to be the marketing department. It was located on the ground floor right behind the reception.

For more than five years I walked up these stairs to work every morning.

This is where the journalists worked. The last evening shift has left their greetings. But so did the ghost of Kaleva.

The ghost of Kaleva was no joke. I heard about him in late 2014 or early 2015. I was ending my evening shift and bringing my water bottle back to my seat, when I saw the managing editor walk to the corridor, where the management had their offices. There was something strange about this so I followed him.

There was nobody in the corridor. The offices were locked and the lights were out.

“I saw someone over there. I thought it was the managing editor, but there’s nobody there”, I said to my boss.

“You saw the ghost of Kaleva.”

“The what?”

She told me that for years there had been reports about somebody slamming the door seen on the left below the balcony in the picture above, walking all the way through the space and slamming the door right behind the camera in the picture. The ghost was only heard. Nobody had ever actually seen it apart from a cleaning lady decades ago, and now me.

Another call to the property manager, and I was allowed to spend the night at the office. I stayed up until about 4.30 am, when I decided to get some sleep. Right then somebody slammed the door. I went to check, but there was nobody there.

I didn’t sleep that night.

But the ghost had a wonderful sense of humour. Every night before the annual meeting of the executive board, it clogged the toilet closest to their meeting room. And when the final newspaper was made in this building, it set off the fire alarm in the same toilet. The firefighters came, the building was emptied, but there was no fire. And this happened three times during that evening.

I spent the last times working in this corner of the building. The annual staff party was the funeral of the building, and the can of long drink in the right corner was actually consumed by me that night.

All the cupboards were full of stuff and old magazines, truckloads of which were thrown away before the move. It’s so strange to see them empty now.

To be continued.