Nightmares Revisited Part IV

The first thing I found on the third floor was this kitchen, which was designed with incredibly bad taste. The red and green really don’t go well together, and to make matters worse someone had decided, that attaching lace to the kitchen counter was a good idea. Ugh.

Behind the kitchen was a small room, where it looked like someone had started renovations. Probably it had more to do with someone initiating destruction.

This room, like all the others, was littered with all kinds of random stuff. Someone had forgotten their jacket.

The following room was almost intact. It looked as if the inhabitants had just left. The rug on the wall was pretty spectacular, although I wouldn’t hang anything like that on my own walls.

A view from the other side of the same room. As you can see, the nearest neighbours are not that far away. The hole looking thing next to the radiator really is a hole someone has carved there.

Although the place clearly has been abandoned for years, there were surprisingly little graffiti and other tags on the walls. This one says “hey man, this is my home”.

Someone had been pretty desperate in getting to the balcony and smashed everything in the process.

The inner balcony door was still intact, although badly worn. Apparently all the doors and window frames had originally been red, but the balcony doors had been painted white at some stage.

There were two doors from the hallway on the third floor. One led to the apartment, which we just visited, the other one led deeper into the building. It was almost impossible to walk through it, as there were boxes of old newspapers and commercials blocking it. The pile of paper was waist high, but we managed to get through. In the other end we found two more apartments.

Again the last inhabitants had left their stuff behind. I’m not really sure the huge white containers were theirs, unless they were really big fans of mead. Or kilju.

I said earlier, that I really didn’t want to run into living creatures while visiting abandoned houses. I certainly didn’t expect to meet this chap. I’m not a biologist, but I think that’s a small tortoiseshell over there.

The kitchen of the second apartment on the third floor. The same mess was evident here, like in all the other places.

The living room of the third floor apartment. This area of the building had survived all vandalism, perhaps because it was so difficult to get through the mess in the corridor. The strange thing about this place was, that there was a kitchen, chairs, sofa and even a table, but no bed.

A look towards the entrance of the apartment. The door at the back leads to the butterfly’s home.

We crawled back through the cramped corridor and back to the main stairway. Here’s another look at the tower and its leaky roof before we started our journey down the stairs.

Nightmares Revisited Part III

I have already reached the door. It wasn’t exactly difficult to get this far, as all doors so far had been wide open. I had previously been too afraid to even get to this point, now I was feeling just fine. And I was about to enter, for the first time in daylight.

Like I remembered, it was a mess. For the first time I could now see the faded, old magazines and commercials, which had scared me so much during my last visit more than a year ago. And when you compare the next two pictures to the ones behind the link, you notice, that not much has changed since then.

The pink walls, the fridge and even the cardboard boxes had hardly moved. Someone had brought their mattress, though.

Even the paper sheets on the window board were untouched.

Is it just me, or was everything done more beautifully back in the old days? I mean, those heaters and handrails are all very basic and probably the cheapest they could find. And yet they look much better than modern ones.

The higher we climbed, the more uneasing things we found. There were several cans and bottles left on window boards, and they all had expiry dates long in the future.

It was certain, that there were regular visitors there. At first I judged everything by the mattresses and beds everywhere, and thought maybe someone homeless lived there. But then I remembered I was in a very small village, and there usually aren’t homeless people in those. I guessed that the people drinking in here were the same people, who smashed all the doors and windows in the house. And I really didn’t want to meet them.

This made me feel even more uneasy, and I don’t mean the fact that nobody had washed the windows in decades or something. If that is not made by a bullet, then what is it? And I really didn’t want to run into someone, who was drunk and carrying a gun in an abandoned abattoir.

The use of this pipe was a little unclear for me, as it was placed directly above stairs and too high to reach. If it was meant for a fire emergency, the crew would have needed stairs of their own to use it. So maybe it was for washing the stairs or then it was installed for Kevin McCallister’s Finnish counterparts to spray sludge on unsuspecting explorers.

When I visit abandoned houses, I take a very methodical approach to exploring them. I start from one end and make my way to the other making sure not to miss a single unlocked room..

In my next post, I’ll start from the third floor.

Nightmares Revisited Part II

After leaving the low wing of the old abattoir, we headed towards the main building, which I had already once visited.

A look back towards the direction we had entered the building from. It was supposed to be white, but its skin was peeling.

Several Windows were broken. This one looks like it has been smashed by a loose piece of the wall.

There was even a basement, but I chose not to enter. There are no good photos of it, but eveything, absolutely everything there was covered in a thick layer of mould.

Looks like an unsuspecting explorer might get hit with a chunk of wall anytime soon.

I have no idea, what the walls are growing, as plants are not my strong side. I’m not an electrician, either, but I hope for the sake of everybody’s safety, that those cables are disconnected.

The rear side of the building is slowly turning to a forest. And the variety of things stored at the property doesn’t limit to the interior. Let’s take a closer look at that wooden frame, as it seems pretty familiar.

This is the frame of a shelter building for fur animals. What it is doing here, is very unclear to me, as fur farming has nothing to do with this abattoir. Hopefully.

Something in the place was just dreamlike. Maybe it was the odd contrast between the wildly growing plants and the functionalistic architecture of the building.

Or the evening sun flickering on the walls.

This is why I love this particular style of architecture. The lines are simple, clean and symmetric. The room behind the windows is the one with all the miscellaneous stuff described in the first interior shot of the building. Below it is the basement we didn’t enter. I did take a picture through the broken window, however.

Inside was yet another surprise. Broken bathroom appliances covered in years of dust. We couldn’t find a place in the building, where these could have come from, so they must have been specifically brought here.

Finally we were on the front side of the building. This is not a part of the main complex, but rather a separate building housing garages and the boiler room. The chimney was originally taller, but the authroities ordered the owner to chop up some of it because it was in danger of collapsing.

Here’s most of the main building as seen from the large yard. As you can see, it is huge and quite a maze. The tower is the part I visited in the middle of the night a year earlier, the wing on the right is the part already shown in the previous post.

Here I am again, standing on the scene of my very worst nightmares. But this time I’m not afraid at all of going in.

Nightmares Revisited part I

More than a year had passed since my drunken nightly visit to the abattoir I was so afraid of. After the visit my nightmares abruptly stopped and the fear was completely gone.

I told my colleague about the abattoir, the visit and my desire to further explore the place during daylight hours. She told me she had worked for a local museum and one of her duties was to document old houses, so she was used to roaming in abandoned houses. I happily accepted her as my company.

We set our course towards the place on a beautiful, warm summer evening, when the world wasn’t the least bit scary…

This time we decided to get in through the back door. I had never been here in the summer, and hadn’t realized, how nature had taken the whole place over.

It really wasn’t too difficult to find open doors. In fact I think there were more unlocked than locked doors in the whole building.

This is always the most exciting part. You have absolutely no idea, what you are going to face next. I can’t remember what I was expecting, but I certainly didn’t expect this…

The variety of stuff stored in the wing building was greater than on an average flea market. There was literally everything from toys and typewriters to furniture and skis. The bags on the right contain pig fodder.

No matter where you looked or went, every corner was full of stuff. This one was the local tire hotel.

More tires, served with motor oil and pickled cucumber.

Featuring bikes, banana boxes, carpets and a bag of floor plaster.

One room was filled with cupboards and lockers of various shapes and sizes. One of them looked like it had suffered a fire.

The evening light in the rooms was extremely beautiful. Judging by the white tiled walls and concrete floor, this was the area, where the animals were slaughtered.

A closeup of a locker door. Judging by the dates this one has rested here for quite some time.

Next to the burned cupboards was a mix of fridges, empty food boxes and doors.

This area of the building was isolated from the others. Either there was no route to the three-storey wing of the building, it had been shut, or it was just blocked with all the junk inside. We had to go back and find another route to continue our exploration.

The Place Where My Nightmares Were Made

It had now been more than two years since I saw the abattoir, which sparked my interest towards abandoned buildings. I had tried entering it numerous times, but it came to nothing. I drove to the village, parked my car and walked the last hundred meters just to freeze from fear at the gates.

At this time my mental health was in an awful condition. I was battling difficult depression, had lost all self confidence and spent my days drinking beer in my bed buried in suicidal thoughts. When I finally fell asleep, it was all nightmares. In them I lost my friends, their loved ones hated them or they were killed, just because of my mistakes or inability to keep their secrets. Every night the catastrophes were different, but all dreams ended in the same way. It was afternoon and still light outside, and I had destroyed everything. I started running from my hometown. I ran and I ran and I ran, until it was dark and I was in the tiny village and stood on stairs in front of two doors. I slowly looked up and saw a white tower, and was so afraid, I was unable to move. I woke up, it was in the middle of the night and I was panicking.

I told my friends about my struggles with the abattoir, and they encouraged me to enter. They even joined me on my journeys to the village, but I just couldn’t overcome my fear. I was still left at the gates.

One night my friend had had enough. She knocked my door with three bottles of wine. She told me to drink until I had the courage to enter, and offered to drive me there, once I was drunk enough. After two hours and one bottle I said I was ready to go.

We drove an hour through the darkness and parked the car a few hundred meters away. She promised to join me on my exploration, but there was one obstacle too much for her. Just before the abattoir is a railroad overpass. Whenever a train has just passed or is about to pass, the bridge makes really strange hissing sounds, and the night train had just gone, so the bridge was pretty loud. My friend was afraid, so she decided to return to the car.

I was alone in the dark and extremely afraid. For one reason or another I started running, and ran through the gates. It had been snowing that day, but there was a clear path of fresh footprints from the gate, so someone else had been there recently. I followed the footprints and turned left behind the building. There I found this.

I had run straight to the scene of my nightmares. There I was standing on the stairs in front of two doors slowly looking up towards the tower, and I was grossly unprepared. It was pitch dark, and I only had a mobile phone without a flashlight and a small camera with me. I pulled the door handle and kept telling myself “please don’t open, please don’t open”. At first it seemed that my prayers were heard, but when I yanked the door a bit harder, it opened.

I stepped inside into complete darkness. I was so afraid, the only sounds I could hear were the blood rushing through my veins and my own heartbeat. It was completely dark, and to see something, I tried to use the camera flash.

I had entered a small space just about a meter long. Its floor was covered in old newspapers and commercials, and I was faced with two old wooden doors. I had to push them open really hard, as the floor was covered in paper even on the other side. Once I was through it, it smashed shut behind me with such a loud bang, that I thought I had woken up the whole village. Now I needed another picture to see, where I was going.

Tempting pink walls and more trash was awaiting me, as I slowly made my way up by the feel of the handrail. Every time I heard the sound of my feet hitting the paper on the floor, I startled a little.

I took more photos as I found my way higher up. The paper piles ended, but now there was shattered glass everywhere.

This was the second floor. More pink walls, thrash and steam from my breath – it was quite a cold night.

The third floor. This was as high as you could climb. I thought it would be a good idea to check one of the rooms here.

Pretty much the same as in the stairway. Trash and dirt.

The deeper I went, the more chaotic the place became. Someone had apparently tried to clean things up, but given up hope. And what on earth is that on the walls?

I also took one photo of the tower through the hatch in the roof. This was, what I was so afraid of as a child: a leaky roof, stairs, some wood and a water tank on the other side.

By now I felt complete inner peace. I sat down on the top of the stairs, went on with my second bottle of wine, and just sat there. When the blood rush and my heartbeat calmed down, I noticed, it was very quiet. I just sat and sat and never wanted out.

After 45 minutes my friend called me asking, if I was still alive.

“Do you realize, you have sat inside an abandoned abattoir for 45 minutes? Get the hell out of there”, she screamed, and I suddenly realized, where I was. I ran out, ran to the car, and we drove home in complete silence. I had overcome my fears. And I surely would come back.

A Little Too Late

I indeed managed to buy a new camera, not a very good one, but then again, nothing could be worse than the one I had used to document my hometown previously. A while after my purchase, a new road was opened connecting the city center to a suburb previously separated by a railroad. When I tried the new connection for the first time, I spotted a building I had never seen before despite spending most of my childhood and youth in the same city. It was yellow, long, yet oddly narrow, and in a state of complete decay. Bricks had fallen off, and It looked like it would collapse, if kicked hard enough.

I paid several visits to the place, but it was impossible to get in. All doors and windows had been boarded shut, and it was located by a parking lot now surprisingly busy because of the new road connection. As there was no way in, all I could do was research the history of the building.

Designed in the 1930’s by famous architect Viljo Revell, the place was originally built for the Finnish White Guard. When the White Guard was disbanded after World War II, it was sold to a co-operative and became their sausage factory. In the late 60’s a local construction company bought the property as their storage facility.

In the late 1990’s the company went bankrupt, and the property, which was listed as protected that year, was left vacant. More than ten years had now passed since that decision, and the building had been subject to weather and vandals during all that time. A ten year court battle had just ended in defeat – one wing of the once so gracious functionalistic masterpiece had been modified and lost its worth according to the museum officials. It was good to go and be replaced by a tower block, the first one in town. And that was when I got on spot with my camera.

Demolition crews have moved in. One end of the building has been fenced, window boarding has been removed and all hazardous material containing asbestos carried out.

This end of the builiding all the way up to the chimney was set for demolition at this point.

The building really looked as if there wasn’t much holding it together anymore.

A view from the busy parking lot I described earlier. As you can see, bricks are missing, and the place is all boarded up. The part set for demolition is just visible in the far right corner.

A closer look at the end waiting for its fate.

And here it is, yet again from another perspective. The advertising board is a promise for fresh new homes on the site of this old ruin. The new house was built, but the two remaining sections of the old one neighboured it for years. After more vandalism, numerous arsons and yet more battles in court, the building was finally demolished for good nine years after this photo was taken. The local magazine even have a short video clip about the demolition.

A Documentarian in Making

Basically this post is all about me explaining, why I photograph the way I do. But I find it important, so I’ll do it.

When I first entered abandoned buildings, it wasn’t about details or excitement. The thrill was actually in seeing, how the places were, before they were completely destroyed. I had found a world of its own, yes, but I also wanted to create a lasting memory of places, which were important to me, and soon would be history. And for me this was nothing new.

I took this photo a couple of blocks away from my childhood home almost 20 years ago, years before I showed any interest towards abandoned buildings. We had read from the papers, that the petrol station pictured was to close. The building along with the grocery store behind it, an old bus depot behind that one and a restaurant to the left of this picture, would be demolished to make way for a massive new supermarket.

Nowadays I have more memories about the new supermarket than this old petrol station, but back then it seemed important to photograph it during its last day of operation. The spring came, and so came demolition crews, who tore the place down.

This photo is taken the following summer. The second one to go was the building housing our local pizzeria and a fabric store. The last ruins of the petrol station can still be seen to the right.

The backside of the restaurant was as important as the facade. After all, I passed this view daily when going to school and returning home.

The restaurant is now long gone, and then they started work with the bus depot. Such a shame. I found it a really fascinating building.

With a demolition site to the right and a construction site to the left, this tiny grocery store would soon give way to a parking lot and a new petrol station. I still remember fondly all the Bertie Bott’s all flavour beans I bought from here.

The last picture was taken way back in 2004. So much for the throwback inside a throwback. It would take another four years before I and my obsolete mobile phone camera would be roaming on the deserted Keimola Motor Stadium.

Back then I was pretty conservative. I loved my home town, and wanted it to stay the way it was. Whenever I saw a beautiful abandoned structure, my heart skipped a beat or two. I became afraid they would vanish, I feared for the landscape changing. I would take detours time and time again just to check they were still there.

This beauty here was originally a school specialized in educating dairy workers, and by now it had sat empty for years. Its windows were dusty, yet intact, and I made a drive by weekly just to see that it was still there. I never got to enter it, but I was more than happy to notice a couple of years later, that it had been beautifully renovated to an apartment building.

This is yet another one of my screenshots from an aerial picture, and this baby wasn’t at all as lucky as the dairy school. It hadn’t been empty for a long time, but the planners were pretty unsure what to do with it. The owners wanted to demolish it, the city wanted to protect it. I had looked through its windows a couple of times, and everything, just everything was in a 1950ish look including the kitchens. I desperately wanted inside.

There was only one summer festival in the city back then. When I walked there, I once again looked through the house’s windows longing to get inside. When I came back in the night, I saw this.

While I was enjoying Amorphis and getting drunk, the beauty burned down. It stood as a charred skeleton for a few more months until it was demolished for good and replaced with a six storey block of flats.

When I later heard, that its doors had been unlocked for all summer to attract potential arsonists, I was furious. It had been accessible all along, and I hadn’t managed a single proper photo of it, even from the outside. It was time to get some guts. And a new camera.

Keimola Motor Stadium

There is a saying, that you can get from any Wikipedia article to the article about Adolf Hitler in just seven clicks. I’ve never managed that. When I read something in Wikipedia, I always find ten interesting hyperlinks, open them and find ten new interesting hyperlinks. The result? I have a hundred interesting tabs open all the time.

Back in my late teens, when this story takes place, Wikipedia still wasn’t mainstream, at least not in Finland. But I was a keen reader already back then, and ended up finding information about all kinds of things on the web.

One day I happened to be reading about Finnish race drivers, and constantly stumbled upon mentions about Keimola motor stadium. I was curious about this, as I had visited almost every corner of Finland without running into it. And yet it seemed, that every Finnish racing legend had started from there.

I started googling, and found lots of stories and pictures. It became evident, that the place had been closed down years ago. It was somewhere in Vantaa, but nobody seemed able to tell, what had been built in its place.

A long and exhausting map search finally found a pair of Petrol Stations called Keimolanportti (Keimola Gate), and I was surprised to find out, that nothing had been built in its place. The most legendary race track in Finland had just been abandoned and left on its own for more than 30 years ago.

In the summer of 2008 I made a rare visit to Southern Finland to see a football game with two of my friends. I asked them, if they were up for an adventure, and they said yes, so we made a stop at Keimolanportti and entered the woods.

At first we only found trees and dirt roads, but then there was a rusty gate – and behind it a forgotten world. The asphalt was broken, plants had taken over everything and most of the structures had been demolished, but we were definitely on track.

I just love the idea of equipping mobile phones with cameras back in the early 2000’s. I mean, the things were completely obsolete. These images always looked good on screen, but when you bought the hugely expensive cable, which only worked with one phone model, and saved your snapshots on your computer, the reality really hit you. Now, 12 years later it hits you even worse.

This is obviously the final straight. The asphalt has been deliberately broken to stop illegal racing, which took place years after the track was closed.

The tower was the landmark of the racing circuit. It was damaged by fire, when a huge pile of used tires, which was stored at the race track, caught fire. 

We spent around an hour roaming around the old track. It was getting dark and late, and we still had several hundred kilometers ahead of us, so the adventure was short this time.

Making My First Entries

 More than a year had passed since I ran into the abandoned abattoir in my childhood village. I had tried entering it several times, but had always been unsuccessful. I was able to drive to the village, walk towards the place and get to its gates. After that I could only stand. Stand and look at its dark, broken windows and the tower rising towards the sky. I had driven there at least five times since getting my driving licence. I never got further than the gates.

Then I ran into another building…

The large building in the center of this amazing high quality photo is another former abattoir. It stood empty for years, was vandalized and became a sort of a manhood test for the local youth: if you were brave enough to enter it in the middle of the night, you were a tough guy.

I wasn’t a tough guy, I was actually quite the opposite. But I was extremely interested in this building, as a family member of mine used to work here, when I was a child. I actually had some memories of my own from here. I remember that the abattoir canteen was on the second floor, I remember that the floor was made of brownish plastic, I remember orange plastic chairs and I remember the bottles of Worcestershire sauce next to the mustard and ketchup. I always wanted to try it, but my family forbade me from spoiling my food.

It was my final day of high school, or Penkkarit, as they call it in Finland. We had celebrated since early morning, and now it was almost midnight, dark, windy, icy and rainy. I left my friends’ place to go to a bar, and when passing the abattoir, I noticed demolition had started. 

I had wanted to explore this place for years, but had been too afraid to do it. I knew, this was my final chance and I had drank myself brave, so I started walking by the fence surrounding the demolition site. There, behind the building, next to an already demolished petrol station, was a gap, and so I entered.

The place was a mess. There was smashed concrete and bricks everywhere, the wind was throwing pieces of insulation around. They had only just begun the demolition, and only one wall in one wing was smashed. I walked past a huge excavator and climbed through a hole. I was inside.

I didn’t carry a camera with me, so there’s not much to show. This was, how it looked there before demolition, but when I entered, there wasn’t much to see anymore. Empty brick walls, concrete and debris. I soon realized, that I was drunk in a partly demolished abattoir in the middle of the night, walked out and went partying with my friends.

The place greatly fascinated me, and I started looking the world with totally different eyes. Suddenly abandoned houses seemed to be everywhere, but I was still afraid to enter them. I don’t know what I was afraid of. Was it the house collapsing, was it homeless people potentially living there or was it the police catching me for breaking in? I don’t know, so I never entered, until…

Here we have another high quality photo. Apparently I wasn’t aware of a function called Print Screen, as these have been taken from the computer screen with a mobile phone camera. Genius.

The demolition of the two wooden houses started in late April the same year. I was walking home from the city after celebrating the first of May, was happy and drunk. I noticed that demolition had started, I noticed that there was a gap in the fence. I went to investigate further.

This time, however, I didn’t get inside. The abattoir was easy, as the gap the demolition crew had made was pretty symmetrical and clean from the edges. This was different. There was smashed wood everywhere, and the risk of injury was just too great to take.

The next week the house was gone. But abandoned houses and building projects now seemed to be everywhere.

A short story on how I became an urban explorer

For every story there is a beginning. And the beginning to my urban exploration story happened almost 15 years ago in a small village somewhere in Finland. It was almost Christmas, but there was no snow. It was cold, rainy and pitch dark, when I traveled with my family to the village we used to live in, when I was a child. I hadn’t been there in years, I couldn’t remember anything about it. So I was excited.

When we turned to the village from the main road, I started having a bad feeling. You know the kind of chill in your lower spine or a tickle up your upper ass, however you want to put it. The further we drove in the darkness, the worse the feeling became. Soon it was all over my body. And then, suddenly, I saw this.

I was frozen in fear. I managed to ask my family what the place was, and was told, it was an old abattoir, which had stood there since forever. 

I spent a sleepless night trying to recall old childhood memories, and finally found one. I was about four, was on my way home from the village shop, and thunder was rising. I looked up to the tower rising towards the black sky, saw something and never walked past the building with my eyes open again.

The abattoir now had my curiosity. I decided, that I simply had to get in there somehow.