Life in the rear-view mirror

Life in the rear-view mirror

onsdag 20. februar 2013

Ghosts and buildings

(bear in mind that when I wrote most of this I was half asleep...)

Why is it that ghosts so often attach to buildings in people's minds? I'm writing this because I was just watching probably the most epic movie I've ever seen (besides Fight Club maybe), and now I cant sleep. It's called The Presence, and despite it's somewhat lackluster cover, it is absolutely mind boggling and original and unexpected. It had me wondering about fear though.

Once I was lost in the woods, not badly lost, but I'd lost my partner in crime and my direction and my car and somewhere in the fog were big, decaying buildings. A mental institution, supposedly pretty seriously haunted as the web is floating with stories from this place. What I expected to be security guards had scared me into the woods. I'd found a path that turned out to lead nowhere productive as it was heading in the wrong direction. I was not too lost, but it was foggy and it was getting dark. I was stressed out quite a bit, but in a sort of way that made me jiggle. How on earth did I end up here? In the woods, all lost and hiding from guards and trying to find my way back to the right building out of the 3 severely haunted old asylum buildings that were hiding in there. Suddenly I spotted it, the right one. I was calm enough to enjoy the irony and surrealness of it even at the time. Had I been in a building it would not have been fun in the least. But why? Maybe because I wasn’t contained. I was in the woods after all, and the woods are owned by no one, not really. You don’t go hiking through someone's living room after all.

I suppose a building gives scary stuff a frame, a context, a reach, a domain, somewhere you are contained, potentially trapped and at the whim of who ever is in charge of it. As I was saying: you don’t just go tracking trough someone else's building by chance, you are there because you mean to be there and so it appears to us that if there is a ghost or a spirit (or whatever you wanna call it) in a given building, then it would have some sort of claim or authority in there, more so then outside it at least. If you're snooping in a non-public building and you run into someone all by your lonesome, you don’t expect that person to just ignore the fact that you are out of place, but to get all territorial on you. I suppose this wears off on our perception of the supernatural. Come to think of it, I believe casually wondering into someones house is probably one of the few instances where you can actually get into quite a bit of trouble without actually doing any harm.

Exploring abandoned buildings can cause many things, such as a criminal record and running into questionable people, but mostly I would say the risk is high that you might come to learn a thing or two and even stumble upon some insights. One time I explores an abandoned industrial building on my own. The sheer wight of that concept had me nailed to the spot as soon as I'd entered. I did not move because moving would have hurried me out the door. But why was this scary? I knew quite a bit about this place, or I would have never come alone. By any rational measures, this place was as easy as pie and as safe as anything. Still, I had this peculiar feeling the someone had to be in here. It was a building after all, and buildings have people. Clearly, I'm aware that every so often, buildings of different sorts are abandoned for various reasons and for varying amounts of time. Still, the idea of a building that is simply empty all the time was something very difficult to wrap my brain, not to mention my instincts around, simply because it had never really applied to any situation I'd been in before just recently. I was in an industrial complex where I had no business and no one was going to give me any grief over it. It even had signs up front that said to "keep out" for crying out loud! This place in your mind is clearly a risky place to be and it is a very good determiner of people's character: the decision whether or not you will be good even if no one can see you and the boundaries are somewhat blurred. But I have crossed that particular threshold many times and kept my fingers clean so this is not my cause for my concern. I suppose the sole concept of a building is so closely nit with people, purpose and civilization that I sort of get the feeling that a house, when left alone, while take on a life of it's own to compensate for, or replicate what has been. I'm not saying I believe this to be true, it's just a funny feeling I get, because when a building is empty I suppose you get more aware of the structure itself and it feels like someone or something will always seek out all places inhabitable. In the wild at least, no spot goes unclaimed.