Just saying

"In God we trust, all others we monitor."

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Where once was home

We've come through an ocean of green and only just emerged from a tangle of vegetation that was way over our heads. Ramona has already made it trough the backdoor and now I'm standing just outside the front door, which is not really there anymore. I stand there for a moment, assessing my target, but then I tentatively try the floor inside with one foot. This causes the equivalent of a small earthquake. A table by the wall quivers, a quiet warning. Not wanting to see what the rest of my force can do in this particular spot, I ease myself onto a spot further away. Coming away from the door, the floor is better.

I immediately get the feeling that this place is inhabited, but this is just the last desperate attempts of my so called «better judgment» to turn me around. Clearly, no one lives here. This home is abandoned. The newspaper on the living room table was printed some time in the sixties. The door to the room holds a clear indication of forced entry. This can be gathered from the very local, but non the less profound destruction where the lock used to be. Do you force or do you find your way? We've waited for time and nature to open the barriers of humanity, and now we are here to visit the left overs and investigate. Some visit the neatly polished gravestones of people, we visit fading parts of civilization. Visit them on their deathbeds so to speak. I personally like to investigate their illnesses, see where the floor fails first and the likes. It is also interesting to see what is left behind when people withdraw. And what is done by those who come after, like us. We play nice, but not all do.

Right next to the newspaper there is a book. It's open, waiting to be read, but neglected indefinitely. The windows all around are shattered and gone. Still, the book has seen no drift it appears. No waterdamages has been eating away at it. No nothing. It shows the beging of a chapter: “Lazarus, come forth”. Lazarus is a biblical character it turnes out. Raised from the dead by Jesus. At this point in time, I'd rather the dead did not come forth.

A few broken tones break the tense silence and sets the mood . Ramona is trying her hand at the piano in the room. It's seems only half awake, only half remembering it's own workings, or it wants a say in the melody played. Because of all the ebonies and ivories, only a selection seems to have sounds that go with them. Some sound when prompted, others stay dead silent. In the middle of the floor the is a suitecase, open and ready to be filled with all the surrounding clutter. The floorboard are a little soft, but not too soft.

Upstairs is mostly empty. Not much furniture, but the floor is carpeted by newspapers and the likes.

Piece of cake

I used to be dead scared of driving to the point of being absolutely positive that I would never ever learn it. Now a day I drive at least 5 hours a week just to go to school, then there's the rather frequent 16 hours back and forth to go home every other weekend and the somewhat.... alternative sightseeing trips on the remaining weekends. And, needless to say, I've tackled the shift stick even, cause that's how we do around here. But now, I can't help but wonder if I was right to be scared? Is it just me that's noticing how stupid we all get in traffic?

I'm just driving and driving, minding my own business, when suddenly I look in the mirror, and HOLY COW, where did I get that trailer?! No wait! That thing is surely way out of the weight class of my poor little Ford. On closer inspection it looks more like a lorry, only it looks to have stuck to my bumper. Wonder what would happen if I hit the breaks? But never mind that. I'm sure the driver must be fast asleep, as the left lane is wide open, just waiting to be used. Funny.

Also, when people are trying to get onto the highway and you are suppose to be nice and not put their life in danger and all sorts of warm and fuzzy things. Well, some people find this a splendid time to rush ahead of you. I mean, you've already got approximately 1567 cars between you and your home, you wouldn’t want to make that 1568 just to spare someones life... I totally get it! I mean, why enter in front of that nice, but somewhat worn out Ford Focus that's made room for you, when you could put the pedal to the metal and squeeze in between the car ahead of it and the lorry that are way to close for comfort? I mean, he or she could totally save at least like a split second!

A late, warm evening in august, I was reminded of what a difficult thing it is to drive. I had driven for a solid 7 hours that day and by now, the traffic had almost stilled completely. I had left the shift stick in neutral, just rolling downhill, which had left me with only one pedal to use, the breaks. Every time I taped it, my right leg protested painfully. This is when the most... shall we say “educational” idea struck me: why not use my left foot? It's just hanging around idly anyway. I feel very pleased with this idea and immediately switch feet. It's all good, until I actually have to do something. I tap the break again, but this time the fault is somewhere else. I tap it too hard. Turns out my left foot is not as fine tuned, or rather it is tuned for something else entirely: the clutch. This is quite unsettling and when unsettled in traffic, I usually automatically floor the clutch just in case. So I floor the clutch, except it isn’t not the clutch, it's the break. I swear to God, the car behind me almost ran me over even at such a low speed. So, note to self: it is of the essence to keep the right foot on the right pedal. Driving is very complicated, it's just that we've all forgotten. We just think that we can do it, we don’t realize that the right foot cant do what the left foot is doing, so how would we know if we suddenly didn’t know anymore?

One afternoon I'm driving home from school. I'm on the highway, and suddenly I plunge into a thought-experiment. What would happen if I fell asleep right now? As I'm doing 110 km/h in 5^th gear at probably around 2500 RPM, I've got my right foot on the gas pedal. I carefully relax the muscles. As this car has a blessedly mellow diesel engine and requires a little intent to unsettle it's pace once it's taken to it, the pedal sinks just barely and it continues steadily at the same worrisome speed of 110 km/h. But then I have another idea. I pull my heal back just a bit from the pedal, and relax my foot again. This time it starts to accelerate. I quickly slow back down, eyes wide with horror. I'm wide awake at this point, despite that my brain is positively silver from all the metal fumes I've inhaled at school that same day, but all around me, people are going home from work, all tired and worn out, all at 110 km/h with their foot on the gas... This is exactly the sort of situation where you will want to remain blissfully ignorant. 

Lyster Sanatorium... again and again and again.

Then we were there again, the building still standing and looking awesome. To think they want to tear this thing down. That's why we're here, because it might be the last time we ever get to see it. I don’t know why this makes me sad, but it does. It's still just as fascinating as the first time I saw it, which was less then a year ago. A year before that again, the fascination was pretty much instant as it emerged from a small photograph of a big white building on the mountainside snapped at twilight a warm summer evening from across the fjord... my 250 mm lens was just short of giving me a good look at it. I would have never imagined I would set foot in this place and live (through the panic) to tell the tale. Not unless there was a gun to my head... and I would still have died from the panic I imagined. Which goes to show that a lot more is possible then originally expected. And even such low level impossibilities feels mighty good to conquer.

This time I have thought to come better equipped, with proper flashlights, a flash and a tripod. Tripod in hand, I work a lot slower then usual as it's not soothing my usual, restless self. My frustration was fairly faint though. My experience from my trips to Lier (abandoned mental institution) is that such hangups as a tripod needing to be adjusted would surely murder me slowly. Being forced to remain still made the nervousness ease up on me, as though the devil was on my trail back there. In this place, my behavior alters as well, but in quite a different way. I become infinitely chatty, thinking and speaking almost simultaneously, leaving no time what so ever for any elaborate consideration on the matter of whether this would be even remotely interesting to anyone, ever. I can be quite annoying.

In the deep darkness of the basement, the sweep of a tiny flashlight reveals a small object on the floor.
“Is that on of them sticks they used to lobotomize people with?” Ramona wonders. I believe I've told her about such things previously.
Not even a chill spreads at the mentioning of such macabre tools. For various reasons, I'm fairly sure she is wrong, but I hunch down to have a closer look. It's just a nut cracker, or rather half a nut cracker. When I give my interpretation of another object a moment later, it was Ramona's turn to be all rational.

“It's just a broken sifter” she clarifies, shooting down my more imaginative ideas, revolving around the fact that it is remarkable head-shaped. There are plenty fuel for the imaginative in this place. I used to see mosters everywhere, but now I feel only vaguely unsure when I'm walking around alone, wondering where Ramona has disappered off to.

As we slowly finish up with the basement, we run into the guided tour and get a tip that we might want to head up to the library while the sun is still in the right spot. Apparently there is a hole in the ceiling and the light is good just now. We head on up 4 flights of stairs, to the topmost floor (not counting the attic). I am very happy as I had thought this train had gone. We barely entered this floor during my first visit as the strange arching corridor was creeping me out (hard to imagine now), there was the added risk of going tumbling trough the floor the further up we went and last but not least: Janne had had enough at that point. She simply did not take as much interest in this stuff as I do. Last time, anything above the first floor was off limits. So some parts of this building remained uncharted, and now I would finally get to see them. The basement and first floor had been thoroughly explored, but some of the second, most of the third and almost all of the forth was still fresh to us.

As we step off of the solid and safe feeling stairs, I bring on my stealthy, soft gait, very aware that there is a long, crushing drop lurking beneath my feet. Under every slightly upward turned window in this hallway there is vivid decomposing going on. In one particular bad spot, I step in a doorway, grab onto it while reaching as far away from the rotten spot with one foot as I can, brushing my front against the wall. Ramona thinks I'm being super silly, so I cant help but rub it in when we later see this spot from below. It's hard to miss as some of the third floor ceiling has made it onto the floor and is now a sizable pile that I step over tentatively, always a bit unsettled when I cant see the floor under my feet. From beneath, this spot looks very bleak, and I'm happy I did my best not to step on it.

Sensitive me picks up even the slightest change in solidity underfoot, and is now moving increasingly slowly and silently, favoring the doorways and the sides of the rooms, while Ramona walks straight across the floor as though nothing is off, like this is just a stroll in the park. This is one of many times I've wondered what on earth is going on in her head. “Better safe then sorry” I think to myself. It's not as though I'm missing anything by choosing a slightly different route through the rooms. Come to think of it, to be safe would probably mean to be somewhere else entirely. I am well aware that many people would consider this utter stupidity, and not even faintly worthwhile. If they were to think nice and rationally though, they too would know that life is dangerous, and my 40 000+ km on the road in the last year is surely a much bigger threat to my safety. My insurance company realize this at least, that's why they keep demanding more and more money for my car insurance.

We find the library pretty easily and it is indeed splendid. Though fairly small, it stretches the full height of two floors with a gallery up top. Further up there is a rectangular hole in the ceiling (maybe 1,5x3 meters?) through which we can see the attic windows and the sunlight. Strangely unfazed by this (this would be the building layout of my nightmares, as it is very difficult to survey) I exclaim:

“I want a library just like this one!”

Before I even manage to cross the room and set up the tripod, Ramona is way ahead of me, wanting to show me the distinctions of oak, as she has tried to explain this before. As I realize the amount of plain, proper wood (oak even) in this room we are both a bit astonished. Ramona is the expert (at least I'm trying to stick her with the task as my expert consultant), but even I can tell that this must have cost a small fortune.

“You could put anything in here! Anything! A full collection of encyclopedia or what ever, this is so strong, it could hold just about anything!” Ramona's joy at seeing something so properly and nicely made is obvious.

“I don’t really want to leave. Maybe we should just stay here for ever and ever!” I giggle.

On the forth floor we run into the guided tour yet again the very helpful make shift guide gives us another tip: the most haunted spot is on the third floor around where there is a big hole in the floor he assures us. And we head down.

We work our way through the third floor as well and eventually arrive at the spot where a long strip of duck tape and a cheerful note used to mark the beginning of the off limit section of the floor. It now hangs limply down along the wall, so I venture a few steps further, rounding the corner to see that a big portion of floor has come undone. Later on, on the second floor, we realize that the hole is 2 floors deep, as the destruction has continued on through the second floor while it was at it, and ended in a big pile on the first floor. The latter remained solid. This stuff can not have been here the first time I realize, as it dawns on me exactly where we are. Surly I would have notice a big hole over head while walking on thin air down the second floor hallway. Thinking back, I remember being pointed to a section of the floor to feel it with my foot. The floorboards were all soft. Overhead, a dark area of the ceiling was already giving away the condition the upstairs floor. The blackening 110 years old floorboards looked pliable enough to give way to anyone insisting enough. That section of the third floor was already off limits due to safety. It is very peculiar to observe such changes. It doesn’t really unsettle or frighten me, as we are not particularly dim and have been thoroughly informed of the risks at hand and what to look out for, but it's sad. 110 is no age for such a structure. The grand dame could easily have been thriving still, but unaccustomed to the presence of humans in the last 20 years, this building has become a place for something else entirely. The lady in white flies again, but on weathered wings, as though in remembrance of a past life. Though in a once proud creation of mankind, we are strangely out of our element. As this all was neglected, nature itself has been pulling the strings.

“I might cry if this place is demolished” I say, not for the first time that day and only half joking.

But there is a lot of work to be done. Windows all around are leaking furiously and the woodwork is slowly coming undone. It's very cool that someone would dare to take on such a daunting task.

Checking out the rest of this side of the second and third floor, I stumble upon a familiar sight. With my recollection mostly revolving around stills from previous trips, this whole section of the house is familiar, but this room captures me instantly. I remember the pix I took here and decide that they didn’t do it justice. The pix weren’t bad, but this room is soooo nice. I lean on the doorway, feeling so very strangely at home. This room isn’t particular in any sort of obvious way, but I feel that this room is a very good place to be. Might be the calm blue paint and the big windows with the sunny, breathtaking landscape outside that is eating at my brain, but this is very nice. I snap a few more pix, but I instinctively know that this isn’t the sort of stuff that attaches to pixels. Oh well, wouldn’t stop me trying.

We find a few more interesting pieces of furniture on one of the upper levels and I carefully place the tripod, instruct Ramona on which button to push, and then head on up in front of the camera, not for the first time that day. I feel so embarrassed, but I feel very strongly that some of my shots need people and I have, as of yet, not been able to convince any of my friends to take up a career in modeling. Also, I hate asking people for help. I will just have to do. Ramona is having a blast as I am chit chatting, trying to excuse my behavior.

“I can see you like taking pictures of yourself” she says laughing.

I'm wondering if she really knows this little about me, or if she is merely pretending, so she can make me even more ill at ease (if even possible). Most of the pictures are useless though, as my discomfort is very visibly present in my posture. This, needless to say, works very badly when you are supposedly a fearsome, supernatural being.

I did take one self portrait I was happy with though. It was me sitting on the stairs in the basement, looking sort of happy. It was hard-won though as I nearly smashed in the back of my head a few seconds earlier, slipping on the damp stairs. It was also by the way much too damp to actually sit on, so I had to pretend to sit on it instead. My head was even lost in a sort of blue haze that looks way funny. I wasn’t aware of any fog on the lens at that point, and there seems to be non on the pix before nor after. But this place was much to damp to trust anything coming from a camera, especially anything back-lit by a window.

We check back with the guy who is in charge before leaving. As we talk for a while about photography, exploring and so on, me and Ramona (mostly me I suppose) becomes thoroughly convinced that we should come back in a few weeks. So one more trip it is I suppose. I did say that this would be the very last trip, but than again I've said that every time we've been here. We've spent a good four hours, and then even rushing a bit at the end. We head on over to the car and drive home in silence mostly. It always gets like this as I'm the one that talks usually, but after visiting such places I have too much to think about to even realize I'm being dead quiet. Luckily, Ramona is like that always so she hardly notices. This time I stay thoughtfully quite for days though, only speaking when prompted.

Luster and Lier

Made my forth visit to Lyster Sanatorium yesterday, so there is probably going to be even more on that soon. Till then, I've finally managed to upload the movie I was working on at Lier last time. It's just a sort of presentation for my contribution to the IKEA-hacking project me and my fellow product design students did at Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences. We were all given a set of Lupin blinds from IKEA and could make what ever we wanted with them. I made a bridge, and later decided to make a monster and set the movie to Lier to define a purpose for it. The movie is sort of non-sensical and a bit rushed since it could not be longer then 1 minute, and I was sort of running out of time and motivation at the end there :P

 

The music is the theme from Shutter Island and "Cure for the itch" by Linkin Park.

How not to go exploring

For all of last week I had been thinking I needed to talk to Ramona about hanging out on Saturday. Sadly, in between shaping steel, relearning to weld and tackling the complexities of SolidWorks, I was way too tired to remember to do this. So it was not until Friday that I did, and not until about 9 PM that it was established that be would go to Sweden the next morning. Being a semi-organized duo of urbexers, we had had this spot in mind for a while and I had already pinpointed it on Google Maps long ago, luckily.

Almost at once it started getting a little interesting though. Have you ever tried reading Google's directions for a route you already know? Notice how they somehow manage to confuse you anyway? 

We made it to Sweden okey, then we drove around aimlessly for a while (according to the GPS, the place we were heading simply does not exist) and when we finally got too worried that we would get lost in the cobweb of roads out in the woods, we headed back to town and went candy shopping. Eventually, I got in touch with my dad over the phone and by the combined forces of Google Maps and the NAF-bible (the Norwegian Automobile Association’s book of road maps) we got back on track.

(a few weeks earlier)

Dad : *wathching TV, looks at me, looks back at the TV, and back at me again* “Is that the NAF-book you're reading?!”

Me: “Yeah, I'm looking for an abandoned hotel I saw...”

Dad: “Oh... “

Finally back on track, Ramona is clearly getting used to the NAF-book and is buzy keeping track of where we are on the map, while I have the unsettlig feeling that while we drive slowly in my little Ford Focus (no off-road truck to say the least) the locals drive just like my local locals (myself included) on the dodgy roads at home: in a way that suggests you know every corner, which is supernaturally fast. 

“So now you have lost your way and cant find the pile of trash you were looking for?”.

My dad wasn’t too far off with this sarcastic attempt at guessing what I wanted when I called.

So what is it we have come for exactly? Cars, a whole bunch of cars rotting away slowly. This has been called a car cemetery by many and is supposedly the biggest collection of decaying cars in all of northern Europe. Different sources give different numbers, but 500+ is not a bold guess to the number of cars, maybe ever as much as a thousand. All from the forties, fifties and sixties, when this was a flourishing business. Now photographers and nostalgic car enthusiasts thrive instead. Before we exit the car, I look at my watch and declare that we have half an hour, tops. This is not enough, by any means, but we need to be back at Eidsvoll by 8.09 pm. “Why haven’t you gotten your lens out yet?” Ramona wants to know.

We track around the woods and see a fraction of it. I take about 150 pix. Even such noobs as us can see all sorts of familiar shapes around us. The VW T1 (van), the old school VW Beetle, a Mini Cooper (a car involved in almost all my dad's tales of his youth) and one that looks like the car Mr Bean drives. The cars are piled up, some missing a lot of major parts, some smashed quite a bit, and they have stuff growing on, in, around and through them. Beetles are smiling wide from bushes, from atop other cars and from between the trees, because it's the only expression they have. We'll be back for sure!

The next morning I woke up anxious and depressed, only halfway recovered from a sugar induced coma-like sleep. This clearly could only be mended by some more candy.

Explore

I have been thinking hard all day, I even dreamt about it last night! I will not tell you exactly what it was, because that would make it worse, but I will shed some light on the matter so you can see what I'm on about.

One day I landed myself in a bit of a tangle with my new found mischievous hobby. I spotted a building a while ago that was clearly out of business, because, well, all the windows were broken. Pretty much every single one. In between planning for bigger missions, we decided to have a look at it one day. The first door we tried had clearly been forcefully opened at some point, but now it was shut properly. The second one was open. Which I found slightly odd, but didn’t really take the time to reflect on it before slipping inside. Almost instantly, when inside, be realized we might have made our first blooper. Abandoned places hold all sorts of strange things, and some are like time capsules, but this didn’t seem right for some reason. First of all, there were forklifts. We had seen that before, but those had come trough hell (or rather a massive fire) while these looked fully operational. Also, the floor looked to have been swept recently. Which is something people don’t just happen to do to abandoned buildings. People might board up windows and door out of the goodness of their hearts, but they don’t sweep. There is just no meaning to it.

As you might have already gathered, this place was slightly less abandoned then we would have liked. It was certainly out of business, but it seemed someone was still using this place for storage if nothing else. At this point in the story (I'm sad to say you are not the first to hear it) my mother was slightly outraged over the phone: “Someone could have walked in on you! They could have been angry! It could have been dangerous!”. And yeah, someone could have very well arrived just then and it would have been very bad.

For fear of saying to much, I will not elaborate any further or go into details of the appearance, type or whereabouts of this building, so this is where I switch back to my pondering. As I may or may not have described at great lengths before (not sure actually), we do not steal, break stuff, break and enter, vandalize or any of that stuff. Outside of the constant presence of expensive (and quite heavy) photo gear, our objective is mostly to see and to make more or less qualified guesses as to why things are the way they are. We are good guys we feel, though you might not be able to tell if you ran into us in a dodgy place. I don’t care so much for labels, but I want to be good and not bad, not rude. But I feel that this whole situation is rude. To be in someone's space unbidden. It is at best, very rude. This is indisputable to me. However accidental, the result is still the same to the subject of out involuntary rudeness. Believe me, I would love to write this off as someone else's fault or problem, but there is no two ways about this. So what is there to wonder about? Well... I was wondering what to do with the pix. We were in agreement at once that we should not give out this location to anyone, not even almost, or accidentally, or partially, or by way of cryptic clues, as is the way of urban explorers. The pix would be published (the least incriminating ones, mind you) and no one would be any the wiser as to were they came from. After all, what were the odds that the wrong people would see them???

The I went on to the mental experiment of what would happen IF the wrong people did see them. “I would feel so bad” I though, and felt some of the imagined shame wash over me. Then I swiftly carried on deciding which pix would be published...

This is when the bullshit detector went off in my head, clearly, or it wouldn’t be a very good one. The consept that all reasoning seemed to travel in big circles around was this: If I know I'm going to feel bad about this later, then why on earth am I doing it? I would apologize with feeling I imagined, but all the while my subconscious was miles ahead of me, repeating a specific line from a song, for a suitable soundtrack (this is actually, I regret to inform you, no joke! I actually ended up having to download it). A fitting answer to my future plea for forgiveness: “Don't tell me you're sorry cause you're not. I know you're only sorry you got caught” (“Take a bow” by Rihanna). There is no real damage done, and this is an honest mistake so long as no one knows. But I wouldn’t be able to convince anyone (especially not myself) that I accidentally uploaded the pictures to the web. After all, I have to remember what so few people seem to realize; that the web is not like my diary at all. People can see and read, and respond and spread this stuff! So, what is not yours to share, do not put it on the web! Tell your trusted friends and your mum and all that, but do not put something on the web if you cant honestly defend it without blushing. And try not to step on peoples toes to much when they have done absolutely no harm to you. And preferably, don’t do stuff at all if you cant justify it.

In other news, this is our second explore in a row that has ended with someone asking us for directions.
“Why does this keep happening?” I wondered aloud.
“It's because we look so at home everywhere” Ramona concludes.

Later on we go to a store, and I smile at people. I only recently figured it was okay to spontaneously smile at strangers and now I do it all the time. Who know it was this easy to be just slightly more outgoing?! My lack of understanding for what falls withing the boundaries of normal conversations, still seems to confuse people, but when you smile a lot, random people might say hi or even start talking to you, which is nice :)