just this weekend i went to visit burkittsville, MD. it's an old civil war town about 10 minutes from harpers ferry, WV. it was a creepy town, especially at 1:30 in the morning on dirt roads with plenty of corn fields.
now i know that the ridiculous movie the Blair Witch Project was filmed there, but that's not the point of this thread.
have any of you been to any creepy towns/old abandoned structures and just felt something weird? maybe even seen something you couldn't believe?
I used to photograph old abandoned farm housed in the middle of no where. Lots of them were inhabited by barn owls and bats which can scare the shit out of you any time of day. I never saw or felt anything weird, but I was more worried about the houses collapsing on me than running into ghosts.
I was photographing an abandoned asylum once. I was in a room with a circular stainless steel tub set in the floor that was surrounded with rings that looked like they could have been used to restrain someone. I heard this eerie screech echoing and nearly pissed myself. Then out of a broken cast iron radiator walked a tiny mouse.
My brother and I were walking down a street near Philly. An old lady comes up to us and asks us how we like it here. We say we like it fine and start walking again. We recently moved and we didn't know this lady so we turn around to ask her how she knows us, except she isn't there anymore and there was nowhere she could've gone. Confused we keep walking with this old stone wall next to us. When we got to the bottom of the hill we found that the stone wall separated the sidewalk and a cemetary. I would chalk this one up as a distorted childhood memory, but my brother remembers it well too.
different type of ghost story...back when you could walk into the abandoned michigan central depot (old train station), i used to go there every year to walk around, see it transform itself, etc....i always thought it was remarkable, that although it was completely silent, abandoned and increasingly delapidated, you could always still feel the energy imprint in the air...if you closed your eyes in either atrium, you could still feel the energy of all the people that used to populate that space....incredible building regardless...
Isn't it gone now, simples? I know several people who did thesis work around that building - it is indeed compelling.
Aug 21, 07 2:37 pm ·
·
Subject: Mount Pleasant (and a room of ill-repute)
Date: 2002.06.18 17:49
One of the 88 Houses of Ill-Repute uploaded to day at Quondam is Mount Pleasant, a very fine Georgian Country Estate in what is today Philadelphia's Fairmount Park. In preparing this webpage I did a websearch on Mount Pleasant to see if there were any interesting facts for inclusion with the Quondam presentation. As it happens, John McPherson, the first owner of Mount Pleasant (1760), was known for having only one arm, and that a one-armed ghost is sometimes seen at Mount Pleasant. I've been at Mount Pleasant a few times myself, obviously to take pictures recently (1998), but also as a student because we once had a project, a house for a scholar, whose site was just beyond Mount Pleasant's formal garden in the back. While the gardens are 'pleasant', I kind of remember that they was also something creepy about the place. If memory serves me correctly (and here I'm going back to Spring 1977), either I or someone else in the class saw a man in the gazebo which led from the garden to the project site, and then the man, who looked like a bum (and there often are bums that live in Fairmount Park), seemed to disappear, or at least he was very quickly gone. I'm now remembering that it was me that saw this man. I was alone doing 'site analysis', and when I noticed the man was gone, I went to see where he went, and there was no trace of the man. I can even kind of remember his face--he was looking right at me when I noticed him. And now if memory serves me correctly, I noticed that the gazebo was no longer there in 1998.
At the 'ghost' website there was also a story about a room within the Philadelphia Museum of Art. For those that do not know, the PMA has a quite impressive collection of period rooms, and apparently in one of the Elizabethan rooms a German woman/visitor was slapped in the face while no one else was in the room. She reported this the a security guard, and the 'slap' was verified by a security video tape. Although the video tape verification sounds dubious, as I don't remember seeing security cameras throughout the museum, the story in general somewhat coincides with another story about a specific Elizabethan room within the museum. In the book Triumph on Fairmount there is the story that the founding director of the museum, Fiske Kimball, when he gave a tour of the period rooms, would refer to one of the Elizabethan rooms as "where Queen Elizabeth I was conceived"--apparently the walls of the room came from the house where King Henry VIII used to 'meet' Anne Boleyn.
So, is Anna Boleyn today a slap-happy ghost in Philadelphia? Or, is Henry VIII perhaps reenacting some rough sex? Or, is QEI demonstrating some pre-natal dislike of Germans? Or is all this a too weird wavelength???
One of the 1st projects I worked on was a rehab of a 100 + year old Victorian home in Chicago. Obviously cause I was the newbie I had to do the field dims solo. The people who had lived their previously were this wierd "people under the stairs" kinda couple. They lived primarily in the basement. Half of the basement was had everything, doors, windows, etc. wallpapered in this old "pscyo"esque wallpaper and the other half was this empty cavern of crumbling hallways and hidden rooms. The windows were all boarded up so to field dim those rooms I literally had to feel my way around the dark to find a light switch. I felt like Jodie Foster in "Silence of the lambs" walking into cobwebs and feeling wholes in the walls. To top it off I could of sworn I heard someone walking around upstairs even though I new I was alone. eek, still gives me the creeps thinking about it.
the passenger platforms in the rear of the building are gone; the building is still there, in really bad shape, but it's fenced in and much more secure nowadays; i wouldn't risk breaking in for a visit since they would probably prosecute you now.
you can see the building in the movie "the island" and i heard also in the new transformers movie...there was a "street basketball tournament" movie filmed there recently, and a couple of music videos...so it might be the most exposed piece of detroit architecture today...
from time to time you hear about a developer trying to do something with the building, but the owner doesn't want to sell, and the building would require a lot of work...over the last few years, some serious plans to turn it into a Casino/Hotel and even the police headquarters were considered for it, but of course, it's still there...
Aug 21, 07 3:19 pm ·
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the ghost thread
just this weekend i went to visit burkittsville, MD. it's an old civil war town about 10 minutes from harpers ferry, WV. it was a creepy town, especially at 1:30 in the morning on dirt roads with plenty of corn fields.
now i know that the ridiculous movie the Blair Witch Project was filmed there, but that's not the point of this thread.
have any of you been to any creepy towns/old abandoned structures and just felt something weird? maybe even seen something you couldn't believe?
share your experiences.
I used to photograph old abandoned farm housed in the middle of no where. Lots of them were inhabited by barn owls and bats which can scare the shit out of you any time of day. I never saw or felt anything weird, but I was more worried about the houses collapsing on me than running into ghosts.
I was photographing an abandoned asylum once. I was in a room with a circular stainless steel tub set in the floor that was surrounded with rings that looked like they could have been used to restrain someone. I heard this eerie screech echoing and nearly pissed myself. Then out of a broken cast iron radiator walked a tiny mouse.
i've been to texas. scared the shit out of me. does that count?
alabama is scarier
i have not had the 'bama experience yet.
texas? check.
arkansas? check.
georgia? check.
pennyslvania? double check.
but no alabama yet.
My brother and I were walking down a street near Philly. An old lady comes up to us and asks us how we like it here. We say we like it fine and start walking again. We recently moved and we didn't know this lady so we turn around to ask her how she knows us, except she isn't there anymore and there was nowhere she could've gone. Confused we keep walking with this old stone wall next to us. When we got to the bottom of the hill we found that the stone wall separated the sidewalk and a cemetary. I would chalk this one up as a distorted childhood memory, but my brother remembers it well too.
different type of ghost story...back when you could walk into the abandoned michigan central depot (old train station), i used to go there every year to walk around, see it transform itself, etc....i always thought it was remarkable, that although it was completely silent, abandoned and increasingly delapidated, you could always still feel the energy imprint in the air...if you closed your eyes in either atrium, you could still feel the energy of all the people that used to populate that space....incredible building regardless...
more photos here:
http://www.forgottendetroit.com/mcs/photos.html
that looks like a cool place to walk around in
Isn't it gone now, simples? I know several people who did thesis work around that building - it is indeed compelling.
Subject: Mount Pleasant (and a room of ill-repute)
Date: 2002.06.18 17:49
One of the 88 Houses of Ill-Repute uploaded to day at Quondam is Mount Pleasant, a very fine Georgian Country Estate in what is today Philadelphia's Fairmount Park. In preparing this webpage I did a websearch on Mount Pleasant to see if there were any interesting facts for inclusion with the Quondam presentation. As it happens, John McPherson, the first owner of Mount Pleasant (1760), was known for having only one arm, and that a one-armed ghost is sometimes seen at Mount Pleasant. I've been at Mount Pleasant a few times myself, obviously to take pictures recently (1998), but also as a student because we once had a project, a house for a scholar, whose site was just beyond Mount Pleasant's formal garden in the back. While the gardens are 'pleasant', I kind of remember that they was also something creepy about the place. If memory serves me correctly (and here I'm going back to Spring 1977), either I or someone else in the class saw a man in the gazebo which led from the garden to the project site, and then the man, who looked like a bum (and there often are bums that live in Fairmount Park), seemed to disappear, or at least he was very quickly gone. I'm now remembering that it was me that saw this man. I was alone doing 'site analysis', and when I noticed the man was gone, I went to see where he went, and there was no trace of the man. I can even kind of remember his face--he was looking right at me when I noticed him. And now if memory serves me correctly, I noticed that the gazebo was no longer there in 1998.
At the 'ghost' website there was also a story about a room within the Philadelphia Museum of Art. For those that do not know, the PMA has a quite impressive collection of period rooms, and apparently in one of the Elizabethan rooms a German woman/visitor was slapped in the face while no one else was in the room. She reported this the a security guard, and the 'slap' was verified by a security video tape. Although the video tape verification sounds dubious, as I don't remember seeing security cameras throughout the museum, the story in general somewhat coincides with another story about a specific Elizabethan room within the museum. In the book Triumph on Fairmount there is the story that the founding director of the museum, Fiske Kimball, when he gave a tour of the period rooms, would refer to one of the Elizabethan rooms as "where Queen Elizabeth I was conceived"--apparently the walls of the room came from the house where King Henry VIII used to 'meet' Anne Boleyn.
So, is Anna Boleyn today a slap-happy ghost in Philadelphia? Or, is Henry VIII perhaps reenacting some rough sex? Or, is QEI demonstrating some pre-natal dislike of Germans? Or is all this a too weird wavelength???
One of the 1st projects I worked on was a rehab of a 100 + year old Victorian home in Chicago. Obviously cause I was the newbie I had to do the field dims solo. The people who had lived their previously were this wierd "people under the stairs" kinda couple. They lived primarily in the basement. Half of the basement was had everything, doors, windows, etc. wallpapered in this old "pscyo"esque wallpaper and the other half was this empty cavern of crumbling hallways and hidden rooms. The windows were all boarded up so to field dim those rooms I literally had to feel my way around the dark to find a light switch. I felt like Jodie Foster in "Silence of the lambs" walking into cobwebs and feeling wholes in the walls. To top it off I could of sworn I heard someone walking around upstairs even though I new I was alone. eek, still gives me the creeps thinking about it.
the passenger platforms in the rear of the building are gone; the building is still there, in really bad shape, but it's fenced in and much more secure nowadays; i wouldn't risk breaking in for a visit since they would probably prosecute you now.
you can see the building in the movie "the island" and i heard also in the new transformers movie...there was a "street basketball tournament" movie filmed there recently, and a couple of music videos...so it might be the most exposed piece of detroit architecture today...
http://www.michaelbay.com/blog/files/afeb1171e5e9bbd1986a07986ec0b9e6-40.html
from time to time you hear about a developer trying to do something with the building, but the owner doesn't want to sell, and the building would require a lot of work...over the last few years, some serious plans to turn it into a Casino/Hotel and even the police headquarters were considered for it, but of course, it's still there...
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