Michael Davidson wrote:

> Ellis was beautiful and at the same time haunting..in fact it was one of the
> most haunted places Ive ever been;

Last Friday on Subway in afternoon I overheard a conversation between two guys
about exploring tunnels of abandoned insane asylums. Got into conversation with
one of them before I had to get off the train. He is into documenting the
adventures with photography. It appeared to be a cross between the draw of the
empy building, and a bit of urban spelunking. He mentioned going into an abandoned
gym in the dark, at night, with flashlights, and being spooked by a floor crowded
with deflated basketballs. I exchanged e-mail addresses and hope to suck him into
BP. Seems there is  a group he goes with and they tour various abandonded sites.
The lure of imagining the past in the remaining built environment.

Though I did not have a very urban experience of the explorations, mine was mostly
with abandoned farmhouses in remote Upstate NY rural locations on dirt roads that
were hardly roads and usually ended in a farmer's corn field. Many times these
were farmsteads on the top of morains that came about as land grants following the
Revolutionary War, but were on land that had so much glacial till that the farms
were never very sustainable. The families tended to move to the west, including a
portion of my own who became sheep farmers in Iowa. Another portion remained
behind and scratched out a living by farming between the rocks. My maternal
grandparents came together by my grandfather, who always was one to wander if
given the opportunity, visiting from Iowa to his distant family connections in the
East. They met at a mountain oyster dinner put on by the local Baptist church. My
grandfather went from sheep farming to carpentry, and eventually became a master
carpenter specializing in spiral stairs. Visiting with Great Grandmother Card, on
my grandmother's side, with the stuffed squirrel in the parlor, the collapsed
barn, chickens & pigs, woodstove, kerosene lamps, and functional outhouse on the
stoney farm was always a mysterious adventure.

My childhood memory is dotted with a collection of abandoned farm structures. In
part the lure of the forbidden zone, either basement or rooftop, lends a sense of
adventure to the contracting business.
--
][<en Follett
SOS Gab & Eti -- http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/5836