Everyone has a different exploring style, ranging from spending all their time taking precise, long exposure shots, to just dickin’ around taking dumb photos of their friends trying to look hella cool while wearing unnecessary gas masks or shitty clown masks. (Those photos are one of the main reasons I hate explaining to people what urban exploring is, because later when they google it, those photos pop up and I die a million deaths by vicarious embarrassment.) My style is to shoot a few perfunctory room/building shots and then start rootin’ through garbage and piles of rubble to find treasures to photograph and occasionally to…shall we say…liberate.
I’ve found many overlooked things in over-explored sites, from lobotomy tools and patient files to horse bones and antique razors. I mostly exclude these findings from my posts for the sake of brevity (at which I mostly fail) and also I know most people would rather look at panoptic photos rather than close-ups of a bunch of old medical vials that I unearthed from under a pile of dried bird turds. So I just upload them, untagged, to instagram, but I figured I should start a ‘found’ section here to show some of those photos.
One of many patient records in a stack of files dated between 1883 and 1930, from the basement file room of a psychiatric hospital. Death files are often all-inclusive, containing the patient’s official records of admission, medical reports and observations of their illness during their stay, to “date of discharge,” which in these files means the patient died at the facility.
CHEESE STORAGE. Looks like I found some mouse house blueprints.
Malted Milk, “for infants, invalids, the aged and travelers.” You know, the subcultures no one wants to deal with but we all have been in, are currently in, or will someday be in. Created in the 1800s, a scoop of malted milk added flavor and nutritional value to otherwise disgusting, garbage dairy products for picky, bratty kids. You can also use it to make delicious things, like malted milkshakes, or to aid with sea/car sickness, hence the “travelers” reference.
A 1905 issue of The Southern Fancier. THE SOUTHERN FANCIER. Never in my life have I heard a more appropriate name for vintage porn. Except it’s all about chickens. Found in the attic of an old farmhouse that belonged to a preacher.
Certification sticker from the late 1800s on patient paperwork at a New Jersey asylum. Once patients got their “certificate of insanity” from the Essex County court, their diagnosis and records were verified by two doctors before being officially stamped or watermarked.
I assume these are recordings of patient interviews, based on where they were located, but I do not know for sure. These dictation ‘diamond disks’ were used from 1912-1929 and played at 16rpm. I haven’t been able to find anyone with a record player that can play them at that speed. They’re thin, and I’ve been told I can probably only get one or two plays out of them before they’re ruined, so I can’t muck around trying to play them at a different speed on a normal record player.
Almost walked right into this lil’ guy with my face. I don’t think either of us were too happy about it.
They just don’t make saws like they used to, back when they used to make them in wood shops in asylum basements.
This cluster of old candy wrappers, straws, and gum was underneath a loose step in the Lyric Theatre, a vaudeville-turned film-turned porno theater in Alabama. I was all excited to see the old straws you always see in movies and kids books about movies, so I took one home, but it was gross and I’m trying really hard to learn the lesson between garbage and treasures but I’m remarkably bad at it. It’s often said that “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” but sometimes one man’s trash should be everyone’s trash.
Stamped silverware atop a metal letterpress form for patient medication and laboratory prescriptions. Finding stamped silverware is becoming harder and harder since it’s a common thing for people to collect.
A friend and I once devoted the majority of a 13 hour exploring day to searching for the illusive old Kirkbride blueprints for Hudson River State Hospital. After rummaging through junk for hours, we finally located the nearly 100 year old blueprints in the back of a basement file room. But of course, they fell apart the second I touched them because I can’t have nice things.
An old Westinghouse fan. These things retail (as antiques of course) anywhere from $10 to $400, depending on their condition and how big a sucker you are.
These glass syringes were in the attic of an abandoned biotech laboratory. Biotechnology is “the use of living organisms or other biological systems in the manufacturing of drugs or other products.” In this case, the lab developed medical vaccines as well as experimental drugs, which were tested on animals, mainly horses and mice. These syringes are 2cc, Ideal Interchangeable, manufactured in the US. The needles are from Becton-Dickinson, a medical supply company founded in 1897. It is still active.
Plate glass negatives from a psychiatric hospital. They’re part of a set used for nurse combat training for dealing with violent patients. These two contain statistical information about assaults by patients, categorized by their illness, and the injurious results.
Data on assaults corresponding to illnesses and gender. Epilepsy* had the highest rate of assaults, followed by schizophrenia. Lues, aka syphilis aka “junk madness,” is third in line, followed by manic depression (now known as bipolar disorder) and “cer-art” which is short for cerebral arteriosclerosis, which is senile dementia.
* This is a complicated statistic, since epileptics should never have been in mental institutions in the first place, as it is not a mental illness. However, it’s not that black and white, especially regarding the time period between 1850-1970(ish), when epilepsy was commonly misunderstood. Many patients with psychiatric disorders also have epilepsy, but not all epileptics have psychiatric disorders. Some epileptics develop mental difficulties due to prolonged seizures and the psychological stresses of the disease, yet with medication, many live normal lives. It’s possible that the high percentage of assaults by epileptic patients in this case are caused by a number of factors such as the misunderstanding of seizures, then often classified as “epileptic mania,” or improper diagnosis. I also don’t think the word “assault” is being used, in this context, to mean an assault on another person, but rather a volatile act that in some cases only involved the patient. So a person who had a seizure and injured themselves could become a statistic for an assault and injury, as seen below.
Microscope slides from the biotech lab. The top two are “Pleurosigma angulatum,” a type of algae commonly used in microscopic studies. The “myelogenous leukemia” slide dated 4-12-’49 is self-explanatory. Ernst Leitz Wetzlar is the type of microscope used with these slides. The microscopes were developed by a German optical institute that originally began in 1849. The company still operates under the name Leica.
If the thought crossed your mind, as it did mine, that this German manufacturing company was operational during WWII (during which horrific medical atrocities were rampant) rest assured, the company was on the good side. In fact, the Lietz family was responsible for the “freedom camera,” named after the Leica 3B camera. The Leitz’s “hired” roughly 200-300 Jews and sent them to America, where they sold the cameras for cash to start a new life. Also, Dr. Max Berek, an engineer at Leitz, had his professorship revoked by the government for refusing to cooperate with the Nazis. He was reinstated after the war. However, all of this does not mean the equipment escaped use by the Nazis, as that was beyond company control, and a few of the microscopes can be found in Nazi memorabilia collections.
Sound advice on a mirror of the rehab ward in a psych center. But if I had followed said advice, I wouldn’t have done so many drugs that I ruined it for myself and had to find another exciting hobby like the one that landed me in front of this mirror in an abandoned asylum, so who’s the right one now, Nancy Reagan??
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Disclaimer: If any information is incorrect, if you have more info, or if you’d just like to tell me something, feel free to contact me.
To support my work and see new comics, go here. To buy books, original artwork, merch, and more, visit my website store. Follow me on instagram.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.