CHICAGO URBAN EXPLORATION

I about died a thousand deaths on the flight into Pennsylvania due to the tiny little jet bouncing through the air. Once I landed everything was fine and Kamryn was there ready to take me on one fantastic journey.

We headed out of the airport and in minutes we were on the highway headed to Ticksville.

Now, as I have mentioned in the posting of the images on this site, Ticksville is not the real name of the place and I have chosen not to publish it. (Besides, you could figure it all out if you really wanted to.)

We spent approximately 4 hours on the road that day, traveling through New England's rolling and well-forested hills. I immediately fell in love with the lushness and the magnificent architecture. Every turn of the highway brought another visual delight. I could have sworn that we crossed the same river a million times, until we reached the one where off in the distance we could see the mountainous buildings of Gotham City.

I have to admit that I am an asylum freak. I love the incredible architecture, the massive buildings and the oftentimes all too lurid history of the hospitals. Of course the ones in Illinois pale in comparison to those on the east coast.
After about 4 hours, crossing several rivers and missing a few exits we arrived at our destination. As we crossed the bridge, one could see the asylum buildings on the hill overlooking the river. It was exciting and I was absolutely stunned.

We made a couple of turns and then cruised through the campus. This was only a teaser, as we were not going to explore until the next day. We slowly drove around the beautiful awesome red brick buildings as I wondered what one might find on the interiors. The buildings seemed to be in decent shape, a far cry from those at Manteno. Despite the state posted "no trespassing,” signs, people were walking their dogs, treating the grounds as if it were some sort of park. It was really quite delightful.

At this time, I think I snapped off about six or seven photographs and my excitement began to build as we pulled out of the drive and headed off toward the hotel.

We arrived at the hotel about 30 minutes or so later and Kamryn and I went inside to check in. It wasn't a luxury hotel, but it wasn't the most disgusting thing I had ever seen. (That award goes out to a nasty little roach-motel on the south side of Chicago... or is it that one in D.C.?)

We walked into the office when out from behind a door stepped a little old lady who wondered over to the front desk. She seemed harmless enough; yet I really never saw her face due to the huddling of old age. Kamryn filled out the paperwork as I browsed though the pamphlets of stuff to do in town. When I came back to the desk she was hovering over his paperwork. Suddenly, without warning, she started to hack up a lung. Unfortunately, I was looking directly at Kamryn's face as he backed away with a look of terror in his eyes. His expression was priceless, but it sent me into a fit of laughter that I could not contain. I darted for the door and stepped outside to keep her from seeing me laugh. Kamryn immediately named her "the crypt keeper", although she reminded me more of a heavier version of Sylvia Sidney's character "Juno", the smoking social worker in the movie "Beetlejuice".

We got into the room and inspected it for filth and creepiness. There were footprints on the ceiling and some cigarettes between the wall and the floor. The bathroom was okay, but there was hair on the sink where it looked as if someone had emptied his or her electric shaver. The sheets and blankets seemed clean enough, but the little table was gross and the curtains had smudges on them that we dared not think about.

We ordered pizza and soda and just had a blast joking around and looking through our share of asylum books and maps. We laughed so much it was ridiculous!

The next day we headed out round about 8AM. We stopped at a convenient store for consumable supplies then headed straight for the place. We had to backtrack on the highway again due to some strange exit that always seemed to only be accessible from the opposite direction.

This is the point at which I always get an ill feeling about getting caught being "somewhere I am not supposed to be" and not knowing the area made it a little more worrisome. My stomach got growly and every possible thing that could go wrong with the mission thundered through my head. This is the time I think of the Thornton Wilder quote:

" The test of an adventure is that when you’re in the middle of it, you say to yourself, “Oh, now I’ve got myself into an awful mess; I wish I were sitting quietly at home.” And the sign that something’s wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure."

So I chose not to be "sitting quietly at home" wishing I was "out having lots of adventure". Instead I grabbed the bull by the horns, bit the bullet and irritably proceeded.

We began to cruise the campus as we had done the day before. We didn't get very far, when we spotted what appeared to be a white Suzuki Aerio with a Santa Claus-ish looking man inside. He was just sitting there, parked in the middle of the road. We passed by him, turned around, and headed off grounds to the parking spot.

I had observed that even the dog walkers didn't drive back into the place, they all seemed to park in the lot up front on the main road. I was very suspicious. Whether psycho-killer or security guard, this man's presence was certainly unsettling.

I had previously been informed about a "security guard" who roamed the interior of the buildings, and took things very personally. In my mind, I had reasoned that no real security guard would be employed to patrol such interior. After all, CUE had attempted to gain lawful access to places before and we were always turned down for liability reasons. No security company in their right mind would allow an employee to roam the interiors of an old, decrepit, asbestos riddled asylum. Even cops won't usually enter a place due to fear of ambush. They almost always wait for you to either attempt entry or nab you on the way out.

The only thing I could think of was that this "security guard" was actually a displaced patient. We didn't have much worries about that. After all, that was Kamryn's job, 40+ hours a week, caring for the institutionalized mentally ill. For him, an encounter would have been the usual, minus the Thorazine.

We dwelled on the topic for a bit, then made a game plan to hike up the road to the furthest reaches of the campus and work our way back down. We geared up and started out hiking along the main road and up the hill, taking exterior pictures as we went and keeping an eye out for the ominous white car. Needless to say, paranoia was just there for our own amusement.

We arrived at our first exploration spot. It was the back of a large 3 story building that had several old wooden garage doors at the base of it. We looked around and darted into an open door. It was a vast dark room of very few interesting things. The ambience was set by the soundtrack of constantly running water. We only found an old piano and some hydro tubs, then made our way out. We tried other doors that would have led to the upper parts of the building with no luck. Kamryn said that the next building had been wide open the last time he was there, so we headed over toward it, but sure enough, it had been re-sealed.

We decided to head through the woods, up the hill to a group of buildings and houses that had possibly once been home to doctors of the asylum. I felt like Goldilocks pulling on all the doors of the "Little Bears" homes until finally Kamryn found an open door.

These houses weren't much to look at. If you have ever seen abandoned farm houses, or abandoned military homes, then you should be well acquainted with the old 50's style single-family, one car garage, aluminum sided house. It was all too typical until Kamryn called me into the house with an oh-my-god-you-have-to-see-this exclamation.

The house was intermittently wallpapered with maps and other pictures that appeared to come from old National Geographic magazines. It was hideous, yet amusing that someone had been so possessed. It really made you think that perhaps the wrong people had been locked up in this asylum, which brought to mind the Poe story of "Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether". Perhaps the lunatics had been running the asylum after all.

We took a few photos and decided on our next move, which was to explore the buildings nearby and to get there via the woods. We set foot to the trail. It was really an old power-line access road, which had been kept clear to some degree. It wound its way around to the parking lot next to the buildings toward the main road, where low and behold, a gaping and broken glass door awaited our entrance.

More than anything's fair share of mold and mildew covered the surfaces of most objects in the room we entered. It had an air of "classroom" about it with desks, text books and other educational supplies. It seemed as if left alone, the slimy green stuff would eventually consume the entire building. We decided to move on deeper into the interior through a tunnel that led into the basement of another building. Here we discovered boxes of Civil Defense rations from 1963.

All of the buildings seemed to have a sign somewhere on their exteriors boasting of Civil Defense (bomb) shelters. In the unlikely event that something should go wrong at this remote location, I began to fantasize about a novel idea that would be something to the tune of "urban explorers surviving total world annihilation", and being able to freely explore the ruins of the world.

So we plodded on, being fairly exhausted. We saw interesting rooms, long halls, bathrooms, a huge kitchen and a room filled with trash from long ago. We took pictures and explored just about every nook and cranny. We found some incredible boilers in a basement section which led us to believe that the main tunnels probably did not run all the way up this hill.

We exited the building the way we had come and regrouped in the parking lot. At this point the horror was discovered. A horror, which was to haunt us for quite some time. (My skin still crawls as I write this). Ticks! I about passed out from the terror when Kamryn lifted his shirt to reveal one of those blood sucking, horrid little creatures attached to his skin. I was able to calm myself only enough to find my Swiss Army Knife tweezers and quickly hand them over while stripping off my coat and shirt. I wasn't sure that I wanted to know if I had any on me or not. I was damning myself for having taken off my hat before the trek through the woods.

Eventually my terror gave into laughter. I uttered obscenities as my nervous cachinnation mixed with whimpering uneasiness. There was one on my shirt. One nasty little bugger with a red spot on it's back. Kamryn quickly flicked it off. Next, we checked out each other's hair and skin like monkeys weeding each other. Kamryn found one more tick on his jeans. All we could think about were embedded tick heads and Lyme Disease. It would be some time before we would be able to shake the heeby -geebies.

After everything was checked, we calmed down a little and exhaled. We made our plans to head down the hill along side the road, away from trees, weeds and anything else a tick would perceivably cling to. We didn't need any more passengers on our journey back to the main campus.

We wondered back onto the main campus, checking buildings for open doors and other forms of entrance as we went. Everything seemed to be sealed up pretty tight. One shack's door was open, but it only led to a water treatment or pump room. Amazingly enough, we discovered that the water was still on, but the shack smelled of chlorine so I decided it probably was not a good idea to enter.

We trekked on, making our way round the back of another large building. We inspected it for entrances but were afforded no such fortune. The road extended us gorgeous views of the river below. Finally, we discovered an open door to one of the other small, industrial type buildings. It was very dark inside and we had not eaten much, so we decided to take a rest and eat some lunch behind the old power plant. As we sat and lunched, many people came by following along the road with their dogs. It made for a much more relaxing experience to know that no one seemed to care about people on the property. Soon enough, we headed for our door.

The theory we had come up with the night before was that the tunnels would probably go straight towards the main road from where the original power plant had once been, (down on the river). The trick was finding the tunnels, but our door turned out to be the solution. It led into a dark basement that appeared to have been a shop of some sort. We made our way through and almost instantly found a tunnel.

Upon entrance to the tunnel we immediately found a couple of blue prints. They were the real old type of blue prints and they were rotten and nasty. Kamryn was in love. He wanted to take them home so badly, but I discouraged it. He would have had to fold them up and stick them in his pack, and most likely this would have destroyed them.

We left the prints and wondered through a paint shop, then back into the tunnel and off into the basement of the pathology building which seemed to have had labs in the basement at one time, but no morgue. We made our way upstairs and looked around the rooms. One room had a big, green chalkboard with various things scrawled on it in chalk. I picked up the chalk and added, "Chicago Urban Exploration, Megan", took a photograph and moved on.

Back down into the tunnel we walked along toward our main goal, the old Administration Building. On the way, we checked out various doorways and offshoots from the main tunnel. We saw a locked up room with lights on, found a tunnel of beds and shelves, some old storage areas, a walk-in freezer and another Civil Defense room.

Looking ahead toward the front, we noticed a fog inside the tunnel. It was fairly transparent, but sort of odd. I had never seen fog inside of a tunnel before, so it was kind of cool. We were walking through it when suddenly Kamryn lit up with excitement. Just ahead, inside a dark passage, was the back of a large staircase. He just knew that he had found what he had come looking for, the Administration Building.

Sure enough, we rounded the stairs and climbed to the top, opened a door and rounded the stairs above the previous set. Low and behold, we were standing in the lobby of the old Administration Building and it was one of the most beautiful abandoned spaces I had ever experienced. Rare, golden marble walls and unscathed leaded glass windows everywhere. It must have demanded a presence that even the most brutal of vandals could respect, for there was little or no sign of destruction. We climbed the white marble stairs to the first landing which revealed two more sets of marble stairs to either side. Shutter bugs we were, snapping away photographs that we knew in no way would do the place justice. It was all beautiful and we reveled in it.

After reveling for some time, we moved onto various floors and into various rooms. Many were carpeted with walls trimmed of cherry or mahogany gothic paneling. The place was very much like a mansion and seemed to have been kept amazingly well over the years.

Another breath-taking discovery was the fireplace and mantle that must have been in a room designed to impress. The fireplace had an unusual design of trees on either side of the opening and a coat of arms of some sort centered above. The mantle was of the same cherry wood as the wall panels and extended to the ceiling in gothic fashion. The reddish wood still had an elegant sheen and brilliant color and the fireplace tiles had been left unmarred. I was amazed that no one had chiseled at or destroyed it.

Eventually we made our way back down into the main tunnel and wondered into the basement of a building filled with stuff...all sorts of stuff. Each room must have been a treasure trove for anyone of historical medical or mental health curiosity. Medical and surgical supplies abound. There were even things still in their original packaging, like stainless steel emesis basins. It was overwhelming and we were growing tired.

It wasn't long before we made our way back down the tunnel and headed back out of the buildings. I cracked the door and looked around. We saw no one, but heading back to the car, there were more people walking dogs and we spotted the white vehicle whom we think was the security guard.

We got back to the car and relaxed as we readied to hit the road, back to Pennsylvania. We stopped for some food and beverage and after about 20 minutes on the road, we were passed by the "security guard".

The pisser of it all was that we could have had more time. The next day, we drove around Bethlehem Steel, checked out some old cemeteries and other places before going to check the flights. By 4:00pm, my flight had been cancelled and I was stranded for one more day… a day that could have been spent at Ticksville.

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