I felt this more than I understood it. Treading cautiously up creaky staircases, stepping around fallen plaster and holes in floors, peering into decaying rooms, I gazed in wonder at discoveries I made. Pigeons roosted on cupboards. Mice nested in sofas. Fungus grew on walls. Weeds sprouted on watery windowsills. Some of the yellowed newspapers and magazines dated back to when I was born.
But no discovery meant more to me than a record album I found on a cracked linoleum floor next to a three-legged table that lay on its side. Eventually, I learned that it was called an album because, prior to the 1950s, phonograph records were made from thick, easily breakable shellac, had only one song on each side, and were stored in paper sleeves within binders that resembled photograph albums. At the time of my discovery, discs of this sort (which played at 78 rpm) had been superceded by thin, long-playing, vinyl discs that were far more sturdy, had as many as eight songs on each side, and played at 33 ⅓ rpm.
I’d never seen an album. When I opened its cover, I felt an awe that was only slightly reduced by the scrape of broken shellac. Two of the discs were shattered. But the majority (four, as I recall) remained intact. Clutching this treasure, I hurried home. Our radio had a record player attached to it. I switched its dial to 78 rpm (a common feature in those days) and put on one of the discs.
I played the song repeatedly. Today, I can still hear the scratchy tune. I’ve never forgotten its title: “Those Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine.” An Internet search tells me that the song was written in 1929 by Irving Kahal, Willie Raskin, and Sammy Fain. Melodic and rhythmic, it was an instant hit, recorded frequently over the years. But at the time, I knew nothing of that. Nor did I understand the emotions of the lyrics, which described the loneliness of a young man whose friends are all getting married. What captivated me was that scratchy sound. It came palpably from the past and served as a time tunnel through which my imagination could travel back to other years. I visualized the vocal group in unfamiliar clothes, surrounded by unfamiliar objects, singing out-of-fashion music in a setting that was always fuzzy and in black-and-white. Regrettably, I don’t recall the group’s name. So much for immortality.
Since then, I’ve obeyed a compulsion to investigate many other abandoned buildings, not to mention tunnels and storm drains, although I never again found anything so memorable as that phonograph album. I assumed that my traumatic childhood accounted for my fascination with crumbling deserted structures and that I was alone in my obsession with links to the past. But I now realize that there are many like me.
They call themselves urban explorers, urban adventurers, and urban speleologists. Their nickname is creepers. If you type “urban explorer” into Yahoo, you’ll find an astonishing 170,000 Internet contacts. Type that name into Google, and you’ll find an even more astonishing 225,000 contacts. It’s a reasonable assumption that each of these links isn’t represented by just one lonely explorer. After all, nobody’s going to put together a site if he/she doesn’t have a sense of community. Those hundreds of thousands of contacts are groups, and logic suggests that for every one that publicizes itself, there are many others that prefer to be hidden.
Those who wish to remain anonymous have a good reason. Bear in mind, urban exploration is illegal. It involves the invasion of private property. Plus, it’s so unsafe it can be deadly. The authorities tend to insist on jail terms and/or serious fines to discourage it. As a consequence, many of these websites emphasize that explorers should get permission from property owners and that they should always follow safety precautions and never do anything against the law. Those warnings sound socially responsible, but my assumption is that for many urban explorers, part of the appeal is the risk and thrill of doing what’s forbidden. It’s significant that their slang term for entering a deserted building borrows from the covert-ops military expression for invading hostile territory: infiltration. As the website www.infiltration.org indicates, the objective is “places you’re not supposed to go.”
Creepers are mostly between the ages of eighteen and thirty, intelligent, well educated with an interest in history and architecture, often employed in professions related to computer technology. They share a worldwide interest, with groups in Japan, Singapore, Germany, Poland, Greece, Italy, France, Spain, Holland, England, Canada, the United States, and several other countries. Australian groups are fascinated with the maze of storm drains under Sydney and Melbourne. European groups favor abandoned military installations from the world wars. U.S. groups are drawn to classic department stores and hotels abandoned when social decay led to an exodus from cities like Buffalo and Detroit. In Russia, creepers are obsessed with Moscow’s once-secret multi-level subway system intended for evacuating Cold War officials during a nuclear attack. Deserted hospitals, asylums, theaters, and stadiums: Every country offers plenty of opportunities for urban exploring (see Mark Moran’s essay, “Greetings from Abandoned Asbury Park, NJ,” at www.weirdnj.com).
One of the first urban explorers was a Frenchman who in 1793 became lost during an expedition into the Paris catacombs. It took eleven years for his body to be discovered. As a character in Creepers indicates, Walt Whitman was another early urban explorer. The author of Leaves of Grass worked as a reporter for the Brooklyn Standard, where he wrote about the Atlantic Avenue tunnel. Touted as the first subway tunnel anywhere when built in 1844, it was discontinued a mere seventeen years later. Before it was sealed, Whitman trekked through it. “Dark as the grave, cold, damp and silent,” he wrote. “How beautiful look earth and heaven again, as we emerge from the gloom! It might not be unprofitable, now and then, to send us mortals, the dissatisfied ones at least, and that’s a large proportion, into some tunnel of several days’ journey. We’d perhaps grumble less, afterward, at God’s handiwork.”
But Whitman didn’t get the point of urban exploration. He saw the tunnel in negative terms. For a true devotee, however, the cold, damp, silent darkness of a tunnel or an abandoned apartment complex or a deserted factory is exactly the goal. The spooky attraction of the eerie past: I suspect that’s what a much later explorer felt in 1980 when he uncovered that same Atlantic Avenue tunnel 119 years after it was barricaded and forgotten.
A major modern instance of urban exploration occurred recently in the Paris catacombs. Those catacombs are part of a 170-mile tunnel system beneath Paris, the consequence of quarry work that over many centuries provided building materials for the city. In the 1700s, some of the tunnels were used to store thousands of corpses when Parisian cemeteries exhausted their space. In September of 2004, a French police team on a training exercise found a fully equipped movie theater among the bones. Seats had been carved into the rock. A small adjoining cave functioned as a bar and restaurant, with whiskey bottles on display along with professional electrical and telephone systems. Another major example occurred in Moscow in October of 2002 when Chechen rebels seized control of a theater. After the military surrounded the building, a Russian urban explorer guided soldiers inside through a forgotten tunnel.
Some of this is adventuring in a basic sense. But I think that there are also psychological implications. As I note in Creepers, our world is so fraught with elevated threat levels that it makes a lot of sense to retreat to the past. Old buildings can be a refuge, drawing us back to what we imagine were simple and less stressful times. In my youth, the deserted apartment complex provided an escape from the turmoil of my family. I was a time traveler, finding sanctuary in a past that appealed to my imagination and in which there were never any arguments.
In my youth. As an adult, I now have a different perspective, one with deeper, less comfortable implications. To me, old buildings have become like old photographs. They remind me how swiftly time passes. The past they evoke draws attention to my ultimate future. They are an opportunity for reflection.
I recently had the chance to visit the high school I attended more than forty years ago. A part of it had burned to the ground. Most of the remainder has been boarded shut for a
decade. When I entered, a hazard team was checking for asbestos, lead paint, and mold, prior to the school’s renovation. It’s amazing what years of disuse can do, especially when broken windows allow rain and snow to intrude. In disturbingly silent hallways, the hardwood floors were buckled. Plaster drooped from the ceilings. Paint strips hung from the walls. But in my memory, everything was clean and well maintained. I envisioned students and teachers filling the noisy corridors. The trouble is, many of those students and teachers have long since died. In the midst of decay, my imagination conjured youth and the promise of hope, gone just as the school would soon be gone.
I wonder if deserted buildings are vessels to which children bring a sense of wonder and adults bring their unacknowledged fears. When I obeyed the compulsion to visit that wreck of a school, was I unintentionally confronting my own mortality? But my visit had a safety that urban exploration doesn’t. Infiltrating forbidden sites, investigating the decay of the past, creepers flirt with danger. Any moment, a floor might give way, a wall topple, or a stairway collapse. Creepers challenge the past to do its worst. With each successful expedition, they emerge victorious from another confrontation with age and decay. For a handful of hours, they live intensely. Obsessed with the past, perhaps they hope to postpone their inevitable future. Or perhaps they feel reassured that the past lingers palpably into the present and that something about their past might linger after they’re gone.
When my fifteen-year-old son Matthew was dying from bone cancer, his most plaintive statement was, “But no one will remember me.” Memento mori. Maybe that’s what urban exploration is all about. Is an obsession with the past another way of hoping that something about us will linger, that years from now someone will explore where we lived and feel our lingering presence? That phonograph album I found. The distant hiss I listened to just as someone listened to that same platter decades earlier. “Those Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine.” It’s a song about time, which is basically what all stories come down to. In the lyric, a young man says he’s got a lonesome feeling. But as I think back to that apartment complex and the deserted rooms I wandered through—the abandoned sofas, chairs, lamps, and pots—I didn’t feel alone.
—David Morrell
Santa Fe, New Mexico
RESOURCES
Visit the following Internet sites for more information about urban exploring. They are representative of thousands of others. Some have links to other sites.
www.infiltration.org
www.jinxmagazine.com
www.urbanexplorers.net
www.forgotten-ny.com (To find a similar site devoted to your area, try an Internet search by typing the name of your region and putting “forgotten” or “abandoned” in front of it.)
http://users.pandora.be/a-p/index.html
http://catacombes.web.free.fr
www.caveclan.org
www.deathrock.net/ariadne/ruins.html (Look in “Amusement Parks” for photographs of Asbury Park, then and now.)
www.weirdnj.com (Mark Moran’s Asbury Park essay is in “Abandoned.”)
http://urbanexploration.org/2005/sitemapgraphical.htm
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Morrell is the award-winning author of First Blood, the novel in which Rambo was created. He was born in 1943 in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. In 1960, at the age of seventeen, he became a fan of the classic television series Route 66, about two young men in a Corvette traveling the United States in search of America and themselves. The scripts by Stirling Silliphant so impressed Morrell that he decided to become a writer.
In 1966, the work of another writer (Hemingway scholar Philip Young) prompted Morrell to move to the United States, where he studied with Young at Pennsylvania State University and received his M.A. and Ph.D. in American literature. There, he also met the distinguished fiction writer William Tenn (real name Philip Klass), who taught Morrell the basics of fiction writing. The result was First Blood, a novel about a returned Vietnam veteran suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder who comes into conflict with a small-town police chief and fights his own version of the Vietnam War.
That “father” of all modern action novels was published in 1972 while Morrell was a professor in the English department at the University of Iowa. He taught there from 1970 to 1986, simultaneously writing other novels, many of them national bestsellers, such as The Brotherhood of the Rose (the basis for a top-rated NBC miniseries). Eventually wearying of two professions, he gave up his tenure in order to write full-time.
Shortly afterward, his fifteen-year-old son Matthew was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer and died in 1987, a loss that haunts not only Morrell’s life but his work, as in his memoir about Matthew, Fireflies, and his novel Desperate Measures, whose main character has lost a son.
“The mild-mannered professor with the bloody-minded visions,” as one reviewer called him, Morrell is the author of twenty-eight books, including such high-action thrillers as The Fifth Profession, Assumed Identity, and Extreme Denial (set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he now lives with his wife, Donna). His Lessons from a Lifetime of Writing analyzes what he has learned during his more than thirty years as a writer.
Morrell is the co-president of the International Thriller Writers organization. Noted for his research, he is a graduate of the National Outdoor Leadership School for wilderness survival as well as the G. Gordon Liddy Academy of Corporate Security. He is also an honorary lifetime member of the Special Operations Association and the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. He has been trained in firearms, hostage negotiation, assuming identities, executive protection, and offensive-defensive driving, among numerous other action skills that he describes in his novels. With eighteen million copies in print, his work has been translated into twenty-six languages. Visit him at www.davidmorrell.net.
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