Scary work at scary workplace
The place I work at now is an old hospital with roots back to late 1800s, with the building that it is in now built in 1925. In 1990 it was taken over by LHL, and rebuilt for their use. What I was doing on wednesday, was clean up some mess from something on an attic stored away around that time… It was huge, dusty and incredibly creepy. More after the jump, I wrote this on LiveJournal, so it was very easy to just copy and paste into here, which I will (instead of using the forums). I’m just that lazy.
So this was basically a job with “find anything that doesn’t seem valuable or fit in a museum, and throw it”. We’re two guys, but we only have 8 wednesdays to do it and three wings of attic to clean up so it’s not that much time. If only we had a larger budget… But yes, wednesday cleaning job. We find a room without any light. We can’t really see how big it is then, but just start throwing stuff out. We’re up in 5th floor, the oldest part of the building and honestly, the scary place. Sure, we have our fair share of ghost stories around there, but 5th floor is sacret. There is no doubt that nasty stuff went around up there, they had the bloodiest surgeries done right up there and in the 1950s they were not nice, at all.
But of course, there’s no such thing as ghost. Working in a room with no light however, not that fun. After removing a lot of stuff, we find something strange. On the middle of the floor there’s an axe. A huge axe, like the one I used to play around with in the horror game Condemned. Yeah, I had to take a picture of it.
The funny part, after that, we see barely in the dark a bed. A bed with what looks like a headless body on. What do you know, it is a bed with a headless body on it! It’s what I beleive to be one of those old bodys they used to train rescuing people out of the water with.
We drag it out, and put it away as that stuff is thing they most likely want for the museum. Yeah, we have a museum up there as well, filled with lots of old things. Old and creepy things. Moving on, we get to the point where we can’t work anymore because we honestly can’t see a damn thing without light. Fooling around in an old room like that without lights is dooming yourself to tripping or getting stabbed in the head by old tub zombies or something… So we go for lunch.
After lunch we get a worklamp that they had to buy, one that doesn’t generate heat. The worklamps they had would most likely have started a fire up there, it was so full of dust the other guy got a really nasty cough after we were done. It was either dust or asbest, who knows. With more light, we continue on and find even more old stuff. It was now I was able to take pictures as well, no point in that before when we couldn’t see anything.
Part of the room we were cleaning out, what you see there is the part we were able to clean out without lights (more or less). There’s more stuff behind the wall, and to the left.
The last picture here is small, because it got so shakey that you can’t really see what is in there unless it is this small.
Oh yes, behind the wall you se up there, we found the storage room for carpetthings. Lots and lots of it. Funny thing is, no one knew about this storage room. My boss, the boss of us maintenance guys, should have known about it but no. It has been up there forever, you don’t even want to know how much all that cost and you don’t want to know we’re going to throw it all away now either. This stuff, was back then and is still, very expencive, and we have a huge room filled that will only be thrown away, because it is so old that is is unusable. The black can there, that’s floor glue. My father, who has worked with this since he was 20ish, said he didn’t even know when they stopped using that type of glue as he has never seen it before. This is old, just plain old. Not to mention, a huuge firetrap.
This room was a part of the restoration in 1990, but they have built stuff around it later, and have just thrown all sorts of crap in there for no good reason at all. The guy responsible for the fire security was the one who finally got around to get it cleaned up, because it was a huge firetrap. When he saw all this, he said to us that if this had ever cought fire, he might as well have gone out and hanged himself. Right above all this is a floor with patients, it would not have ended well.
But yeah, we’re removing it now, so at least the safety will be a bit better. There are however, some things you just don’t want to know. Maybe I’ll share some of the nice ghost stories from this place, or the morbid pre1990 hospital stories. There’s lots of fun to be had in 5th and a half floor, or “the lost room of the nurses” as it’s called.
October 3rd, 2008 at 8:07 pm
Why no linky to Simdex LJ in Blogroll?