Abandoned House 1:

This is the first abandoned place I ever entered and probably the utmost creepiest.
I found this house after a romp in the mountains with some friends of mine. It lays across a bridge that is in equally decrepit shape. The bridge is basically one reinforced slab of metal laid across the river. It's rusting at all the joints and bends under your weight. It definitely won't be around too much longer, for the moment it remains. We crossed the bridge and first found this tiny Inari shrine with various figures and idols crammed into the space. The shrine stood only half my height. Though pretty much abandoned, it had a sort of homely feeling.. like the local gods were watching over this abandoned ground still. I went back there later and found the small shrine trashed and all the figures broken or missing.

Outside of the house there are a couple refridgerators laying on their sides. Why anyone ever owned so many refridgerators is a mystery to me. I have to say I had no interest in opening them or anything. I'm afraid of what's in the back of my own fridge sometimes so. . .

I didn't have any qualms about going in to the house itself, but I did worry that maybe there was some homeless person living there or something. But of all the houses I've been in, this one had very little in it indicating that anyone else had squatted there after the original owners had gone. The only things living in there were a couple spiders.

The entryway of the house was completely destroyed. The door was gone, the roof had collapsed, crumbled, and disintegrated, but the main body of the house still stood upright. Near the entrace to the main room were stacks of books, encyclopedias, and magazines. Some were in drawers, some were on shelves, but there was a lot of reading material. Some of the ones that had been exposed to the elements had taken on the appearance of aged tomes. But I don't recall seeing anything there dated any older than 10 years ago.

Next was the kitchen area where there were more fridges. Really strange, yes, but honestly, I don't want to know the reason why. A light fixture that had once been in the ceiling had come undone and was just hanging in the middle of the area from its cord. A white, hanging orb. There were various holes in the cieling and pretty soon I'm sure the roof is going to come crashing down entirely. Some vines were already crawling into the house through the holes in the roof - nature reclaiming its territory. I thought the contrast was kind of beautiful. The curling, organic shapes of nature versus the angled shapes of broken things.

At that point, there was nothing really scary, just intriguing. Since it was getting dark, we couldn't really see into the main room of the house. I kept taking pictures into the darkness and then looking at my camera to see if it seemed worth risking spiderwebs and unsolid floorboards to go investigate. The more items I found, the more eerie I found the house.

First, most abandoned houses don't have much of the original things or furniture in them. I mean if you moved out, you'd take it with you, right? Or else it gets stolen by people passing by, or trashed. This place had most things completely intact. Next, the clock on the wall stuck at 8:20 and there was a calendar that I didn't even notice until I looked back at the photos. It added to this idea that everything was just.. leftover the way it was. Whenever it was that someone last lived there.

Next there was the phone.. an old style black one as you can see in the pictures. The receiver had been cut off and the cord was just laying there. That creeped me out at first - why would someone do that? Had it been like that before or after the house had been abandoned? Then I later found the receiver on a shelf on the other end of the room. Why?

The most scary thing, though, was the picture. In Japan, when someone dies, you traditionally take their photograph and hang it in a place above you so that it always must be looked up to and respected and the person's face always looks down on you. There was one such picture in perfect condition hanging in the main room and watching everything we did. It sorta put a face to the history of the house.. That was really terrifying.