A World Gone Mad
Abandoned buildings give off powerful
first impressions, feelings that grip tightly and stick with you for
the duration of your stay, and often heavily influencing your perspective toward them as a whole. Be it a powerful sadness, a soothing
tranquility, or an imposing darkness, these first interactions with a
location are important moments, and ones that we, ourselves, try to
pay mind to when conducting our work. In that regard, and many
others, this place was different. When individual chambers herein
were viewed as stand-alone forms they were both eerie and darkly
humorous to behold, however when we stood back and tried to piece
together the whole which was this beautiful old inn, we were left
with mostly a feeling of confusion. It was as if hearing the
punchline to a joke nobody ever told.
Our visit took place in the very early spring, and though
snow still remained on the ground, it was contained solely to where the
shadows fell. The air was cool, but warm at the same time, and you
could smell the forest on the surrounding mountains awakening from a
long sleep. In a river valley at the center of all this stood the
inn, and you could tell from just a glance that it has been here for
ages. It was at home upon a small bluff above a peaceful river, and
crumbling facade and peeling paint aside, it looks more or less as it
did when first constructed in the early 1830's. That was outside
though. Inside, as we discovered, was a different world entirely.
It was obvious from our first steps
past the threshold that the final years of this inn must have been
unusual ones. The bottom floor was largely devoid of personal
effects, with mostly tables and building fixtures remaining. The main
feature here was a large room with a decomposing skylight at the
center. Our imitate thought was that the lobby had been converted to
a strange and rather unsightly dining hall of some kind. We pondered
its use as we headed up the stairs to the second floor. As it would
turn out, the higher up the stairwell we climbed, the further down
the rabbit hole we fell.
Reaching the second floor landing, we
pressed upon the first door which greeted us there. It creaked open,
revealing a singe half moon table in an otherwise empty room. Propped
against it's battered legs was an old sign that read “No Entrance”.
Though it was silently setting the tone for the day we paid it little
mind at the time, for what truly caught our eyes was the bedroom that
lay at the far end of the hall. The door to the room was partially
ajar, and out from the opening was pouring a brilliant pink glow, a
color further accentuated by the heavy darkness of the corridor
leading to it. We approached and opened the door. Beyond we found a
room quite literally covered in pink items. It was mostly clothing
and fabric, decaying and mildewed, nailed to the floors, walls and
ceiling. A surreal sight that quickly turned disturbing, as we notice
that the ceiling items were composed primarily of infant and toddler
clothing, and the fashion in which they were nailed to the ceiling,
with various limbs limply dangling in space, conjured mental imagery
of tiny corpses being used as interior décor. We exited and
proceeded down a skinny side-hall into yet more darkness.
On the left we came upon another room
of unknown use. Though down a very tight side hallway, the room
itself was much larger than those we had seen thus far. In the center
of the room was a massive pile of debris, so high and cluttered that
we could not safely walk over top of it and were forced to shimmy our
way around the edges. The walls had strange grey-scale paintings of
furniture and doors scrawled upon them. We exited carefully and made
our way further into the interior of the old inn.
We finally caught our break when we
were packing up to leave at the end of the day. The sun was beginning
to set, and with it came a deep chill as the winter's dying grasp
creeped in for the night. We were quite worn out from a long day
filming, and were eager to get somewhere warm, preferably with
coffee. As we made our way back through the bottom floor we passed a
small door we did not notice before. Pushing it open we came upon an
old administrative office, and though it was in utter discord, with
foot-deep paperwork carpeting the floors, it laid out for us the
history of the old inn.
As we were to discover, this building
had not been an inn for decades, rather it had been transformed into
a commune for artists. The paperwork answered many of the questions
we had regarding the use of the building, but the real epiphany
occurred when, under the filthy piles of yellowed paperwork and
rotted posters, we found several dust-covered boxes. We cleaned one
off and carried it over to a small desk at the corner of the room.
Inside were hundreds of old color slides, and the same for each of
the other boxes that were with it. We held them up to the the light
of a small window and once again the old building was alive. There
were people here, music, creation. We discovered that, as we had
begun to assume - The rooms above were in fact exhibit spaces, their
meanings long vanished with their creators. The large room on the
lower level we initially thought to be a dining hall was actually a
gallery at one time. We became lost in the slides, in the memories of
the building, and did not realize how much time had past until the
window light grew too dim to see by. Then we felt the cold, and in an
instant we were snapped back to the present. We stood alone, in the
dark, tired hotel, and slowly we collected ourselves and made our way
to the door. The world seemed imposingly silent as we stepped out
into the night. Looking back over our shoulders we could see the old
inn fade away into the dark.
*Please note that any slide scans shown herein were digitized on-location, and were not taken from their rightful place in the building.
Slide scan of the room as it were.
Not surprisingly, Styrofoam cups hold up extremely well
