After last week’s legal kerfuffle, all I wanted to do is get out and explore… originally, my trip to Poughkeepsie was for a very different purpose, meeting with my prospective lawyer, who had successfully saved a few explorers from terrorism charges already, for dealing with what could have been a life changing amount of court dates, but that disaster never came to fruition, and I wasn’t about to cancel my trip! So I found a college friend and, amazingly, two more experienced explorers who were willing to show me around, and turned the weekend into a surprise adventure. There’s only one obvious thing to do in Poughkeepsie, and we were about to do it.
I’ll have to admit I was a little bit, no, maybe a lot, scared of this one. While it probably wasn’t justified, I’ve always been paranoid about asylums, as if security there is more intense, or just more of them, than any other abandoned buildings, and with the property having just been sold last week, there was potential for it to be even worse than normal. With the help of our guides, we were marched directly into the Kirkbride to explore the best known (some would say overdone) main building. After a few minutes together on the top floor, they went off to climb things, leaving us to be the tourists and take photos of everything in sight!
It immediately became obvious there was no way we could see all this in one short November day!
All this furniture isn’t cheap! Someone must have decided it was too heavy to move…
Somebody had a bad day. It’s a bit small to read here, but this was a firing (with immediate hiring at any other facility in the state, for greater pay) letter from the civil service board, for someone who wasn’t quite pulling their weight but had earned tenure…
This seemed like it would be the way to the next section of the hospital. Unfortunately, it only leads to a locked room. It seemed like a good idea at the time… but now we realized we were lost. As paranoid as I was about going back outside into the (absent) security, I sent us looking desperately for tunnels, which we may have found blocked, and trying in vain to reach the rest of the group, and we wasted an inordinate amount of time trying to get into another ward before finally going outside and just doing it. After I probably made an idiot of myself to two explorers I would have loved to meet up with again.
These are always a bit unsettling… I’m glad I’m not climbing around with the other explorers!
When you see it…
We spent a while trying to find the morgue, and eventually did find the right building, but the entrance took quite the climb, or a ladder we didn’t have. So we settled for a maintenance shed and what turned out to be the campus power plant for our last building (I hate how it gets dark before 5pm!)
Now this is how to spend a weekend! So much better than meeting a lawyer and planning for my own demise…