Quote from: Sephirah on January 05, 2025, 03:17:56 PMI am a massive sucker for abandoned places. All the history wrapped up in them. I find it utterly fascinating.
When I lived in Illinois, a friend of ours was big into "ghost hunting". She saw an abandoned asylum in Peoria featured on the TV show, "Ghost Hunters" and wanted to go.
The place was trashed and many places had been boarded up for safety reasons. It was not a mental hospital. Back in those days an asylum was a hospital and this one was for tuberculosis patients. The upper floors had large windows because the belief back then was that tuberculosis patients needed a lot of fresh air to get better.
Overall, I was not impressed. Yes, it was an abandoned building, but I don't find those scary. As a kid, I explored many growing up in the desert.
We decided to walk the cemetery instead. It was much safer than having a building fall in on us. The moonlight lit the cemetery fairly well so we could see the grave markers. There was another smaller cemetery nearby, so we went to check it out. That one got to me. It was the children's cemetery and it was much larger than I expected. A few of the graves had names on the markers, but no dates. The ones that got to me the most were the ones that had no names. The grave was labeled with a number and no other information.
I learned later that there were a couple of organizations that were locating and marking the graves, and another group researching old records to identify the children buried there. Then they would make a new marker with the child's name.
The place had a very heavy sadness that hung in the air there. We returned several times, sometimes during the day. My wife and I would make a day of "visiting the kids". There were so many without names. It would get to us to the point where we were overwhelmed and had to leave. But it was important to us to let them know that someone cared and was thinking about them. I am in tears just remembering this.
