Old, broken and pretty: the creepy appeal of abandoned buildings
Every time you remember something, according to one study, you’re actually remembering the last time you remembered it. This makes every memory a photocopy of a photocopy, of a photocopy. A memory that has been remembered many, many times can become increasingly grainy and unintelligible, until images are replaced by feelings. Which is why my memory of an abandoned village I visited one day over twenty years ago exists mostly as a sense of uneasy awe.
I was ten, and on a family holiday on the Greek island of Paxos. The abandoned village must have been listed in whatever guidebook my parents had bought, because we definitely went there deliberately. Which is strange, because - now - there’s very little information about the village online. Via Google, the only information I’ve been able to dig up on it is that it may or may not be called Geramonachos. In my mind, the village was surrounded by pine forest. I remember the way the greying pine needles carpeted the ground, and the sweet, hot smell that seemed inseparable from the sound of the crickets, which was like a cacophony of maracas.
I have no idea how old, exactly, the houses were. But my guess would be “old”. The brickwork was crumbling, and if you looked through the dusty, cobweb-clouded windows, you could see (if I remember rightly, which I very much may not) things like old tin kettles, and paraffin lamps. All of these objects, presumably, were in the exact position in which they were last touched by human hands. Geramonachos (if that was it) was one big shrug. There was no available information on why its inhabitants had up and left. This gave the place the static charge of somewhere stuck in time. It was like when you’d press pause on a VHS tape, and the image would blur and shake; but not change.
I remember being astounded by the fact all these probably long-dead people’s possessions were just there for the taking. In spite of the almost overwhelming sense of foreboding, I was desperate to go inside one of the houses. But my dad held my shoulder and said they were unsafe; that I might fall through the rotten floorboards.
And that’s about everything I can remember about Geramonachos/not Geramonachos. The place that opened up my fascination with abandoned buildings.
Dereliction, of course, is as big a horror trope as the “final girl”, or an old music box mysteriously opening and tinkling out a contextually disturbing little tune. There are so many films about abandoned asylums, that it’s created an entire (quite problematic) aesthetic. The crazed writing on the wall. The empty wheelchair looking as if it might creak into life at any moment. A whole straitjacket-core movement, that lazily feeds into stereotypes about mentally ill people, going back centuries.
But ruins can also be beautiful. On a trip to Burgundy in September, my girlfriend and I came across an abandoned eighteenth century chapel, on a walk way up in the wooded hills. It was a tiny, rectangular structure, and if you looked through the barred up door, you could see the original altar, complete with a metal crucifix and a faded statue of the Virgin and Child. To me, the lack of restoration made it perfect. Yes, it was creepy. Yes, it smelled weird. But if I didn’t like actively like creepy things that smell weird, I probably wouldn’t have a cat.
In Japanese culture, there’s a world view called wabi-sabi, which perfectly encapsulates my love of abandoned buildings. Wabi-sabi is – in a broken nutshell – about embracing the imperfect, the wonky, and the broken. Aesthetically, this gives a big thumbs-up to anything broken down, or crumbling. In the West, I guess we might call it “shabby-chic”. Although that term is much more “trend from ten years ago” rather than “philosophy”.
Recently, an entire abandoned 1930s mansion was discovered in north London. Going by objects found inside the place (which is either the stuff of dreams or nightmares, depending on where you stand on advanced dereliction) it looks to have been abandoned about thirty years ago. In a video taken from inside, we see everything from outdated cleaning products, to a pair of 80s paedo glasses left on an armchair. The house strays a little into “too much even for me” territory when the video shows a lamb stuffed toy hanging – for some reason – by a noose, and a collection of tinned goods dating back so far one of them is emitting a weird hissing sound. Even more eerily, the man in the video flicks a switch, and a light turns on. How a building that hasn’t been inhabited for decades still has electricity is anyone’s guess.
While watching the video though, there it was again – that uneasy but compelling feeling. That of the static of a moment stretched out over a very long time. The memory of the memory, of the memory of a feeling I first felt decades ago.