May 21, 2008: Hobos and Raccoons

The story I’m about to tell you was one of the worst experiences of my life. The events of this morning are not something that I would wish on anyone. I seriously doubt that our little condemned mental asylum will have many visitors in the future after this story gets out there.

Around noon today Zack and I went back to the asylum one last time for filming. We needed 5-10 minutes of footage inside the buildings. We go in a building pretty close to where we parked and started walking around and filming. The first room of the first building we go in looks like the main room from One Flew Over the Coo Coo’s Nest. There’s the glass partition separating where the nurses would be and where the crazy people would be. As we turn out of that room and walk down the hall, Zack appropriately repeats, “This is where they used to keep the violent patients.” Nice.

We walk up to the second floor and down a hall and see another big common room. There’s a single boot on the floor that’s been there forever (We’d been in the building before) and two hobo beds. On the left is a circular bed of sweaters, pants and other kinds of thick clothing. On the right is a rectangular gym mat with cardboard boxes strewn around it. No hobos in sight. To the right at the back of the room is an old out of use bathroom and I think to myself, “I wonder where the hobos take a shit?”

Keep in mind I’m looking at all this through the little screen of a camera. If a hobo jumps me, I’m pretty much fucked. I take the camera into the old bathroom just for the footage we need and head upstairs. As we start walking, it starts to stink a  little bit. I’m still looking at all of this through the camera screen so I don’t exactly understand what’s going on. Zack, meanwhile, is behind me freaking out. I walk up to the top of the staircase and point the camera down the hall. I do a little zoom in/zoom out pointing at the window at the end of the hallway and Zack goes, “Dude we just walked through shit.” I look down and my question had been answered: The hobos shit in the corners of the staircase going to the floor above where they live!

Shit!  (literally/figuratively/metaphorically)

We bolt down the stairs and out the door where we came in and breathe with a sigh of relief that we’re out of the shit filled stairwell.

After that was over we realize that we still need a few more minutes of footage so we head over to another one of the buildings. After a few minutes of standing in the front trying to figure out what the name of the building was (because it was almost entirely scratched off of the wood) I turn on the camera and head inside. 

We make a left after the entryway and head down to a room filled with old wheelchairs and broken and shattered toilets. When I say it was filled with wheelchairs, I mean it. There was barely anywhere to walk. There had to be at least 100 wheelchairs in there, maybe more. After documenting that, we decide to head upstairs. 

The second floor door was rusted shut so we headed up to the third floor. Figuring that hobos probably didn’t live in this building we figured it was relatively shit-free. Looking at the screen of the camera again and I go up the stairs I don’t notice what I’m walking by, through and on. As I start to go up to the third floor, behind me Zack goes, “Uh, dude, you just stepped on a dead raccoon head and there’s shit everywhere.” Again, the corners were filled with shit and I had apparently stepped on some dead marsupial. Without getting a shot of the third floor and after a unanimous decision “let’s get the fuck out of here,” we run down the dilapidated stairs and out of the building. 

Luckily we never ran into any homeless people because with absolutely no protection other than two cameras and a flashlight, we would have been pretty screwed. Would hobos eat other humans? It beats digging through the trash for food. If we did run into any, I’d hope that they’d be so high on whatever drug they were addicted to that we could kick ‘em in the nuts and get the hell out of there.

Driving away Zack and I started talking about how we’d pretty much lost interest in the place after our feces-filled fun. I’m guessing that once word gets out about stairs filled with hobo-poo, people won’t be going there on Saturday nights anymore. Why did it have to be us?!