A tale from the slime's youth

I'll be honest, when I was a teenager I was pretty much a hooligan. Trespassing and getting into abandoned buildings was one of my hobbies (which seems to be the case with a great deal of the people I've met around my age that grew up in the Midwest).

I've seen a bunch of interesting stuff, but there was this one building that really stood out from it all. It was a few block from my childhood friends house. Fortunately, I was to find a picture of it on google maps *retches*, for you to see.

I visited a few times around 2011-2012 and it was significantly overgrown a lot like this photo here from 2008. This was the only one I was really able to get on google maps, these days it seems like this whole area has been completely cleared out and new expensive looking houses are in it's place.

It's a little funny though because while I was looking I found a red herring, this other couple of abandoned buildings probably about 200 feet away from this one in the median between two roads like some sort of a nail house or something.. That probably gives you a little bit of an idea of the place I grew up in. I can't really remember if I've gone into these other buildings or not. I suppose this story could be of either of these places or an amalgamation, I can't say.

Regardless, this place was very strange, it consisted of a small house with some haphazard additions built onto it. One of the "rooms" of the house was just the opening of a shed pushed up against the window of the house, so you had to awkwardly climb over into it. I also recall entering this building through a massive hole in the side, a few parts of the roof had fell through as well so certainly there at some point was storm damage, maybe that's why it was abandoned?

I remember seeing this place quite a few times when I was a very young kid though (before there was this massive storm that tore up my hometown), and it didn't seem like it was inhabited then either, so I'm not really sure.

There was a LOT of shit inside this place, it wasn't arranged like a house at all, so I assume that someone just used it for storage. There were just bags and bags and bags of stuffed animals everywhere, a lot of them torn open. There were also a lots of electronics, lots of TVs, phonograph / receiver / tape deck combo units and kitchen appliances from all different time periods. Some of the kitchen appliances were very old and had the classic bakelite casing.

It felt like for every appliance / TV you saw, you were likely to see another one of the exact same make and model somewhere else in the house. Why did they have so many duplicates? There was also this area in the house that was ankle deep, just baby doll parts and baby doll part molds, which understandable had my 14 year old self very sp00k'd.

So, amongst all those things in that house, there was this little black and white TV. Well, there was actually two of them but one of them was significantly water damaged. But once I found the other that was in good shape, you know my stupid ass swiped the cursed artifact. I distinctly remember being pissed off at my friend for, not long after getting out of the house and making our way home, bending and snapping the antenna on top of the set. Not that it would have been useful at that point anyways but it just bothered me since it was other wise in decent shape. Or so I thought.

This set was a General Electric M113AVY with an 11" inch screen, and it was produced in the 60's. It's black and white, the only inputs it has are the fork coax connectors and had a headphone port on the front. It was meant to be semi portable as it's fairly small and has a convenient handle on top.

But when you turned this thing on it had this god awful noise that would come out of it, it sounded exactly like a woman screaming. That was enough to convince my young mind that this thing was in fact haunted. Looking back now its fairly obvious what the issue it had likely was, that screaming noise as well remembering that it would take about 10 minute for this thing to fully turn on and fully display an image, I think its pretty likely that the tv had some bad capacitors inside.

It's unfortunate because I did eventually end up getting rid of it after coming to the conclusion that it was damaged (and was most definitely not confident enough in my electronics repair to do CRT's yet), because these things seem like they go for a lot these days, as do CRT in general. Gone are the days that you just find them on the curb and in thrift stores for under 10 dollars.

I still had a bit of fun with it though, I got to play some old consoles and watch a couple of films (The original 1958 The Blob and 1960 Little Shop of Horrors). I was really into old B-movies at the time)

You can see in this picture here the opening screen for Fallout 3, I had connected up my Playstation 3 to the set via this very convoluted chain of adapters. I was really infatuated with the fallout games around this time as well so it felt really fitting to play Fallout 3 on what looked like a semi-era appropriate set.