If you haven’t read Part 1, you can find it here. As mentioned in Part 1, the pictures in these articles are only a small sample of the pictures I took on site. You can view the rest of them here.
While walking around the courtyard behind Belton Court, I found an open window. Clearly the egress point for whoever had last been inside the building; the window was propped open with a piece of wood, and someone had left a sweatshirt on the sill. After climbing through the window, I explored the place essentially on tip-toes, expecting at any moment to run into a Clicker (bonus points if you get that reference) or, more realistically, whoever else is crazy enough to be inside an abandoned Christian college.
The layout of Belton Court was confusing and labyrinthine. Corridors seemed to intersect or end randomly. I wandered down one creepy passageway …
.. to a room with a solitary chair, placed as though someone had been keeping watch out the window.
At first, I stuck to exploring the rooms on the first floor. One of my favorites was the one with a large world map lying on the floor, propped against the wall, by a door leading to another dark corridor.
That dark corridor led to another suite of rooms, one of which looked like someone had wanted to build a fire in. Local teenagers partying? A vagrant hoping to pass the winter? Whoever they were, clearly something had sent them packing before they could actually start the fire.
As I crossed over into the western wing of the building, I passed the library. The only things remaining therein were a sign reminding people not to leave their computers unattended and a book about “Recruiting and Developing Leaders for Youth Ministry”.
The layout of the western wing was even more confusing than the other part of the building I had just left. There was a network of overlapping suites that didn’t seem to obey any pattern or symmetry. There were several semi-hidden passageways leading to crawlspaces (I’ll get back to these later). The rooms were a far sight better than anything I occupied in my college years.
Then, of course, the room that looked like it had recently been the sight of a pretty sloppily executed Satanic ritual. It was clearly the work of some bored teenagers (the next room over I found several used condoms).
Still, as I wandered the empty rooms, I couldn’t help but feel a little creeped out. Even empty buildings can be noisy, with various bizarre and unexplained creaking noises that echo back and forth. All the same, I decided to go up to the second and third floors of the building to continue exploring. Somehow the level of decay seemed even more acute the higher I went.
You don’t want to know what happened in this room, and I … I don’t know.
I followed yet another corridor. Something about this one raised the hair on my neck; something about the light coming out of the doors, leaving the far end of the corridor in darkness.
After coming across a locked door, I turned back and decided to explore one of those crawlspaces I mentioned previously. The entrance was behind a small door in a closet.
Following the space, I found a rather curious sight …
In retrospect, I regret not looking to see if something was beneath that toilet lid. Do zombies poop? In any case, the crawlspace led to a large attic area, which I didn’t explore too thoroughly since I lacked a flashlight.
So, turning back from the attic, there were two main areas of the building I hadn’t yet explored: the tower and the basement. (There was also the east wing of the building. I haven’t posted any of the pictures from that side, but they are all available here. Some of them are quite cool, I just couldn’t post every picture I wanted, and didn’t want this to drag out to three installations.)
In any case, the next step was the tower. Simply getting access to the tower wasn’t trivial, I actually had to force open a closed fire door and prop it open with random debris.
So I climbed …
and I climbed. ..
I had expected to find something interesting at the top of the tower, like a crazed wizard, since I had earlier noticed a light up in the top window. Rather anticlimactically, it simply turns out that the tower had been leased out as some sort of T-Mobile signal generating station. Sure enough, I checked my phone and I had GREAT reception in there.
The next step, then, was the basement. Something felt strange, though, as I descended the stairs. I could hear a faint electronic beeping coming from the bottom of this flight.
For some context, since the building is built on a slight hill, I am on the “ground floor” looking down the stairs that lead, eventually to the basement. In reality, what you are seeing at the bottom is a sort of landing on the back of the building on the bottom of the hill, with an emergency exit. Just around to the left is another flight of stairs leading down to the basement proper.
In any case, I reach that landing, where the closet with the fire alarm system is located. One of the alarms is going off, but through battery drain or bad wiring is only very faint, but still continuous. The display says it is coming from the basement.
As I went down the last flight of stairs towards the basement, I began to hear another noise. One that I can’t adequately describe. When I first heard it, it sounded almost like breathing, but more mechanical. The closest comparison I could think of is a steam train engine from old movies; this rhythmic and heavy wheezing noise. At the bottom of the stairs the noise was loud, almost deafening, and the air was heavy and humid.
That image is a bit misleading, but virtually all of the light there is coming from the flash on my phone’s camera. Standing there, I could not see through the threshold of that doorway. In fact, I couldn’t see the chair on the floor for that matter.
Those who know me know that I am not a superstitious guy, or anyone who puts any stock in the supernatural. But something about the combination of the darkness and that horrible noise set me on edge. I broke out in a cold sweat and just immediately felt anxious and panicky, and immediately ran back up the stairs and left the building. I justify it in retrospect that, without a flashlight, it’s pretty outrageously stupid to try and explore the basement of an abandoned building.
Part of me wants to go back and figure out what was making the noise (either some sort of generator for the T-Mobile power station above or, and far more likely, a Bloater), but the part of me that is so drawn to post-apocalyptic stories also wants to leave it at that. For a place that looks like it was abandoned hurriedly in the middle of the night, it only seems fitting that my last experience there was one of blind terror.