Kyle
The first abandoned building I ever went to was a high school in the town of Magnolia—which is the smallest town in the county I grew up in, which is the smallest county in Illinois—population 250, maybe.
There was an abandoned high school and I was with my cousin Billy and my other cousin Paul, his younger brother. We grew up like brothers; our moms were sisters. We used to break in there. Not break in—there were ways you could get in. It was fenced off, some windows were boarded. We’d go in there and there’d be old magazines and comic books and chairs and stuff everywhere. It hadn’t been used since the 70s, maybe the 80s. Sometimes we’d bring a basketball and go to the gymnasium and play basketball in the gymnasium, which was pretty cool, just a whole abandoned gym to ourselves. This was when we were in elementary school, 4th, 5th, 6th grade. One of the windows that was right at ground level was boarded up, but other people in the town went in there, so you could pull it apart far enough to crawl in there and you’d be in the basement and you’d go up two floors.
One time, it was really freaky. We saw, I think it was a can of Pepsi, or maybe Coke, sitting somewhere and we touched it and it was still cool. It was kind of creepy, like, somebody was just in here and we all freaked out and left. We didn’t know if it was some adult figure from the town that we we’re going to get caught by, we didn’t know! We never saw anybody, but we got the hell out of there.
