VA Hospital I

Getting into the VA Hospital was not an easy task. The fence surrounding the complex was simple to breach; holes all along the perimeter allowed someone willing to get dirty underneath access. But the buildings were boarded up tight. Not many windows even within climbing-in distance, and none of them broken. A hulking main hospital building was joined on the grounds by what looked to be a smaller hospital building, an office building, a few duplex homes, several outbuildings, and a neat row of private houses. Inside the first house we just felt like we’d broken into someone’s home – and a nervous raccoon was upstairs – we ignored the houses and aimed at the institutional buildings. We found access to the office building, but – hard for an explorer to say – nothing of interest was inside. Upstairs were dormitory style bedrooms done in boxy wooden 1970’s institutional furniture, portending things to come. We left without shooting and headed for the big hulk.

The main hospital building had been retrofitted with countless other buildings attached to it by a web of trailer-built hallways; like an octopus it had reached out and suckered onto the smaller buildings around it. But all those attached buildings, and still…no open windows. Circling the building was no easy task with all the appendages it had grown, and three vehicles were parked in front of a much smaller building across a large parking lot. We worried they were associated with human beings who might catch us. Surreally at one point, a fire truck made a circuit of the road around the complex. We hid behind one of the attached trailers. We tried everything: air ducts (too slippery – only works in the movies), lowering the tops of windows (they stuck on pieces of plastic designed to stop them from lowering), climbing down into cellar window areas (none opened). It was hard to believe we were going to be stymied. That’s happened only once before and at a place that was not abandoned, only closed. This place was definitely abandoned.