Creepin...

Adam, who is a relentless photographer (he had already gone out into the hills behind BPU in the morning) gave me a call and politely bullied me into going out to the haunted city I had discovered. Here we crawled in and among the wreckage and took a bunch of photos.

I’m glad Adam called, or I would have sat at home drinking beer, which would have been a waste of a perfectly good Saturday afternoon. Well, except for the part about sitting at home and drinking beer. So we walked over by the river to the fenced off bits. We clambered over this and that, occasionally becoming the object of interest of wandering Koreans who couldn’t figure out what the silly Waeguk were doing, and the one who wanted to invite us to church.

What struck us both, and I’m not sure if you can see it in the photos, since the trashing and junk is so predominant, is that many of the houses were once quite nice. This wasn’t a slum of squatters such as might have been condemned in Seoul in the 60’s and 70’s – these houses were multistory brick ones with substantial rooms, western toilets (in most cases – there was the odd outdoor WC), and yards. This looked like a neighborhood that should have had enough political/economic power to put up a fight, but the place was trashed. I’d love to find someone from the area who could explain what had gone down here. The electricity was still hooked up, but no juice was running through the lines though we spotted evidence that a few people might still be surreptitiously living in some of the flats. Oddly, we didn’t see any rats or cats.

It felt a bit ghoulish to be walking through the tatters of someone’s busted lives. Adam found some kids collection of balls and that hutch I picture here still has its table-settings inside it. Whoever lived there got out so fast that they couldn’t or didn’t take all of their belongings.

We’ll be going back to document whatever it is that goes up here. I need to find a nice high perspective around the place to get a picture. I wonder if I could see this from the tower at BPU?

The whole shooting match is up in a webfile at www.spunangel.com/scraphix/haunted/index.htm

Alla this was so interesting to me that when a guy from the Gwangju Times solicited articles for next month I was all hepped up to go off on some kind of uniformed tangent about Korea destroying its cultural history.

Which, sadly, I know nothing about. ;-)

I was all rushing online to find something to say, to cobble together with these pics and some article I saved from the flight magazine and then realized.. hey, I'm and idiot!

I have an article..

So I am pimping my marketing piece as a 4-5 segment thing to run for the next couple of months.

This wasp picture looks computer generated to me, but it is actually one of the few living things left in the Condemned Zone...

Spooky place..