Frozen in time: forgotten places

The "freezer surprise" thread got me to thinking.

I was at an estate sale one time around 2002. The owner had died and he had lived at the same address since he was born back around 1920. His parents had lived there since the 1890s. The floor tiles on the kitchen floor had totally worn away to the concrete slab below. There was a trail throughout the kitchen along the most traveled area with the exposed slab showing beneath worn, blackened floor tiles. In the pantry room, there sitting on the shelf was an UNOPENED can of dried fruit from the 1930s!!! The tin can was nearly black with age and the colored label was obviously of 1930s art deco design. The TV in the bedroom was a late 1950s Admiral with rabbit ears. The telephone was a 1930s vintage table model. The living room had an old wind-up Victrola that was playing a record as people picked through the house. It was not an antique in the normal sense because it had been sitting there since the 1920s! The furniture in the living room was of 1880s to 1920s vintage. Everything was just as it had been for 80 years or more. Junk mail was stacked on bookshelves with postmarks from the late 1930s! It was the closest thing to a time capsule that I've ever seen.

Anybody else ever run across places that were suspended in time?

 

I have seen this quite a bit due to my job. I had to carry out a valuation on a house a few years ago which was the only remaining house in the street after all others had been converted to offices or knocked down to build something else. The lady had lived there since the war, she explained that she used to be somebody’s 'mistress' around that time and he gave her the house to live in and basically nothing had changed since then. There was no plumbing or toilet and all of the light fittings were very valuable and had been stolen along with door handles and other items over the years. There was lots of stuff around that had obviously been there for a very long time, I remember seeing a magazine sitting on the side that was from the 1960's. She had no family and had to go into care.

I also did one on a very large house that used to be the doctors surgery and their residence in a small town. The surgery area looked almost like it was closed 50-60 years ago and just left. There were lots of interesting items around some I imagine would be worth a lot of money. I was with a rather squeamish female colleague who thankfully didn’t notice the mummified human arm that I saw in a box.

 

In junior high my friend and I use to sit in his attic and look at his dads stash of Playboy's from the '60,70' and 80's. Until he caught us looking through them anyway.

 

This place has been vacant since the late 80s.
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For all the Plutonium that was showered over that place...the trees look good.

 

Those pics are always really creepy to see. At the same time, insanely fascinating.

 

I had a similar experience several years ago. My roommate's great aunt passed away, and he was the only family member living in the area. We went to clean out her house and it was like a time warp. The most recently re-done room was the kitchen, and that dated to the 50s. We found stock certificates from companies long-gone, but lots of cool old newspapers in pretty good condition that my roommate had treated and sealed. It's really eerie like you said.

 

Looks like one of the levels on Call of Duty 4

 

I collect old stock certificates,....especially if they are from a "five and dime" store called "Wal-Mart". I also collect certificates from an old laundry detergent company called "Microsoft" and another goofy company called "Google". Please send me any of those if you find them.

 

I thought the same thing. Expect no Ferris wheel. Bloc or whatever, that level sucks.

 

LOL--we got really excited. Turned out to be from a long-defunct mining company. Value of nil.

 

When I lived in Arlington VA there was a guy down the street that was in his late 90's and I used to see him walk his dog every day. After not seeing him for a couple of days I called the cops and they broke into the house and he had died in the kitchen. The house had not been changed for at least 40 years. It was like a David Lynch movie inside. There was no TV just a radio and mail that had not been opened for 30 years. Otherwise the house was very tidy. The guy was a laywer for the government and it looked like he never spent a dime. He had about 10 changes of clothes in the closet. The whole thing was very strange. At the estate sale I bought the cool Art Deco couch for $1.00. It was like brand new I do not think any one ever sat in it.

 

It is. The game company had level designers visit Chernobyl and recreate it as perfectly as they could. If you look up images in google and compare them to the game they are almost exact. Notice the second picture. In Call of duty that is right when you walk outside and see the rabid dogs.
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Cool i didnt know that, the top pic looks like the location where you have one bullet in the sniper rifle?

 

Wow nice. I had no idea

 

http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chapter26.html

 

http://www.opacity.us/locations/

 

I think it is a little before that. I don't really play the game but I realized that they were the same when I was doing some research on my own time about Chernobyl. I plan to go there eventually =D

 

I don't know if anyone has ever been to Ambler PA, but if you have you surely noticed the abandoned Asbestos factories. Keasbey and Madison opened the factories in the late 1800's and they operated until the early 1970's. Not shown in any of my pictures are some of the massive machines in the basement of the one factory, that is where you truly feel like you have walked back in time. I am guessing the machines are from the late 1800's to the early 1900's. I will try to get some pictures of them next time I go.

These are NOT my pictures.
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Chernobyl... sick stuff. Girlfriend grew up on the further eastern end of Ukraine; spared the blunt of radiation because of wind direction at that time.

 

When I saw the pictures it reminded me of this girl's trip. Spooky stuff. You beat me to it.
I don't want to get off topic here, but does anyone else remember her story being called BS?

 

How could you fake that blog?

 

Not quite all BS ( i think the issue was to the ownership of the pictures, for which she added a disclaimer on the last page of her blog) -- you could always do the tour and see for yourself:

http://www.tourkiev.com/chernobyl.php

 

I was in a house recently with a garage that looked like a time capsule from around 1984. It had a Commodore computer, Atari 2600, Intellivision, board games, VCR, just all kinds of stuff from the early '80s. It was all in its original boxes, neatly stacked. It was like the kids had left one day and all their stuff got moved to the garage. It seemed kind of weird. I was curious, but I didn't ask about it. It would be weird to hear "My kids died in a car crash..."

 

I'm guessing they bought it because they would be antiques and collectibles in the future. That's why I kept my Super Nintendo and Nintendo, well I bought my Super Nintendo @ a garage sale in Houston for 15 bucks with like 20 games. I was like ~10, so I thought I hit the jackpot. I tried to keep boxes just because they are easier to store when you move (which we did alot). But really, some people really really keep Austin weird.