What is the best random discovery you found on a road trip?

submitted by medium_tomato from self.AskSaidIt

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[–]TruthTeller 7 insightful - 3 fun7 insightful - 2 fun8 insightful - 3 fun -  (4 children)

Not exactly a road trip, but close, and definitely weird:

Back in college, one early autumn day during dinner at the cafeteria, I saw a table of some fellow-students who looked disturbed. On asking, no one would say anything.

Next day one of those women was in my class. She volunteered that she and her buddies had gone driving through the small towns around our college. On a whim they decided to sneak into an abandoned building, which looked like some kind of an institution. As they were exploring they found something disturbing. It looked like an old school classroom. But there were things about that room that made no sense. For one, all the school desks were bolted to the floor. Then, there were rails on the ceiling and thick, heavy chains that came down to these large hooks. Some of her friends were drinking or on drugs and they all totally freaked out and ran out and came back to campus, all shaken.

I was completely disbelieving. Over lunch she volunteered to take me there. So after lunch we left campus and drove through these New England small towns and all the way up into the Berkshire mountains. I remember it started to get cold and foggy, although that early autumn day had been warm and sunny back down on campus.

By the time we reached this abandoned building I had started to get a little worried. It was getting towards sunset and the cold and fog really added to the atmosphere. I no longer felt as bold and doubtful as I had been over lunch.

In any case, we finally went in just as it was getting dark. And she was 100% right. It was exactly as she had described it.

I remember this chill that went down my spine. The room was really odd and the placement of desks and chains made no sense. There was these dark stains on the floor but it could have been oil. Nevertheless at the time these stains appeared to us as blood.

I panicked and we raced out of there. We lost our way on the drive down from the mountains and got home around 11 pm.

We never spoke about that again. The whole thing stayed with me for years.

[–]JasonCarswell 5 insightful - 3 fun5 insightful - 2 fun6 insightful - 3 fun -  (3 children)

Any chance those "extra features" could have been used to help disabled people?

Maybe find it on a map and research it to see if it is/was an asylum and/or hospital?

[–]TruthTeller 5 insightful - 3 fun5 insightful - 2 fun6 insightful - 3 fun -  (2 children)

You know. I'll tell you: This was 1983. So this is way before you can just pull it up on Google somehow. It definitely did not look like any kind of a sanatorium or a hospital. The chains were huge and the hooks were these meathooks that are used to hang hogs in butcher houses.

After turning it around in my head for years, the best explanation I could come up with was that someone brought all these disparate elements together as a joke. I know that sounds weird. But let's say this place was being used for storage of items from some nearby town, by the town government or something; old desks from school, hooks from some old mechanic or butcher business. Someone decides to fake this setup precisely to freak out these pesky college students breaking into abandoned places to get high. All it takes is a good drill, some bolts and an evil mind.

This was also a time when students in colleges like the one I went to staged these "happenings" which was a left over trend from the 1960's. For example, as part of a class project a friend of mine staged a huge "happening" just outside the big dining-commons windows on a Parent's Day special dinner. Over 50 people/actors were involved with fake news crews, guys in radiation-protection suits and geiger counters, an ambulance, and the staging even used a set of twins to some very disconcerting results. The entire dinner was cancelled and parents got out of there as soon as they could, sick to their stomachs from what they thought they had seen.

So things like that were not unheard of around our college.

It's amazing what you could do when everyone did not carry around a smartphone.

[–]JasonCarswell 3 insightful - 3 fun3 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 3 fun -  (1 child)

That does kinda sound fun, like something the Cacophony Society might have done before Burning Man.

I don't know what all was there but I suspect there's got to be a logical explanation. Maybe the "desks" and chains were not for children but for some kind of custom pseudo-assembly line automotive manufacturing and the stains were oil and lubricants or something. Or maybe they rendered dead animals into glue or pet food. Sounds weird and like a good setting for a Saw movie.

[–]TruthTeller 3 insightful - 3 fun3 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 3 fun -  (0 children)

Yeah. In the end I decided that in my panic my mind was making up stuff, filling in the gaps and connecting far too much together. The way the whole thing unfolded freaked me out to no end.