Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital
I was born there :-)

It was the oddest of places, eh? One day it shut down and was abandonned, and they literally left everything inside and fled. In our teens, we used to hop over the security fence and break in. The children's wards, unoccupied for 15 years, still had bed frames in and murals on the walls, even though there were trees growing through the floors and no glass in the windows.

We broke into the old nurse's quarters and found a table with a 1982 phone book on, and a notebook that had lists of all the meals/menus served day by day for the year. Sadly it didn't quite go back to the month where I was born.

We went in three or four times... once got chased off by a security guard with a dog, another time we were there for a few hours and thought that nobody knew we were there, but by the time we'd hopped back over the barbed wire-topped wall to my car, there was a big note on my windscreen saying that they'd seen us trespassing and had taken our descriptions and car registration details, and that if we ever came back they'd pass it all on to the police.

It really was the oddest place. When you see images of the towns around Chernobyl, it reminded me of that. As if a nuclear bomb had gone off and everyone fled. Why would you close down a hospital in the middle of a very affluent, expensive land area and not empty it of its contents first?!

Good story by the way. Despite being a paperboy and delivering the advertiser in 1993, I don't remember this!
(harrypitta friends with the chilli saucerer, Fri 10 Feb 2012, 10:05, Reply)