Too Close for Comfort Encounters.

If you've read my posts about hobo week, the abandoned asylum, the horrific journey to East Lansing, or the time we camped out in Salvation Army for five hours and bought 83 coats, you have probably figured out by now that Reina and I are very exciting people who like to do very exciting things. It only made sense that we should find an adventure in which to partake on New Years Eve. 

In the dinky town of Plainwell, Michigan, there sits the most enormous building I have ever seen.

The Plainwell Paper Mill opened in 1867 and provided jobs for 1,400 people up until its closing in 2000. I couldn't find any pictures on google that best showed how massive it is, but it sits on a 36 acre lot... and there's not a whole bunch of "lot" that isn't taken up by building. 

In May of 2010, Reina, Brooke, John and I explored this magnificent playground. If you look in the last picture in the middle-left you can see the top of the cluster of trees that had grown in a very small courtyard right behind that loading bay. Not completely sure how the group of us got away with this in the middle of the afternoon, but we had managed to climb one of the fences, waltz around the building until we found this little courtyard, and, well... break in. Although we justified the breaking of one pane of glass with the fact that it was already cracked, and the one above it had already been broken anyway. So, once we had broken the second pane I could easily slip inside, break a rusty padlock off a door and open it for the rest of the gang. 

The next couple hours were some of the best ever. Every time we turned a corner it was a whole new experience. One level was filled with rows and rows of fenced stalls, all empty except for one in the middle that contained a very large elf costume sitting up (creepy). One level was full of run down offices. One enormous room contained shelves and shelves of ancient blue prints and old, Polaroid pictures of the days when the Mill was functioning. A section of one level was oddly refinished - carpeted, lit, furnished - and was set up as if a board meeting had recently taken place, containing blue prints for what the future plans of the Mill were. The basement appeared to be nothing short of the deepest depths of the caves of Moria... only with a lot of rats and bats instead of trolls and a balrog. And then there was the roof - the highest point in Plainwell. For those of you who don't know, I have a thing for roofs. And this was by far the best one on which I'd ever been. 

We became hopelessly lost, but eventually squeezed under a garage door we found in one of the darkest sections of the building. Even for the hours we were inside, I know we didn't explore even a fraction of the place.

So now that you're up to date, I can talk about Reina and I's second encounter with the Paper Mill, which was much more threatening. 

We had talked about going back to the Mill ever since our first escapade, and decided to finally go for it tonight. So we got all geared up in layers and, rather than your boring ole flashlight, found HEAD LAMPS. Because we are that hardcore.

                

At about 9:00pm we walked over the bridge, climbed over the fence, and ventured over to the courtyard where we had entered a year and a half ago. There was a piece of plywood nailed over our broken window panes, but nothing that we couldn't easily peel back to slip inside and then replace as if it had never been touched (remember that bit at the end of the story).

We explored around all the old places like before, just as enthralled as before. Since our first visit, they had begun to start rehabilitating the place (the city plans to move City Hall operations there and build a new Department of Public Safety facility at the site), so there were some lights left on here and there and some construction equipment, but for the most part nothing seemed to have been changed. 

(A view from the roof I really wish I didn't have to take with my crappy phone camera.)

But then, of course, things had to get interesting. We spotted a spiral staircase and descended down it, because at the bottom we spotted light, and the lit rooms were far and few in between and a breath of fresh air. However, once we stepped off the staircase, ready to turn the corner through the doorway leading to the light, things turned a bit horror-movie-ish.

"What do ya got, if ya ain't got love? Whatever you got, it just ain't enough...."

The voice of Bon Jovi echoed through the vast, dimly lit room that lay ahead of us. In the depths of this massive building that we had been in for an hour with no evidence that we might not be alone, there was a radio playing. Our first reaction was to freeze, but then of course we had to act on our curiosity by slowly and quietly inching our way around the corner. No one else appeared to be there - the radio was all alone, sitting on some scafolding that was set up on the other side of a massive hole in the wall.

That's Reina in her headlamp standing on the scafolding - that blue light on the right of it is the radio blaring 106.5. 

See, this picture was taken on the second floor, but the scafolding was set up on the first floor. Meaning from where Reina was, she could see down beneath her to the first floor, the wall in which was also busted out just like this one. So two, identically busted out walls stacked on top of each other, the levels connected by the scafolding. We were just about to climb down the scafolding and see what was through the hole on the first story, when we heard a crunch... crunch... crunch. It was the sound of footsteps trying to slowly but deliberately make their way over a pile of bricks -- the pile of bricks on the other side of the hole right beneath us. We stopped for a moment to make sure we weren't mistaking the sound for something else, but the more we listened, the closer it got, and the more obvious it was that we were most definitely hearing someone below us walking towards us: two teenage girls inside an abandoned building at night time who had only seconds ago been speaking to each other in full volume and shining our headlamps in every direction. 

We wanted to run, but the floor was creaky and we didn't want whoever was beneath us to be able to track our footsteps. As silently as possible, we made our way all the way to the other end of the room in order to reach the stairwell that, while it was furthest from us at that point, would lead us closest to our point of exit on the first floor.

We reached the first floor, hearts pounding, and peered into the long, fully lit room - in the middle of which was the window through which we had entered. The part where we heard someone walking was connected to the other end of this room. So basically, if we wanted to get to our broken window, we had to make it to the center of a wide open room, the other end of which had a doorway where said person could walk out of at any given point in time.

We were quietly debating on whether we should go for it or not, when our question was answered with a loud BOOM. Some door that sounded as though it was just beyond the doorway across the room slammed. I like to think of myself as a fairly brave person, but at that exact moment, there wasn't much I could do to keep my knee from trembling. 

At the moment of the slam, Reina and I both jumped away from the doorway and joined in a very brief panic attack, until (praise the Lord) I decided to look around the other corner - away from the doorway into the room where our potential murderer could be entering at any moment - and spotted another door, which happened to lead directly outside. I swallowed the biggest gulp of relief that I possibly ever have, summoned Reina, and pushed through the door and into the cool, death/arrest-free air. 

The exit was very close to courtyard, so we decided to trot around real quick to look through the windows for any sign of the other person(s), but instead what we noticed was that the plywood that we had carefully re-attached to the wall to cover our entrance had been completely ripped off and thrown aside.

We ran back around the building as fast as we could while still remaining in the shadows, and hopped the fence at a speed that is only capable of achieving while extreme amounts of adrenaline are pulsing through one's veins. Once on the other side we gave each other a very well-earned fist bump (typical). But just to be safe, we waited until we were across the bridge and into the parking lot before hugging each other and jumping around while squealing about what seems to be our unlimited supply of luck. Or just God.

So anyway, that was how we had the most exciting New Years Eve ever via narrowly escaping either death or arrest or something else highly unfortunate.