mmerriam | We Are The Ghosts Of The Places We Have Lived

I have an interest in abandoned, derelict places.

When I was younger, I loved finding my way into old buildings. When I was younger, it was a combination of the thrill of exploration combined with the inherent danger of being in a decaying structure. Add in the adrenaline-pumping fear of being caught, and it was a wonder I didn't end up in more old building.

When I was a pre-teen and early in my teenage years, we lived in a tiny little rural town, Oney, Oklahoma. The town's official name was Albert, because that was what it said on the post office, but the original name of the town was Oney. The school was Oney school and all the old-timers called the town Oney. Albert existed only for governmental purposes.

It was a town in decline. Serious decline. The railroad had not only stopped running trains there decades before, but had torn up the tracks themselves and taken them away. The population was small (around 150 people at that time) and there were plenty of old buildings from the village's better days standing around empty: an old grocery store, a tiny movie theater, the old bank, what we thought might have been a jail. On the property my family owned stood the abandoned cotton gin and mill and its adjacent office. I found my way into all of them, exploring with a handful of other adventurous boys and girls.

As I grew older, my thoughts became less about the thrill and adventure aspect and more about exploration and remembrance. I developed a sense of these empty building having actually been places where people lived, worked, and loved. I could feel the echo of those lives in the empty corridors and graffiti covered walls.

As I became older still, I grew less adventurous, stopped wandering into old places. Failing eyesight and a sure sense of my own mortality tempered my love of exploring these lost structures. Instead I turned to the internet and followed other explorers in their photographs and videos.

What interests me now is the history of a place. What was it? Why did it fall into ruin? Who were the people who worked or lived there? What must they think to see this place abandoned? Now it is about remembrance. These places meant something to people, to the community, to history. They deserved to be remembered.

Like I said earlier, Oney is small place. I lived there (off and on) from 1974 to 1980, doing most of my elementary school and all of junior high in that little town. The school was one of those solid brick structures built by the WPA in the late 1930s or early 1940s. It was not air-conditioned, and was hot during the late summer and early fall months, but it did have big windows and doors, so it had good air circulation. The classes were small; no more than a dozen of us in a class at anytime and sometimes a class might be as small as six kids. Budget cuts and dropping class sizes finally caught up to the little town, and the state closed the school, rolling it into the larger Binger school district. The last class left Oney school in 1991.

I knew this, of course. I had worked at the 3M plant in Weatherford with some old schoolmates from Oney. I knew the school was closed. I knew it was gone. This isn't something rare out in rural Oklahoma. The land is dotted with little school buildings (and sometimes entire multi-building campuses) that have closed and been left to rot.

At some point the main building was torn down, probably for safety issues. This seems a mercy to me. But the gymnasium is still standing. I suspect there was a plan to use it was a community center, and somehow those plans, (like so many plans and dreams in small-town Oklahoma) fell through. Recently, someone I know on Facebook entered the old gym and took some pictures, and there it was, a piece of my childhood, a piece of my history, standing forlorn, decaying slowly on the Oklahoma prairie.

I was unprepared for how sad this made me feel. It was like looking at old friend who had fallen on times so hard there was no return. And there is no return for this place. The best thing that could happen to it would be for someone to come along with a bulldozer and level it. I suspect this how the old-timers felt about all those old empty and ruined buildings I loved exploring as a kid.

I was struck by the fact that, not only is it part of my history, but I am a part of its history, however small. I played basketball in that building, went to school assemblies, plays, and banquets in that building, had an 8th grade graduation and dance in that building. The blue paint on the rusting handrails may be chipped and faded, graffiti may be painted on the concrete bleachers, the ghosts of basketball goals may be broken bits that lurk at either end, and the old parquet floor rotted and covered in fallen bits of ceiling, but I know these things in my soul and remember them as they were.

I am a part of that old building's memories. Its history.

I am one of the ghosts of that place.

There will come a day when that building is no more, either knocked down by man or carved up and reclaimed by nature and the land. I know that this is simply the way of things. Buildings come and go. People come and go. Everything dies, in the end.

But I will remember that place as it was, and it will always be a place where people lived and worked and learned and played and loved and were.

And someday, when I am no more, I will take that memory with me, and we shall both be ghosts...