I noticed a few photos of folks chillin' in storm drainage tunnels. Seriously, be careful. Check the weather forecasts before exploring these. We used to do that as a kid... until a neighbor boy died during a flash flood.
When I was a teenager, there were a number of abandoned multistory office buildings in suburban Atlanta where I lived. Maybe 7-8 within 10 miles of my house, and a couple of cool abandoned restaurants too. There had been a commercial real estate boom, followed by the inevitable bust.
Anyway, we got in to all of them at one time or another, sometimes via ridiculously elaborate plans.
What finally put an end to it for most of us was returning to one of our favorite buildings and finding someone had set up a wire tied to the inner doorknob that went off somewhere in to the dark hvac room. Our imaginations about what might be at the other end of that wire convinced us that maybe we weren't as invincible as we thought. You never know who else is going in those places.
There was also this weird abandoned castle out in the woods. It was like a funhouse castle, wooden walls, but with fake stone on the outside. Turrets, fake drawbridge, the whole thing. No clue whatsoever how it got there. Must have been some old amusement park? But no one ever found any info on it.
Anyway, it involved parking on the side of this long stretch of country road, then walking a couple hundred yards through some woods. One night as we pulled over to park, this fat redneck dude comes out of the dark woods over to our car. Our windows are down and I'm in the passenger seat.
He points a MAC-10 right at my chest and tells us we need to be leaving.
For one time in my life I have literally nothing to say.
We drive off at a crazy rate of speed and never go back.
Being the south, there's a lot of things that could have been going on there that night, but the place was a few miles from where a crazy mercenary type had his commando training compound, so our theory was his people were using the place that night.
Interesting article... this quote struck me a kind of weird though:
"The mission, which (according to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Special Subcommittee on Investigations of the House Commerce Committee) was financially subsidized, and to be filmed by CBS news, was aborted when the participants were arrested by the FBI. WerBell was released without being charged."
There were always a lot of rumors swirling around him. Probably a healthy mix of lies, half-lies, and truths.
His compound was along this road that ran between towns, fenced in, with a rotating police light on a tall pole next to the gate. Supposedly when the light was on, that meant training was "in session", I guess as a warning to anyone who might want to enter. Anyway, it meant that all the locals were aware of him.
One rumor was that he provided School Of The Americas* (a couple hours away) with special training the military couldn't / didn't want to provide directly.
After his death, his son ran the place for a while, and one of this instructors, Jason Lau, opened a specialized kung fu school in the area. Their military supply retail outfit, Brigade Quartermasters, continues in operation- http://www.brigadeqm.com/aboutus.asp
The county I grew up in was very, very, very right wing. Still is to some extent. So he was in the right place.
