Looking to share r/l weirdness, I'm wondering, if people could share odd ball stuff they've encountered in the basments of places where they've lived or worked. Stuff which could lead to interesting adventures

For example in his autobiography Kitchen Confidential Anthony Bourdaine reported that through the basmeent of a rastaurant he ran, he found a maze of hallways connecting him to the hotal next door and a forgotten night club from the days of legs Diamond. It had been emptied of fixtures and booze but was a huge empty space.

I once worked for a company in New york who's stroage for records was in the basement of the building next door. This had once been a health club and hidden behind cardboard boxes were huge mirrors and at one point a circular hallawa with alternating wood slats and mrrors on it.

I never found anything strange in a basement but I once found a large number sealed evidence bags and SWAT weapons in a storage warehouse. The moral of the story was if you're a cop who takes bribes to loose evidence you shouldn't put it in a warehouse rented under your own name and if you do you should continue to pay your rent.

I remember finding old HDDs and Modems in the basement of a Burger Joint I once worked at. No computers, just the HDDs and Modems. (External modems, but interal Hard Drives).

When I worked as a janitor, well, let's just say that I learned a lot about chemicals that can be found in any office building/apartment complex. And some of the weird equipment to just maintain a place...

back in my hometown of Ann Arbor, MI, there are a number of urban legends regarding the 'steam tunnels' that supposedly criss-cross the UofM campus (roughly 75% of the land in town). some of these are true, as there are a few underground tunnels that connect a few major buildings. they were constructed back in the 60s, when civil unrest was common in universities, to allow staff members to evacuate from surrounded buildings.

So? share.

well, thats pretty much the extent of the urban legend, usually told to gullible freshmen.

lol, I meant 'canray' should share.

Well, being a Gamer, I often look at things from different points of view than the average person.

One thing that peaked my interest was when I was reading the novelization of Terminator 2, where the explosives the Conners used to blow up Cyberdyne, were improvised from cleaning supplies. (Remember, Sarah learned how to do this in T1!). So, yeah, there's lots of flammable materials there, along with good supplies of things that can be made to go boom.

Note: I hasten to point out that I grew up, and was in, a Mining Town at the time as well, so knowledge of explosives isn't that unusual as almost everyone has an Uncle that knows how to go Prospecting, or works for the Mines working with the stuff. However, as I now live on the Praries, I freak people out with my knowledge of Dynamite.

Other things that I found was "Oder Counteragent", which I was upset to find out only is available from Supply Stores that sell to Corporations. That stuff was great! Kills any smell! I mixed up some Double-Strength stuff, and it worked in the DUMPSTERS!

For the equipment, I couldn't even figure out half of the stuff (I was only there to clean up, not maintain the building.), but it appeared sinister, and the warning labels were things that made me shudder!

I like urban exploration. Fave places are old cold war bunkers. Strange things I have found include a 1940 Krupps manufactured telephone exchange, electroshock therapy devices, a soviet box filled with "surgical supplies". Old tax books. Old tubs for "therapy" use. Old computers. One door that had a sign with a radiation warning and not to be opened until 2042.

I even had designed a board game around the idea of urban exploration in Moscow.

-Chrysalis

During my college days at Texas A & M, I was also a "Tunnel Rat" ie the steam and maintenance tunnels underneath the entire university.

Entry into the tunnels was interesting in the Cadet Dorms it was a closet looking door that had a trapdoor to a ladder down into the tunnels.

We used the tunnels to get into other Cadet Dorms/Barracks unseen for various pranks like dumping bags of FORTRAN Punch Card holes along carpeted hallways.

We unsealed the small railway tunnel that was used to convey prepared foods from the main dining/preparation facility from way back when the university was all male and pretty much all Cadets.

We found that every building was accessible thru these tunnels, some to the tunnels had not seen use since before the Korean War, we discovered this due the light bulbs used in those sections were made during WWII and the Korean War Era, we installed new light bulbs to make using the tunnels easier and less flashlight intensive.

In the basements of alot of the older buildings were WWII era wooden furniture ie full sized desks, chairs, solid wood filing cabinets filled with old student and university records ie accounting types of records.

We used the tunnels to gain access to the newer buildings facilities controls like the switches to the hot water pumps, would turn off and remove the fuses during the winter months so they took cold showers.

While I was a Feral Cat Conference many years back, a Lady Professor who helped found and establish Aggie Feral Cat Alliance of Texas (AFCAT), had explained that the Maintenance Department explained that the Steam Tunnels were not accessible to the cats. I was able to give her some insights into the system and exactly how accessible it was to the cats.

Many times during my college days in those tunnels we came across the cats and the signs of their presence. Nothing like shining a flashlight into a room and all you see is sets of eyes at various levels reflecting the light back at you.

WMS

if that isnt the proverbial red button with the "dont push!" sign, i dont know what is...

Hmmm, growing up in a rural area with a high water table, basements were rare while wells were plentiful. However, attics of old houses and barn lofts were great for finding things. Old farming equipment (hand tools really) that has since been replaced by more modern equipment (machines) make for great torture devices.

Where I work now, the basement was originally designed for records storage has been converted to office space. There are walls that run hot and cold for no apparent reason. (The truth is steam and water pipes - but the PCs don't need to know that.) There is a shredder in one of the mechanical rooms that would make Enron proud. The thing has a conveyor belt wide enough for records boxes. Indeed that is what it is for. The monster has a mushroom stop bottom and the on button is a covered push button. Make that conveyor wide enough for a meta-human and ...

i could tell you stories . . but i won't . .
i'll only say this much: if you ever get the chance: work in retail/logistics once . . you'll be surprised at the sheer number of tunnels and other such things used in modern cities and shopping areas . . it's pretty much possible to cross whole districts of this city i live in without ever going up to street level, if you know how and where to look . .
the other extreme is in berlin for example . . there's places where you can cross parts of the city without ever going DOWN to street-level . .
as for places being unaccessable to cats? yeah, right, if you can get your fist in there, a whole cat will find it's way inside . . as long as the head fits through some tiny little hole, the rest of the cat fits too . .

@ Stahlseele

Speaking of tunnels, downtown Salt Lake - the city where I currently live - has several tunnels owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that allow movement of Church leaders from the Church Office Buildings to the Temple and other LDS buildings.

RE: Cats
I agree! They can go anywhere.

Makes me wonder how many secret places there are in Winnipeg. There's an underground concourse that's a part of the Downtown Skywalk at the infamous "Portage and Main"...

What else could be down there?

It's a Flood Plain, however, so not likely much.

The steam tunnels at UW-Madison are pretty cool, plus we have Tunnel Bob.

All you need to find these places is a willingness to wander. A set of lockpicks helps, but isn't necessary.

One way to find out about the tunnels is to research the city's founding. Seattle is a great example of a city built on top of itself--the whole Seattle Underground near Pioneer Square was canonically converted into the Ork Underground.

But what can you do with them in game? I've seen abandoned sewer tunnels turned into a lair for a blood mage. Smugglers who hide out in long-forgotten speak-easies are cool. What about business complexes, built by mega corps and later leased or sold to smaller companies?

IIRC, there was a bad batch of plasticrete mentioned in CC or M&M that you could spray an enzyme on and it would temporarily become permeable. If a company intentionally built a non-load bearing wall with that material to conceal that an underground section existed, it would be possible to later use that as a hidden entrance.

If you go to the City Planner's office, a lot of those tunnels can be found in blue prints of the city. Copies are fairly inexpensive and make great additions to a game. Unroll the blueprints on your gaming table and let the players have at it. Electrical, HVAC, and structural drawings are all available.

I found some UrbEx web sites while I was researching Scab (my character in Second Stringers).

YOU GUYS ARE MENTAL!!!!!!

Much props, but clinically mental nonetheless.

For example.

Yeah. And Chrysalis did not tell us what he found inside...

There was a reseach facility in France that had a big tunnel system underneath. A Russian spy lived there during the day and came out at night to fetch research documents.

The door was a large stainless steel vault like door. It was locked and welded shut. Later on I did bring a geiger counter to have another look at it. It read in the 5 rem range.


Rules in urban exploration:

1. Do not leave anything more than footprints and do not take anything away.
2. If you come across a locked door or window. It also your responsibility not to break-in.
3. Vandals sacked Rome. You are an urban explorer.

4. If you enter a huge system of tunnels or caves you do not know, bring a local guide you trust.

Stumbling into an undergroud rave after 5 hours of being lost in a tunnel system had it's merits though.

I found some extremely racist literature dating back to the 1870's called Lynching Black People as a Community Project. It was a book of racist and sexist fairy tails. The small little biography of the author was that he burned down his elementary school when he was 10 and was driven out of town. Made me happy that most people would look down on a piece of literature like that if it was written today. Also a lot of National Geographics that dated back to the great depression that had a government advisory on the back that told people to spend more money to help out the economy and get us out of this depression. A half molded loom, an old printing machine, a dusty old piano with half the keys missing, a bunch of broom handles, a black and white picture book where most of the pages had molded together that only had the first picture of a sad looking lady (who apparently committed suicide in the house.)

This was from a basement of a 200 year five story high old mansion. There were other more spooky things, but then again that place just scared the hell out of me. It burned down recently, and no one knows why.... although I used to hear my father or sister calling out my name only to realize that I was the only person in the house, or my sister was 2000 miles away. That or hear my Grandmother call out to me, except for the fact she had passed away six + years ago at that time.

I had a list of stuff to bring, cameras, etc. But two most important aspects:

Never do urban exploration alone and always respect the area you explore.

mark my words:
mark your ways!
also: use rope or threading . . it helped theseusagainst the minutaur . .
chalk is good for markings . . bread crumbs don't work all that well with critters of various size cohabitating the area you're exploring . .

All easily explained. Swamp Gas. Oh wait, that's for ufo's? darn.

Considering the houses that I've lived in before, no basements. Darn it. And currently, the house my parent's are in, they're the first inhabitants so no sordid/scary/haunted past. Thank goodness. I wouldn't want to visit much if they did... not that I'm superstitious, but still...

urban exploration... you guys are crazy. Y'all take some good pictures though? Have y'all watched the Cities of the Underground on History Channel?

i ain't crazy(ok, maybe, but they could not prove it so there), i just get bored fast ._.
nah, i don't take any pictures . . i hate cameras <.< . .
and i don't get history channel over here, but i have watched several documentaries on the subject on the local channels that deal with such stuff . .
especially all the old bunkers from world war 2 are basically all over . . or bette,r under the place in germany *g*

In my high school I was told they had a bomb shelter under the track field. The entrance was under a closet in a wood shop. When I was there the entrance was covered by wood. A friend told me they and a graphics teacher had sneakedin there, before it was covered, an old printing press some ink, type and some faux communist agitation newsletters. It is still sitting there. Waiting to be found.

Well the only thing that was left in the basement at my parent's house when they moved in was a film copy (to use with a projector) of Emanuelle and a flask of booze.

Yeah, I was just waiting for someone to mention porn.

Check out Japan Underground for some jaw-dropping imagery. I'm always amazed by the concept of building a city right on top of an old city and the utility access tunnels needed to run a modern metropolis.

The weirdest basement I've ever been in was in the home of my great-aunt. Her father dug it by hand and filled it with concrete. Since human hands are incapable of machine precision the walls bowed inwards and the floor steeply tilted towards a drain in the center. I don't think there was a level surface anywhere in that room.

The county I grew up in, in southern Ohio, is chock full of big old houses with plaques saying they were part of the Underground Railroad. Some of them might have been. I personally think it's more likely that people are trying to put a more positive spin on the fact that this was a big moonshine area back then, and so lots of people had secret rooms/tunnels for bootlegging purposes. At any rate, tons of houses down there have tunnels and secret rooms, which are always cool. Most people I knew just boarded such stuff up, but I would never be able to do that. One kid I knew found a room in his house his parents didn't know about and started growing a plant they wouldn't approve of. That kind of thing earns you major cool points in high school.

The house next to the one I grew up in had a tunnel going across the street to another house. It was built in the 20s to hide the son of the family that lived there, who was on the run from the pigs after raping and murdering somebody. They eventually found him and poured concrete over both ends of the tunnel, but the tunnel's still there, and supposedly nobody ever checked it before they sealed it up. No legends of gold or anything, though, so nobody's ever had the interest to jackhammer it open and look inside.

The middle school I went to was the town's high school up until the late 60s, and has a bomb shelter under it in the form of a long tunnel going to a nearby elementary school. I snuck off once and wandered around it. It was actually pretty extensive, and led to things that looked exotic, but weren't, like boiler rooms and storage rooms that hand't been used in 30 years. The most interesting thing I found was a room where they stored old science lab equipment. Mostly it was just flasks and beakers on shelves, but it looked kind of like the old Unearth Arcana cover from some other game.

The town also had a defunct sewer system that generations of kids had tried to wander through. I don't know if anyone was ever successful. When my friends and I tried it, we got probably halfway across town before the air got too thin for us to breath comfortably. By that point, we'd seen graffitti dated from 1911. I don't know how accurate that is, but it's possibly authentic. Also, a lot of smaller pipes leading in had been blocked off with old headstones dating back to the early 1800s.

When I was in college in DC, I lived near the Russian embassy, and when Robert Hansen revealed that the CIA had dug a tunnel under the embassy in what was apparently a rather fruitless effort to eavesdrop on the embassy (because the KGB knew about it from the start), the neighbors started making it a weekend hobby to search for evidence of the tunnel, since nobody ever made public exactly where it was. I don't think anyone ever found anything.

But the only actual on-topic thing I have to contribute is that once, in the basement of someone I shouldn't name, I found a box full of fake passports from various countries, a handgun, and rolls of $100 bills. I definitely know the guy whose picture was on the passports, and I've never asked him about it. I figure that's the kind of heavy thing you just sort of have to roll with. I mean, I guess if I had that kind of stuff, I'd keep it in my basement. But still, it was weird.

A Spider the size of my hand.

First place I lived in when I moved out after high school was this old, maybe 1920's era house. It was big three story thing with a creepy basement. We spent several afternoons searching the completely unlit basement. It was concrete, with a bunch of small side rooms that we couldn't figure out what they were supposed to have been used for. There were no light fixtures that we could find. It was just a strange place... Would have been excellent for a Blair Witch kind of amateur movie.

Minor efforts to explore some of the basements and underground service tunnels at OSU. Um, yeah. Nothing really noteworthy though.

I guess the more interesting thing I discovered was went I went back to my home town to help clean up my grandpa's house. A bunch of WWII era rifles, pinups, and so on from his days in the service. No one else was particularly interested in keeping them for some reason, so I laid claim to them, said I'd get them when I cam e back next. Sadly, my grandpa's evil-biddy-from-hell wife (not my real grandma, BTW) decided to sell them fore next to nothing. From what I could tell, she did it just to spite me.

-paws

All these posts reminds me of the show on the History Channel called Cities of the Underworld. It has some great information about the tunnels, caves, and various other hidden places underneath cities across the world. Bunkers in Berlin, caves that led for miles underneath Paris, bars in Portland that still had trap doors where they literally used to shanghai sailors in the late 1800s. Great show.

And here I am in boring England where most local places wont have much fun in them and the few tunnels and such we have suck. I'm sure theres a few near by but they are like forgotten by all.

That is what you have to look for. Be the one to look in the dark corners.

As for those houses in Ohio with small 'rooms' do they look like fireplaces? That is pretty common in big houses build in Pennsylvania from the earliest colonial days through the early 19th century(I'm sure it's in other houses but I have only been allowed to explore house in Pensylvania) These look like big fireplaces with no open chimney hole, what they actually are , are bearing loads from above, the arch of the 'fireplace' spreads out the load like a buttress.

heh, you said buttress!

Let’s see.

Living in Edinburgh, what more can be said?

That city’s got more underground vaults and catacombs than any sane person wants to trudge around in. Under the Old Town it’s basically just one big basement.

The university campus I went to is, fittingly enough, an old lunatics asylum, with nooks and crannies, dead end corridors and half hidden basement rooms just about everywhere, unfortunately they’ve all been pretty thoroughly explored donkey’s years ago.

There are, however a set of tunnels from when the buildings were new, and the place was not so much a loony bin as a place for the upper classes to have their embarrassing relatives discreetly locked away in comfortable surroundings. These stretch from building to building under the nicely kept lawns, and some even have glazed light vents looking up through the ground.

It’s a crying shame that they’ve all been really thoroughly blocked up and most are pretty dangerous with regards to cave-ins and similar. There are, however, stories of tunnels that have been forgotten, since new ones were sometimes dug without anyone bothering to put them into the building plans, and searching for the entrance to one of those has kept a lot of students busy over the years…

Michigan State's campus also has a rather notorious steam tunnel system. Back in 1979, a 16-year-old child prodigy computer science student by the name of James Dallas Egbert III went missing. Frustrated by the Campus Police's lack of progress on the case, his parents hired a high profile private investigator by the name of William Dear to conduct an independent investigation. For the initial phase of the investigation, Dear was fixated on J.D.E.'s involvement with Dungeons & Dragons. The investigator was convinced that the boy had lost himself in the game, and was playing it, live action in the steam tunnels under the campus.

When campus officials balked at allowing a search of the tunnels, Dear staged a bit of a media circus that ended up getting national press. (This inital national press about the Egbert case was one of the sparks that lit the wildfire of negative public opinion about the RPG hobby. I can't say for certain that it was the inital source of the idea that "D&D is an evil influence and a danger to children everywhere," but it certainly was one of the first.) When the search finally was conducted, some strange things were found, such as a dining table in a room with a doorway much too small for the table to fit through, with a Paper-Mache' figure seated at the head, but no sign of the missing prodigy or any hard evidence he had been there.

As it turns out, J.D.E.'s disappearance had nothing to do with his involvement in D&D. He had turned to drug use in attempt to deal with the stresses of being a 16-year-old college student and the general social isolation his status as a prodigy brought. Exacerbating the situation was the fact that he was gay in a time that was much less accepting of such things than it is now. Depressed and despondent, he wavered between the ideas of suicide and simply running away from his life forever. Settling on the former, he had gone down to the steam tunnels to take an overdose of sleeping pills.

Unfortunately, the dosage he took wasn't enough to kill him, it only knocked him out for about a day. He came back up out of the tunnels, J.D.E. and crawled to the house of a 20-something gay friend of his. Spent about a week there getting high on illicit drugs, long enough for stories of his disappearance to hit the press. From that point on, Egbert started to get passed from house to house while being kept stoned out of his gourd, as each of his hosts would realize just how much trouble they'd find themselves in if they were the one caught with the missing 16 year old boy in all the papers. He was bounced from East Lansing, to Chicago, to New Orleans, and then finally Morgan City, LA, where he finally became aware of the search for him and was allowed to contact the detective who was looking for him.

He was reunited with his parents, but due to the sensitive nature of the circumstances of his disappearance, not much press coverage was given past the fact that he had been found. Unfortunately, the help he started receiving afterwards was too late in coming, as about a year after his initial disappearance, he made another attempt on his life, this one successful.

Nine years later after the Michigan State steam tunnels were linked to underground D&D games and a high profile investigation, the steam tunnels at NC State University would suffer a similar fate when Chris W. Pritchard was tried for masterminding the murder of his stepfather and attempted murder of his mother. The case became the subject of two true crime novels that were both adapted into made-for-TV-movies; both movies chose to focus on Prichard and his co-conspirator's involvement with RPGs and in particular Steam-Tunnel LARPing, while downplaying Prichard's emotions about growing up in a broken home, his heavy drug use and the fact that he stood to inherit two million dollars had his plan been successful.

Fortunately for Shadowrun, the only publicized case of someone "lost in the game" (legitimate, or fabricated by the media as in the two cases above) involves a something a little more classy than steam tunnels: a lingerie store in Belfast. But since that's not a basement or even underground, it's a story for another thread.

Come now, no story involving a role-player and a lingerie store is going to be criticized for being tangential.

Tell.

Please?

I remember reading about it!!! The crazy "elf" who stole from a lingerie store! ha! But where was that link...

blogsearch to the rescue:
http://www.comicmix.com/news/2007/03/14/ro...laying-robbery/

A few suburbs from me, there's a mental hospital. The mental hospital is in a large park, and is a series of separate buildings, used for different purposes. Ward No. 2 is a three story (plus attic and basement) psychiatric hospital building that was abandoned in the late 80's.

We managed to get into No. 2, by shimmying across about ten meters of ledge over a two story drop to a broken window. We laid some denim over the glass and climbed in. Finding ourselves in a large room of broken bunks and cabinets. The whole place is amazingly creepy. Peeling linoleum, dust, spiders. There's a whole room just covered in moss and mould. In the day time it's pretty dark, and one night we decided to go at night.

No-one we knew had been to the basement, not even in the day time, but we were there at night with one torch and a few phones for light, and we went down. We had to peel away a few cobwebs, but we finally got into this long basement room with chicken-wire windows, that looked burnt. In the center of the basement was a pile of books, stacked in a pile.

We started reading the books, and they were the treatment manifests for the patients. Some of it was just anti-depressants, but some patients lists went on for days, and involved restraints, enema bulbs, tranquilizers, etc. It was really creepy - Why would all those patient manifests be just lying in a pile?

You broke into an abondoned mental hospital at night and yet have somehow avoided being eaten by ghosts? In all likelihood you have awakened something ancient and evil which will now stalk the world feasting on the lifeblood of the innocent. I hope you're happy.

Oh NO! Down Syndrome Cthulhu!

usually stacked books are in piles

Symmetrical book stacking. Just like the Philadelphia mass turbulence of 1947.

They probably had a room where they kept all the old patient files for storage and patient confidentiality. When it came time to remove all the furniture and stuff, the person in charge of the move/closing probably forgot to decide on what to do with the files such as moving them to storage offsite or to send it to the shredders, especially if they are old files which most of the staffers forgot or really didn't care about anymore. The movers removing the file cabinets probably just dumped them in a pile because the cabinets would be freaking heavy and figured someone else would come by and box up the manifests anyway, it's not their job. Alternatively, the cabinets were rented from another office supply company, in that case, you betcha they'd dump those manifests before taking them out. Another alternative is at the closing of the site, it was an all you can grab spree as the people departing are picking through and taking what useful furnitures there are left at the site, and again, the books get dumped because no one wants them. There they sat forgotten because everyone thinks it's someone else's job to come by later to box them up... I can see them forgetting to budget money to have the files to be shredded or stored elsewhere and well, it got dumped. ooops.
so probably not so creepy at least in my eyes.

you beat me to it. "no ordinary human would stack book like this"

The abandoned basement of an old apartment was being used as shelter for an unexpected tenant. Since nobody went down there much, the place was inhabited by squatters. The vagrants were good at avoiding detection, so some tenants got the feeling that someone, or something, was living in the basement; empty, used ketchup bottles littered the place, and whenever the janitor went downstairs, the vagrants would rush away and out one of the windows, leaving food scraps behind.