Exploring a skeleton of the Former Soviet Union

Of all the abandoned buildings in the Soviet ghost town, the largest one in the center was the most intriguing. First of all, it was the biggest in the town. Second, from the outside it looked like a hospital and therefore the most likely place to find strange remnants from its former occupation. But what really made us want to explore the place was the fact that each of its doors and all of its many windows were securely shut forbidding entry to anyone.

Persistence pays off though, and walking around the perimeter of the building I finally came across a window that was only loosely fastened and was able to accidentally break it open.
Jumping in through the window brought back a fear in me that I haven't felt in years. The room I climbed into had obviously been untouched for years. It was cluttered with garbage and entropy had slowly ruined the floors and the walls. We carefully across the room afraid the floor would give and admittedly a little nervous opened the room's door out to the hallway.
Stepping out into the hallway, it was immediately apparent that remembering our way back to the same room was a priority. All of the other exits had been barricaded and the only way out was the same way we came in. The hallways were long and dark with doors evenly spaced the entire way down. We carefully walked down these hallways pushing open each door and peering in to see what remained in each room. Most rooms were in shambles and contained very little. Some had old broken furniture and disgusting old mattresses and pillows. Others had been vandalized in Mongolian writing and we were unable to read them. The creepiest find in all of the small rooms was the picture above of the three children, vandalized and left alone. Beyond the small rooms, our first odd discovery was a large auditorium with a stage and torn red curtains still hanging from above. Our previous idea of the place being a hospital was suddenly in question but we were still unsure. Even weirder than the stage was this board of lights the hung on the opposite wall with many different colored bulbs in strange patterns. What this was used for I'm still trying to guess. Again challenging our idea that the place was a hospital, we found two large red doors that were labeled with a sign that read, "BAR." Inside, it was one of the most odd, colorful bars I've ever seen. String decorated the ceiling, each of the walls was painted in a surreal design and empty booths sat covered in dust. On top of the bar sat a roughly cut deer head. Beads hung separating the two main rooms in the bar and looking up close we realized it was made from bones from livestock. In the window a bird was dead, trapped between two panes of glass. The next room we opened was strewn with books. They were in piles out of order but inside each cover was a pocket with a library card. There had obviously been a library somewhere else. Looking through the books it was obvious most of it was political. Katiya could not read Mongolian but the alphabet is nearly exactly the same as Russian and she could read the names that were in most of the books: Lenin and Stalin. It was all communist propaganda. This book was poetry about Lenin and although I thought about it, I couldn't bring myself to take it.
We searched every room we could in the building. Many of the doors were locked and we were unable to find out what was hidden inside. We searched three different floors, always making a mental note of where we were so we would know how to get back out. If there were ghosts in the ghost town, it seemed obvious that this is where they would live. Each time we pushed open a door we nervously peered around it hoping to find something interesting, but afraid we'd find something horrifying. For some reason we couldn't get the idea out of our heads that behind one of the doors a corpse would be swinging by a noose and we'd all be sprinting to get the hell out of that place as fast as possible. But to our knowledge, no such thing existed and we found nothing too scary .




Our other discovery came on the second floor where we found two huge machines. At first it wasn't obvious what they were used for but it only took looking around the room to make it obvious. They were movie projectors and peering through the hole they showed movies through, we found that it was above and behind the theater. In the corner of the room were stacks of old reels. I only looked at a couple of the films that were already opened and pulled out of the tins and my guess is that they are all old Mongolian films. Again, we only looked through everything slightly and left it almost entirely as it was. Whether or not the place was a hospital or not I can't be sure. From the library, theater, and bar, I really can't make any conclusions. What was intriguing was that though we were inside the place we still couldn't reach two other wings which were blocked off even from the inside. What remained in there, I'll probably never know. No matter what the place was, it was creepy as hell. Never had I been exploring in a place that was not only blocked off to keep people out but was also obviously untouched for years. On top of that, it wasn't even in the United States but in the middle of nowhere in the Mongolian countryside where the Soviet Union formerly lived. The true nature of the ghost town and of this strange building can never be conveyed through writing or pictures, but at least here I can attempt to share pieces of it with you.