in 2002, friends of mine cracked a squat which was a former health service/council residential home. huge place, loads of space, all services on and lots of tat. a huge great kitchen/canteen, basically a squatters’ paradise…
they had all lived together before in relative harmony, often in smaller buildings..
but as soon as they moved in there (literally on the first day) all sorts of arguments and politics started…….. no idea why as they weren’t short of space or resources….
people spread out to the far corners of the building complex and some would just stay in their own rooms…
couldn’t make sense of it at first but as I spent more time chilling out in there some things started to make sense…
one of the first things I do in a large communal space is explore the building thoroughly, to help with maintenance purposes and to see what tat etc. is about.
I am not easily scared, but for some strange reason I felt uneasy in certain parts of the building, if I was there on my own I would not stay in these areas for long. (others also said the same thing about these areas).
whilst exploring I found a “burglar alarm control panel”. I looked at it to see if it could be used for components and it soon became apparent the control panel was to keep people in rather than keep burglars out! In fact if you left through certain doors without shutting the thing off, various bells went off in the offices… (at least until we dismantled the system as it was waking up everyone if people went for a piss in the night 😉 )
then I found the offices which were still full of files from an era when the local county council got abolished (it appears these files were just forgotten about).
what I saw was shocking… most of the files were mundane stuff, but there were two accident/incident books…..
it turned out that although the place was being used as an old peoples home, it had previously been uised as a home for youngsters with mental health problems, and was basically a low-level secure unit (hence the alarms). (This is a place where you often have borderline cases between criminal and mentally unstable behaviour, and some inmates can be violent).
however there was a serious problem with the quality of care there, and basically the older male teenagers were “running the place”. There was some really dark shit going down like gang fights, binge drinking, carers being slapped about a bit (and perhaps returning a few blows), even girls being sexually assaulted by the male inmates and/or being forced into “relationships”. On more than a few occasions the Police or other authorities had to be called…
I checked the locations in the accident book against the building plan I had found – and you guessed it; all the locations I felt dodgy about matched up with the places where all these incidents had happened.
Those who lived in those locations actually started arguing with each other more, and there was a lot of gender tension if the groups there were mixed….
eventually before everyone got evicted we had a party but the atmosphere was wierd, someones records got scattered about/stolen and a chap who lived there slashed his wrists and deliberately sprayed blood everywhere about the place (he recovered though and is OK)
Can’t help but wonder if the “bad karma” from the buildings previous use somehow “contaminated” the building and affected the people inside? I’m not easily taken in by some “hippy theories” but in about 8 years of knowing people setting up squats and communal spaces; I have never witnessed such things happen and so much tension within a squat (most of the people there no longer speak to one another or work together now).
If we ever get a place again that has been used for bad purposes or had bad things happen there, I am going to use feng-shui to cleanse it.
