Tour Report: Rest Home "Fernview"

After visiting our friend Jens and revisiting "his" sanatorium in the Harz mountains, we still had two more days to go on our short tour in March of 2019, so we took the opportunity to visit my mother-in-law and check out a few more locations.

On top of a hill in a small town lies an abandoned rest home. I had seen lots of photos from there, but the most "famous" scene is one room with an old armchair and ferns growing up the wall behind it. So of course, when we were in the area, we had to stop to check it out.

As we drove up to the huge building and saw the broken windows and piles of trash on the outside, we didn't have high hopes to see anything interesting. The place was wide open, so we didn't really go through the trouble of looking for a parking place far away and found one pretty close to the building. Now we only had to find a way in.

There was no fence, and almost every window was broken, so this was an obvious way in - but lazy as we are, we looked for an open door, and we found one right away!

As we entered, we were once again shocked and amazed what vandals can do to a building. There was no single room in its original condition, all remaining furniture had been moved around - either to create the better photo, or to create the better party room, or simply to create chaos. There had even been a fire in some of the rooms, and local kids apparently also used the place as "canvas" for their "graffiti"...

We still took the time and walked through the entire place, and we even managed to get some pretty decent shots - although the vandalism was omnipresent. And then we found the room with the ferns on the wall.

Well, that was a bit disappointing. Firstly because the armchair had lost one of its "arms", but mostly because the ferns weren't nearly as green as we had expected. Yes, it was March, and spring hadn't really started yet, but I suspected that the reason was the immensely hot and dry summer of 2018 that had dried up a lot of the plants.

So after about two and a half hours, we went back to the car and drove off to the next location.

To find out about the history of this place and to check out all the photos, click the button below.