Tour Report: Villa "Kidney"

About a month after our summer vacation in 2020, it was time for another exploration tour. The plan sounded perfect: the evening before, we met up with our friends from Pixelcracker and Lost Places in Schleswig-Holstein und Umland at our place and enjoyed a great barbecue together.

Unfortunately, the evening ended with a small accident. My wife seriously injured her right foot, tearing the ligaments and breaking her tailbone. As a result, only the three of us were able to set off the next morning.

Still, the tour promised to be an exciting one. Our chosen location was already well known and quite overrun at the time, but it was also famous for offering many fascinating and beautiful photo opportunities: a huge villa that had been built in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a dialysis clinic, combined with the private living quarters of the doctor.

After the doctor passed away, the clinic continued to operate under a successor until 2009. Since then, the entire complex had been left abandoned.

We started early, as we were planning to meet another friend on site. She wanted to explore the clinic as well, accompanied by a former employee — which was especially interesting, as it often means you can pick up additional background stories and details about the place.

After roughly two and a half hours on the road, we arrived in Boye and parked in a nearby residential area. There we met Andrea and her companion, and just a few minutes later we entered the property.

We quickly found an open door and stepped inside the villa. It became obvious almost immediately that we weren’t alone. At least two other groups were already inside, wandering around and taking photos.

So even early in the morning, the place was surprisingly busy. We decided to move quickly, knowing that the infamous “urbex bus” could arrive at any moment.

The villa itself absolutely blew me away. Even the large entrance gate to the property had a thatched roof. There was a garage with a car lift, high-end furniture throughout the building, partly gold-plated fittings, fabric-covered walls, and parquet floors that must once have shone like a mirror. The swimming pool was designed like a jungle grotto — an almost surreal touch of luxury.

Sadly, vandals had already done significant damage. Valuable items had been stolen, and the walls were covered with poorly executed graffiti.

While we were taking our photos, even more people arrived and started roaming through the house. We hurried even more, and when we heard someone flying a drone over the property, we decided it was time to leave. At that point, there were around 20 other people inside the building — not all of them behaving responsibly. There was shouting, smoking, and littering, all things we deliberately avoid on our tours. For us, respect for these places is essential.

With so much illegal activity in a high-end residential neighborhood, there was also a real risk of neighbors calling the police — something that had reportedly happened there more than once.

So we left the site, leaving the “amateurs” and “idiots” behind, and headed off to our next location.

Looking back, it’s a shame that the place was so crowded that we couldn’t explore it in peace. But I’m still glad we went. Just a year and a half later, the villa was completely demolished.

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

Tour Report: Eye Clinic N. [Revisit]

We visited a total of three places on our short tour three weeks before our summer vacation in 2020. After visiting the disused railway line and the hotel ruins, we paid a visit to a former eye clinic. We had already visited it once in 2016, and since the building was on the way, we wanted to get an impression of the location, because two years after our first visit, the building and the surrounding park were sold to a new owner.

The parking lot was the same as it had been a few years earlier, so the walk to the location was correspondingly short.

To make a long story short, nothing had changed since our visit four years earlier. There was no evidence of any work—or at least safety measures—being carried out on the building. Only the vegetation in the front area of the park seemed to have been cleared some time ago, with the exception of the trees.

The house itself was overgrown with a thick layer of ivy, and small trees and bushes grew on the balconies and window sills.

As we crept around the house, we could see that some of the ceilings and floors inside had collapsed—the danger of the building collapsing, which was already evident in 2016, had worsened in recent years. Therefore, we decided not to look inside the house again—apart from the decay, there were hardly any worthwhile motifs even at that time.

So we settled for a quick tour around the house and a few photos from the outside—which turned out really atmospheric thanks to the vegetation.

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Tour Report: Sanatorium "Grand Duchess"

After we'd explored the abandoned recreation home that we'd found by accident, we moved on to the location that we'd originally planned - an abandoned sanatorium. Built more than 120 yeas ago, the place promised to be an exciting explore in both historical and architectural aspects.

It was only a few minutes drive from the recreation home which - as far as I know - had been a part of the sanatorium after World War II. Of course, there were no regular parking spots, so we had to find us a place somewhere between the cars of the local residents. We found one a bit down the street, which was good because standing in front of an abandoned place with a license plate from a city about 600 kilometers away is not the best thing to do if you want to keep a low profile.

We walked a bit up the hill to get to the old sanatorium which really was a sight for sore eyes. It was a beautiful day - mostly sunny and partly cloudy, which always makes for a nice atmosphere. There was no wind, so we could hear the crickets in the grass as we started looking for a way in. We walked around the building following one of the many trails through the vegetation surrounding the building. It only took us a few minutes to find an entrance. This entrance seemed to be frequently closed with OSB plates and then opened again by someone else. Upon entering, we saw a hand-written note - possibly put there by the owner or some sort of caretaker. The note said something along the lines of "If you feel that you have to enter this place, at least don't leave your trash and don't spray things on the walls!".

We started exploring the building, and we found that a lot of people obviously didn't follow the note - there was a lot of graffiti and a lot of leftovers from various parties that happened in the place. It was kind of disappointing, since in the absence of any furniture or original decoration, the architecture - the staircases, windows and long hallways - were the only thing (next to the outside) that made this location beautiful. There were a lot of graffiti, however. And I'm not talking about beautiful, artistic graffiti, but only stupid slogans, tags or penises...as I said - it was a bit disappointing.

We walked through the entire place, and I did take a couple of photos, but not as many as I usually would have in a location this size.

After about an hour and a half, we went back to the car, drove back to the hotel, went shopping for groceries and started looking for a restaurant for dinner.

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

Tour Report: Recreation Home "Castle"

As we drove through the wilderness of Eastern Germany on the way to an abandoned sanatorium during our summer vacation in 2018, we came across this former recreation home sitting on the slope of a densely forested mountain.

Finding a place to park, however, proved a bit difficult on this one. The place is situated on a heavily frequented county road and only has a small access road going up the hill. Only the entrance to this road was wide enough for us to park and still leave enough room for possible forest workers that do tend to show up once in a while to cut down trees and who might get mad if they find their access blocked.

So we parked as close to the main road as we could to leave as much room as possible, which meant that the passing cars were speeding right by us with only a few centimeters in between. Not a nice feeling. we hurried up to get our gear together and walked up the small, leaf-covered road until we reached the old castle-style building.

The foundations of the place were made of large stones, so it even more looked like a castle, but we saw a lot of trash lying around, and many of the windows were walled up tightly, which didn't give much hope for the rest of this explore. As we reached the entrance, we found it open - but it obviously was being walled up over and over, only to be opened again by vandals or teenagers (the latter supported by our finding lots of empty liquor bottles, beer cans and disposable barbecue grills).

We entered through the hole in the wall that once was the main door and found the place inside just as trashed as the outside. The building was pretty much gutted. Except for the architecture, the arched windows and some old wooden appliances, nothing showed the former glory of this once popular recreation home. A fire has destroyed the staircase, so there was no way to get to the upper floors, and we left after taking only a few photos to document the place.

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

Tour Report: Doctor's Villa "Sparrow"

 After exploring two underground air-raid shelters from World War II, we decided to explore something above ground and enjoy the weather. We decided to check out the premises of an old lung clinic that also happens to have a very large bunker.

After a short ride, we arrived at the place. Our friend Toeppi called a guy he knew from a movie shoot that took place there a few years before to see if we could get the chance for a legal visit, but there was no chance, so we checked out the area for ourselves.

The place was huge; some buildings seemed to still be in operation, and everything else was tightly locked, so after looking around enough, we decided to head back to the car. On the way, we spotted an old house between the trees. It must have been the villa of the clinic's medical director. In earlier years, it was common that the medical director had a villa on the premises of the clinic - sometimes equipped with a private practice. This house looked "palatial" enough to be the director's villa - and our research later on confirmed our assumption.

We just had to look around for a few minutes to find a large hole in the fence, and after another couple of minutes, we had found a way into the villa.

It was kind of disappointing; the place had been thoroughly vandalized, and there was nothing left that could point to the purpose of the place. We only took a few photos before we left again. There just wasn't a lot to see - but we had one more location on our list that was going to compensate us for this little disappointment, so stay tuned...

To check out the history of the place, click the button below.

Tour Report: Sanatorium F.

This abandoned sanatorium in the mountains of Germany was the first spot my wife and I explored on our summer vacation tour in 2017. We had left home relatively early to be able to fit in a short exploration before going grocery shopping and then drive up the mountain, so to speak, to the "Schlittenhunde Erlebniscamp" (Sled Dog Camp) where we were going to visit good friends and spend the first two nights of our vacation.

Since there was so little information about this sanatorium, we didn't really know what to expect. The usual questions arose: Was there going to be security? How tightly has it been sealed? Maybe it has been demolished? And what about the nighbors?

We found a public parking lot a bit down the road that looked inconspicuous enough - after all, this is a tourist area with lots of hiking trails, so two people with backpacks shouldn't look too suspicious. For added entertainment, rain had started just as we had arrived. On the good side, this led to almost no one except us walking around next to the road, and we could slip into the overgrown path without being seen.

There was no fence, the doors were open, and there was no sign of a security service patrolling the area. Access was really easy due to the open doors, and we started our exploration in the basement and worked our way up to the higher floors. After finishing the main building, we checked out the smaller adjacent building, before we walked back to the car to check out another place before heading to the grocery store.

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