The Buckner Building is 273,660 square feet of dark, scary, flooded hallways. It used to house the entire town of Whittier, which was established in World War 2 as a secret military base. It had to be abandoned after suffering structural damage in the 1964 earthquake. So it's been abandoned for a long time but everyone who goes to Whittier sees it.
The building isn't fenced off or secured, so there isn't much to stop someone from entering, other than the frightening, filthy nature of what's inside. Maree decided to go explore it this summer with a friend one weekend. She came back with enough interesting pictures and stories that i decided i needed to check it out myself. So a few days later, during a rainy day, i decided to drive down and see what i could find, stepping slowly through half of the flooded floors, trying to avoid puncturing the rubber fishing waders i was wearing to keep my feet dry.
The building is huge. Six stories are above ground, with at least two below ground levels, from what i hear. Every single window has been broken, and since Whittier is a rainforest, every floor is flooded under a few inches of water. All non metal/rock materials have decayed into a nasty rust colored type of mud/powder that seems to collect more on the lower levels. Even the concrete is dissolving away and being redeposited as calcite cave formations.
This room is turning into a rookery. Notice the noose at the top of the picture. Neither of us noticed on our individual visits until we saw the photo. Failure to pay attention to your surroundings is undeniable proof of super natural activity.
The upper levels are not too scary, largely empty and sort of rinsed clean, relative to the rest of the floors. They have many very small rooms. It's hard to tell if the rooms were offices or dorm rooms. As you go down lower though, things start to get creepy and dark. These pictures that i took are from floors three through six. I was taking pictures in natural light and had no flashlight.
This is a scary open area in the central part of the building.
The building is divided into three sections that are not connected. Maybe they are expansion joints? I don't know what they are, but crossing from one section to the next involves stepping over an 10 inch gap in the floor. At these gaps you can see all the way down or up, left or right. At those points water is sometimes cascading down from floor to floor. The sound of water is everywhere, with occasional waterfalls pouring out of the ceiling.
The farther down you go the creepier and darker things become.I ended up being in the place for nearly three hours before i got tired and hungry. Since i had no flashlight i was unable to visit the dark floors. I walked a little ways into the second floor, into an abandoned nightclub and restaurant. I had a video camera with nightvision but it didn't work well enough to tell what i was stepping on and what to avoid with my head at the same time.
At this point things began to look just like something from the Silent Hill games. I would never want to come here at night.
Nature is taking control. There was even a small tree or two in a couple of rooms.Lower down, hidden in the dark, are a bowling alley, theater, even a prison. We saw some pictures somewhere of the prison in the basement, flooded under a foot or two of nasty water with rusty prison bars and open cages everywhere. It looked nuts. They say in winter bears will sometimes go to the basement to hibernate.
One of the wings that runs perpendicular to the length of the building. The second and first floors are mostly boarded up at the windows, and the first floor is additionally hidden behind a thick growth of trees and bushes.
Calcified gravel is fending off weird algae.Below are some of the pictures Maree took of the lower levels where i couldn't go. She has this amazing feature on her camera called a flash. It's sad, but i've never bought a flash because i hate them.
A calcite column and stalactites in one of the dark lower floors. Here they have solidified an open door!
A great texture on a frightening elevator door.
A large hallway covered in something undefinable stretches into darkness. This is just like the type of place where you'd have to fight the first boss in a survival horror game.
A few rows of seating in the theater.
The floor looks particularly disgusting in the theater. Some poor soul wandered in on a bike and was surely devoured by demons.
