A Forgotten Life

You can tell a lot about a person based on what they throw out or leave behind. Out on Route 11 past Natural Bridge is an abandoned house, motel, and restaurant complex. While the restaurant is the most dilapidated of the three there are still plates, broken furniture, and various cutlery strewn about the crumbling cinder-block structure. Up the hill is the motel, a one level Norman-Bates looking building of roughly 20 rooms then a separate cottage for what I assumed would be the manager and check in/check out. While the floors are now caving in, each room still seems to have a bed (with the bedding on it) and various hotel furniture such as a night stand- though the rooms seem to be ransacked and abused. Some rooms have old childrens toys and clothes in them; other rooms have pentagrams and satanist markings spray-painted on the walls. While these two structures are more eerie than anything, the house is what really bothers me. A two story brick house, with black shutters falling off, and a dilapidated porch swing, the previous owners seem to have simply picked up and left one day. The kitchen, featuring a white 1980s refrigerator and yellowed linoleum floor still has a calendar dating to 2007 on the cabinet and glasses in the cupboard. More disturbing is the food left in the fridge: a jar of pickles, a casserole dish with something petrified in it, old bottles of soda. Other rooms still have papers in desk drawers, a turned over coffee table with magazines helter skelter on the ground. The house always leaves me with a feeling of emptiness, yet when I'm there I always have the feeling that I am not alone (I visit with a large group of people generally, but get a strange sixth sense). It's an odd juxtaposition to see wallpaper peeling off the walls next to old furniture and clothing. As I combed through the house one day I started noticing really personal items: a child's (John W. Wells) birth certificates, photo albums of a boy playing baseball in the 1970s, old newspaper clippings, and even a girl's journal. Simply by going through these things I have learned who John Wells is, what his family was like, that he played baseball, that his sister had bulimia and so on. I've never really liked the feeling I've gotten from the house but what is more bothersome is why such personal items have been left behind. I've never been able to come up with a reason but it is something that has bothered me since the first time I ever visited the house. I feel like I know this person simply through the things that his family (or him for that matter) have left behind, but why?