5 Creepy Abandoned Rooms Found Hiding in Plain Sight

5 A Parisian Apartment, Locked Away for 70 Years

Did any of you have parents who left your bedroom untouched after you moved out? When you went back to visit a year or two later, did you feel like you were stepping into a time machine, with all of your old magazines and shit laying around? OK, now imagine how the family of a deceased Frenchwoman felt seeing an apartment of hers that had been left untouched for 70 years:

How is that even possible? We're talking about an apartment in Paris. Did nobody ever drop by or, you know, break in? How could this apartment wind up frozen in time like this?

Well, imagine it's 1940 and the Nazis are coming. Not "There's a menacing wartime chill in the air and everyone wonders what Hitler's up to," but "Oh shit, the Nazis are coming, like, right now!" If you're like one Ms. de Florian, you're getting the hell out of there. She packed her necessities, locked the door of her Paris flat, headed for the South of France, and never came back.

Now, here's where things got interesting. Most of us would have eventually rented a U-Haul to come back for our stuff, even if our stuff was crappy. A handful of people might have given up on the apartment altogether. Not de Florian. She just kept paying the rent on her locked apartment ... for seven damn decades. While she was going to the Cannes Film Festival or sunbathing in the nude or doing whatever it is that people do in the South of France, de Florian's Paris apartment turned into a monument to dust and indifference. It wasn't until she died at age 91 and her heirs tried to sort out her finances that anyone remembered that the apartment was even there.

The manager of the estate found that everything was exactly as de Florian had left it, and this wasn't some run-of-the-mill Parisian studio apartment, either. De Florian was a wealthy collector, but a weird one, as evidenced by her Mickey Mouse toy and stuffed ostrich.

Among the dusty books and rodent memorabilia were tons of framed paintings, including this portrait of a buxom lady barely keeping her pink nightgown on:

It wasn't just the near-nip-slip that got one appraiser's attention. This painting looked like it was made by a famous Italian portrait artist named Giovanni Boldini, except no one had ever seen this painting before, so they couldn't be sure he made it. Further snooping revealed a love note from the (married) artist. It turns out the subject of the painting was Marthe de Florian, the grandmother of the apartment's tenant. And Marthe was hot stuff -- she counted French prime minister Georges Clemenceau among her admirers.

So imagine learning that your grandmother left you a 70-year-old museum of an apartment and that your great-great grandmother was scandalously horny. You probably wouldn't mind, since the painting of your great-grandma would later sell for 2.1 million euros.

4 A Boarded-Up Mom-and-Pop Store, With Merchandise Still on the Shelves

Before you could buy your sodas and 5-Hour Energy bottles from the grocery store or gas station, people got that sort of thing from the general store or, as they were called in Britain, the corner shop. Corner shops provided everything from medicine to candy to cuts of meat, all sold as Britishly as possible.

In 2008, an English developer was renovating a boarded-up building when he made the discovery of a lifetime. An entire store had been abandoned 40 years before -- and everything was exactly where the previous owner had left it. It looked like the candy shop from the beginning of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, minus the candy and happy children.

Among the treasures discovered by the developer were dulcet cream, kidney pills, and a 1971 magazine with the misleading title of Titbits.

Research revealed that the shop had been run by a series of couples from 1890 until it closed in the 1970s, but the weird part is that whoever ran it didn't seem to restock the shelves for the decades the store was open.

There were medicine bottles from the 1930s, a magazine describing Princess Elizabeth's 1938 tour of Australia, lozenge tins, and dated records. Just whatever the owners felt like shoving on the shelves, apparently. Researchers even found an invoice from 1927. But locals must not have minded, because they fondly remember coming over for ice cream and cigarettes. Hopefully they weren't eating 30-year-old ice cream.

Like many of us, Archie Graham-Palmer grew up in a large manor home.

Or a haunted abandoned insane asylum, we can't tell from the picture. Graham-Palmer's family has owned the cottage for over 165 years, with each generation dumping their share of crap in the old basement. It wasn't until Archie took over the estate that anyone had the guts to poke around in what was probably regarded as the house's no-no zone. Imagine his surprise when he found a whole kitchen under all the dead bodies.

If you're thinking, "Hey, this looks just like the servant kitchen in Downton Abbey!" well, get in line, because that's exactly what everyone else thought, too. Especially since everything from the pots and pans to the pig spit above the stove were just sitting there, ready to use.

There was even an extra big and sturdy table for the downstairs servants to eat and judge each other over.

The downstairs kitchen even had bells so the higher-ups could summon their servants for back rubbing and mocking.

Among the discoveries were a cookbook from 1911, complete with recipes that required an "army of cooks" to prepare them, and antique fire extinguishers, presumably the only sort of health insurance offered at the time.

2 A Collapsed World War I Bunker

When you hear "trench warfare," you picture either soldiers lying down face first in muddy ditches or khaki coats doing battle, but it's probably that first one. So when we talk about somebody accidentally stumbling across an old trench full of dead bodies from World War I, you'd probably just picture a bunch of bones in a ditch. But a lot of these trenches were actually the equivalent of tiny unfinished basements, which makes it that much weirder that one could go completely undiscovered for 90 years.

Yet in 2010, French engineers looking to build a road discovered a German trench from 1918. In addition to housing the remains of 21 German soldiers who were killed by French shells, archaeologists discovered walls, floors, and a system for heating. At almost 400 feet long, the trench was more of a dirt hotel than a last-second hole in the ground. These guys had electricity and phone lines back when the rest of the world was still using telegrams and smoke signals. Oh, and beds. These guys had beds.

Workers also found a wine bottle, a mustard bottle, wallets, glasses, and rosary beads. They also found a French shell threaded on a rosary chain -- a macabre souvenir of life in the bunker. They also found the remains of a goat, which was most likely used for fresh milk underground. We hope.

Now, if these were French soldiers or American soldiers or, hell, Samoans, everyone would be clamoring for DNA testing to claim their long-lost granddad Malietoa. Not Germans. After 70 years of stuffing any nationalistic pride they had left into their delicious sausages, there was no way anyone was going to want to resurrect the bones of wars past.

1 A Cold War Bomb Shelter Found in a High School

One day at a high school in Auburn, California, somebody wondered what was behind the tiny little locked screen door in the weight room that nobody ever, ever used:

And sitting behind it like an awful, paranoid Narnia was a long-forgotten room intended to survive Armageddon:

Back when the USSR and USA were in the middle of their nuclear staring contest, the civil defense department of the government sanctioned and funded bomb shelters all over the country. And officials at this high school went all-out for theirs -- they stocked the secret room with water, medicine, food, toilet paper, and LOTS of bottles of diarrhea medicine. Nuclear war was a huge diarrhea instigator, apparently.

Before the world was drinking bottled water, bomb shelter preppers were bagging water for doomsday. These bags of water are as clear as a summer sky. You could drink them now, if you wanted. And the decades-old food was likely more nutritious than whatever was being served in the cafeteria.

Among the civil-defense-issued goodies were hard biscuits, bandages, toilet liners, plastic cups, and tongue depressors, just in case they got bored and wanted to make crafts.

Well, shit, might as well seal it back up for when the zombies come.

Chris Sansone is a New York City-based writer and television production freelancer. Check out his website at www.clichedcoincidence.com or email him at sansone.cracked@gmail.com.

For more abandoned places we want to stay far away from, check out The 6 Most Mind-Blowing Modern Ghost Towns and 6 Abandoned Places That Will Make Awesome Supervillain Lairs.

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