We all know Athens is an evil, moraless Sodom & Gomorrah type place, but perhaps there's a reason beyond the non-stop partying. After this video came out, OU closed down the top floor of Wilson Hall.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWgYLyfXXMI&mode=related&search=

 

This is a trailer for "Athens Asylum", a documentary produced at OU.

Since the devil already lives in Athens, nothing happened other than a lot of pot smoking.

 

C-Dawg, are you the devil?

Boy, I sure wish I could pledge your fraternity!

 

Boy, I sure wish I could pledge your fraternity!

 

All you have to do is pledge your soul. Money, success and pleasure will be yours. For a while.

C-Dawg Njaim- Dude, take this bit of advice from someone who sputtered at a big party school. Get out and transfer to a small school!

Athens, OH - 13th Most Haunted Place on Earth.

Athens, OH - 1st Most Stoned, Drunk, and Bored Place on Earth.

 

Anybody else see a connection?

Cheyah...freshman hazing is totally awesome, dude!

 

:banger:  :drunk:

After I have my fun, I take them back to the Ridges and show them ways to sneak into the courtyard of the main asylum.

 

And is it at this point that you just start making out with them?

Lord, all we need to do is add an inbred hillbilly, a banjo and a canoe and we will have stepped into Deliverance!

Athens, OH - 13th Most Haunted Place on Earth.

Athens, OH - 1st Most Stoned, Drunk, and Bored Place on Earth.

 

Anybody else see a connection?

Good point!  :-)

Lord, all we need to do is add an inbred hillbilly, a banjo and a canoe and we will have stepped into Deliverance!

 

Next: haunted cow-tipping.

Lord, all we need to do is add an inbred hillbilly, a banjo and a canoe and we will have stepped into Deliverance!

 

Next: haunted cow-tipping.

 

...while hooking up with drunk party sluts...

 

Lord, all we need to do is add an inbred hillbilly, a banjo and a canoe and we will have stepped into Deliverance!

 

Next: haunted cow-tipping.

 

...while hooking up with drunk party sluts...

 

 

Exactly: "cow-tipping."

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Come on David, that's a

 

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The thing about the Lunatic Asylum complex is that much of it is in use by the university, yet people continue to think it's impossible to get in.  The thing is once you're in, you're pretty much in because by law they have to keep a lot of the doors open within the building.  They call the big building Linn Hall, and the center part is the Kennedy Museum. 

 

I wish on that video they had done just one overview of how big the asylum is, this photo is of Bob Taft in his bullet-proof limo buzzing past the eastern side of the building.  Remember, there's a whole other side this big, and a lot of additions in the back:

 

Some of the east side of the building has been overtaken by the OU art department, which is pretty frightening:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

^ There are still parts that are "off-limits" but are not hard to get in at all. Found a few unlocked doors, but a lot of the place is just boring on the inside. Cleaned out. Oh, and that "blood spot" is still there.

Have any of you ever been up there before the university starting using The Ridges?

 

Come on David, that's a

 

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I have never heard of alternative forms of cow-tipping until now.

Some of the east side of the building has been overtaken by the OU art department, which is pretty frightening:

 

So far, these images are the first thing in this thread that has sent me running off screaming.

Don't worry, I have an endless supply of frightening art school imagery.  Here's some more from The Ridges, from when somebody had the bright idea to stage a "prom":

 

 

 

 

 

 

On this one you can see the tile leftover from one of the surgery rooms in the building.  And at bottom right would be my main home-skillet, former and future singer in our roots-metal outfit Beerwolf (yes, we predated the recent surge of "wolf" bands by several years), who has unfortunately relocated to Montana with his young bride (not pictured). 

 

 

And if you leave the shutter of your camera open for a second (only in Athens), it opens a window into the spirit world:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

His ghost still haunts the house today and was accused of sexually assualting a sorority girl in the 70's.

 

A ghost... was accused of sexually assaulting a sorority girl... ??? 

^More than likely a frat guy wearing a sheet with three holes.

I remembered there was a visiting professor who took some phony ghost photographs in the lunatic asylum but her personal website has disappeared:

 

 

And here is a link to more in the series:

 

http://www.lennonweinberg.com/artists/larson/larson_past/larson_2005/larson_2005_1.html

 

 

But first here is some cut-and-pasted artist gobbley-gook:

 

Laura Larson (b. 1965) presents works from three related series of photographs in her second exhibition at Lennon, Weinberg. She is working with images and ideas associated with the traditions of late 19th and early 20th century spirit photography in ways that further her ongoing investigation of places and their occupants. Her previous body of work recorded the residue of occupancy left behind by departed hotel guests, clues to lives and identities that cannot be deciphered. In these new works, Larson offers a different sort of enigma.

 

The color photographs of the series Apparition depict deep forests in which phantoms hover. The Ectoplasm photographs are black and white, printed small, in which Larson has restaged historic pictures of spirit mediums extruding mysterious substances from their bodies. The Asylum photographs of apparently paranormal phenomena were made in the women's dormitories of the Athens Mental Health Center, an abandoned and decrepit asylum central to the town's reputation as the most haunted place in Ohio.

 

Whether frauds or true believers, spirit mediums such as Eva C and Mrs. Henderson used their bodies as vehicles of revelation and truth, and photographs as their proof. At the time, the medium of photography and advances in science were revealing things previously unseen to a naive yet skeptical public. To this day, innumerable photographs of unexplained phenomena are studied and catalogued as incontrovertible evidence of the existence of spirits, even as it is taken for granted that photographs can be constructed out of whole cloth. As Laura Larson describes:

 

"The assumption of objectivity that continues to haunt photography  the desire to trust our eyes  is a central concern of these projects. My photographs chart the complex relationship between belief, vision and technology. They are produced using a 4 x 5 view camera and cheap effects and materials, employing the methods of their historical counterparts. While digital technology gives the artist tools to seamlessly create documents such as these, it doesn't have the evidentiary weight that analog images command. With their low-tech staging, the images draw upon the performative aspects of analog technology. It's impossible to ignore the strain of artifice in spirit photography. The seams are all there: magazine cutouts doubling as apparitions, cheesecloth masquerading as ectoplasm. The tension between the real and the fake becomes irrelevant since the images unconditionally require a suspension of disbelief.  It is the simultaneous willingness to believe and the willfulness of that belief that captivates me."