I went downtown with S last night, and I parked my car in the ‘spooky’ car garage. This is some sort of massive parking lot / building that they are constructing in the center of downtown. Amusingly enough its being built on the corner that was once dubbed ‘the most haunted street’ in Orlando. Anyways, they opened up the garage long before they have actually finished building the place. As a result it’s a huge building of raw concrete blocks with building material scattered all over the place. Every time I go there, despite the number of cars, I hardly ever see another person.
A few random pics follows:
The world’s oldest, slowest kid.
Close-up of my face simply because it’s priceless.
S got impatient waiting for the elevator, so we took the stairs down. One flight down I noticed a set of wood doors, one of which was slightly adjar. I decided to sneak in and investigate. To my delight I found a corridor packed with massive bricks of foam. It was pretty strange, and gave the place an odd fun-house quality to it. I’m sure we weren’t supposed to be in there, but it’s not my fault they left the door unlocked.
The walls! they are closing in!
S hold’s them at bay.
Just beyond the foam the corridor opened up to a massive un finished room. It was grand in its sheer size, and eerie in its emptiness and unfinished-ness. I wanted to explore, but I decided that running around in there was pushing my luck.
Either the room is shrinking or I am growing! Notice the strange gnome door.
Good for Kesha.
When I got home around 2 in the morning, I saw an odd-eyed cat spying on me from my roof. Actually he yowled at me to let me know he was spying on me. He had been out lurking about in the moonlight. That’s what cats do. I like how his different colored eyes illuminate in different colors in the camera’s flash. That’s the moon behind him. The moon never looks as big as it did on E.T.
2026 Update
Setting the dial for February 2008, where the spookiest thing downtown is an unfinished parking garage and a yowling cat.
Oh, Ed. 2008 was a beautiful fool's era: we still treated a parking garage under construction as a free haunted-house adventure, not a liability lawyer's wet dream. You documented your sneaking-around with a point-and-shoot camera and then uploaded it to a blog, slow and clunky and wonderfully pointless. Now that same story would be a live-streamed vertical video, geotagged, with comments asking why you didn't sell the footage to a paranormal app. The unfinished building itself would never be this accessible today—there'd be a security app, a QR code to report suspicious foam, maybe a drone buzzing overhead asking you to scan its face. And that cat? Odd-eyed cats get their own tiny social media empire now; you'd be an unpaid intern to your own roof gremlin. Everything got faster, sharper, and infinitely more surveilled. You had raw concrete, foam bricks, and a yowling familiar. We have notifications. I know which one I'd summon, but modern me has complaints to file.
“2008 Ed, you found a mysterious half-open door in an unfinished garage packed with giant foam bricks and thought, “I’m sure we weren’t supposed to be in there”—what exactly did you think was going to happen when that door closed behind you?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2008 Ed: So, Beelzebubba, you want to know what I thought would happen if that door shut behind me. Honestly? I figured I'd be trapped in a giant foam brick coffin and they'd find my skeleton months later, wedged between two slabs of packing material, probably still holding my Aiptek camera. I mean, that garage is spooky enough on its own, being built on the most haunted street in Orlando and all, so my imagination didn't need much help. I kept thinking either a ghost would flick the lights off, or a security guard would materialize out of nowhere and yell at me, and I'd have to explain that I was just looking for the elevator. Running around in that unfinished room felt like pushing my luck, but the foam corridor had that fun-house thing going for it, so I half-expected a clown to jump out. Anyway, I made it home, and the odd-eyed cat on the roof gave me more of a welcome than any ghost did. Take that, spooky garage.
