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| A shelf in the Nightmare Lab at Seoul National University's closed Suwon agricultural campus contains dozens of preserved specimens in jars, seen in September 2013. / Courtesy of Ron Bandun |
By Ron Bandun
Urban explorers are sometimes criticized for hiding, or even "hoarding" the sites we visit. But there are legit reasons for withholding information from the internet. We protect sites by obscuring place names, embargoing publication of pictures until a later date, even controlling who knows offline. Now that the Nightmare Lab is gone with only a trace of wallpaper remaining on concrete, I can tell this story.
Our story begins with a longtime collaborator, photographer and self-publisher Joseph Jung. He'd lived in Taean when it was hit by the 2007 oil spill, and that coupled with an aging population led to myriad school closures in the area. This developed in him an interest in visiting abandoned schools and photographing them. He'd told me he wanted to publish a book after he'd visited 50.
Later, he found the Seoul National University agricultural campus in Suwon, closed around 2004. In September 2013 he invited me and a couple other experienced explorers along to check it out. What we found was a campus with half of the buildings still active, the other half closed, but many of them built with this magnificent old architecture. We found an open window in one building and slipped in.
Inside, we ran into a Korean photography crew that seemed to know what they were doing. In one room I found a couple jars stuffed with preserved fish, and at the time that seemed like a pretty significant discovery. The rest of the building was stripped down to concrete. Except one room.
On the second floor, we entered one room with the same old aging wallpaper still clinging to the concrete, with shelves standing against the walls. Maybe workers had been afraid to clean this one room out, because the shelves were lined with dozens of jars of animal specimens. We saw mammals and lizards and octopi. One jar showed eleven specimens representing developmental stages of a frog.
Next to it was a brain in a jar: it was a tall jar, maybe 50 centimeters in height, with the brain floating at the top. Sticking out from the front were two eyeballs, and underneath was a long spinal cord with nerve tendrils like dozens of centipede legs.
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| A cat's brain and nervous system is preserved in a jar at the Nightmare Lab, an abandoned room in the former agricultural campus of Seoul National University in Suwon, seen in September 2013. / Courtesy of Ron Bandun |
Immediately after visiting the nightmare lab, we agreed to protect its location, taking the measure to not even name the city it was found in.
A month later, I showed my pictures of the jars to a couple friends I was planning to invite. One remarked "Why did you not take those home with you?" I changed topics and put the camera away, quietly rescinding the invitation that was on the tip of my tongue.
I returned to the Nightmare Lab several times over the years, as it's always a good excuse to visit Suwon. Sometimes security stopped us and turned us back, and sometimes the building was tightly sealed, but other times we could find an unlocked or broken window and enter. Never did we break any of the windows to force our way in, though if someone else had before us, we might as well take advantage.
We discovered other locations, such as Korea's supposed first arboretum dating to 1907, and another building we called the Utopia Building, which had images on the walls showing proposed utopian communities from who knows how long ago. In one building we found a Korean typewriter that had a totally different key configuration to the modern bilingual keyboards we use today. Security in some parts of campus was strict, and myself and other friends on a few occasions had to run or hide from security.
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| A typewriter keyboard has an interesting configuration different from modern keyboards, seen in the former agricultural campus of Seoul National University in Suwon, seen in February 2015. / Courtesy of Ron Bandun |
On May 13, I returned to find things very different. The whole campus is being turned into various community sites, such as Gyeonggi Youth Culture Creation Center and Gyeonggi Province Upcycling Plaza, and suddenly the whole campus had tons of visitors, especially young children. The Nightmare Lab building was gutted, removing everything but the concrete structure. No doors or windows left to stop us. Wandering around, I thought the Nightmare Lab was gone too, but then I rounded one corner and saw that familiar wallpaper still plastered to one surface, marking where it once was.
With the jars removed, to who knows where, our embargo is lifted and we can finally talk about what we found in the Nightmare Lab.
Ron Bandun is a self-described "anarchaeologist" and cat lover.
