Germany The White Morgue

Its been a fascination and somewhat an attraction for me to find the morgue in the many abandoned hospitals I have visited over the last few years, it seems like a huge pull for me to go on a search for them, knowing that all hospitals have one, be it a small one or a big one, it becomes almost like a pilgrimage to find them, the darkest spot of the site, for me centralised around this one cold table that has had hundreds of corpses resting on it. I think the fascination is that in the Western world mortuaries are hidden out of sight and so to actually see one for real, is unreal. I ask myself if I can believe what I am seeing, the table where so many of the dead have lay and now existing in a limbo of eternity until removed from the world entirely. 

So many questions about what exactly happens on such a table flying through my mind and thinking of what it would be like to work in such a place. I had seen a picture of this morgue in Germany and knew I had to pay it a visit. We made a speedy entry before the crack of dawn as we had been told there would be security on the site, entry wasn’t how we were told and for a while we walked around the building that was supposed to hold the morgue with no signs of entry, we had almost given up and it took us a while to find an alternative, but with our detective heads on we found a way. 

The hospital itself was built in 1929 and was pretty un interesting for photographing, many white walls and empty, but it was our mission simply to find this table and when we did and first entered the tiny room, I was amazing at how calm I felt. I had been to various mortuaries before, the tables were always different, some made of metal, some of wood and many of stone, this was pure white one I’d seen and with the white walls surrounding it, it felt pure and serene. It was hard to imagine a body on that table, unclean, with blood dripping all over the place onto the cold white floor. But stemming from an incident in my childhood involving an excited dog, a dead rabbit in its mouth and its blood and guts on snow and all over me, I think the contrast of red and white remains so poignant in my mind of deathly cold and the shadowy passing of life, the contrast of red against white seemingly so powerful for my existence. I didn’t want to leave this calm place, but the guys were eager to get to the next place so we moved on, but it will remain as one of those chilling unexpected and unique visits that make my travels worthwhile.