Berlin attracts urban explorers looking to find abandoned locations and travel through the Cold War past with its desolate bunkers, abandoned barracks, and eerie hospital ruins.
Ciaran Fahey, a veteran of the “Urbex” series, said, “I’ve never seen so many people,” when visiting a decrepit, graffiti-covered former children’s hospital in what was formerly communist East Berlin.
Two dozen thrill-seeking tourists, including Germans, Russians, and Latvians, cautiously navigated the crumbling, half burned, and slightly unsettling complex while dodging shattered glass, bricks, and mounds of debris.
It was closed in 1991 and is now periodically utilised by homeless people and partying youngsters due to the hundreds of murals that decorate its gloomy old patient wards and cobwebbed hallways, earning it the moniker “zombie hospital.”
Like other “lost locations,” it is potentially hazardous and prohibited, therefore anyone who enters under a chain link fence while keeping a wary look out for law enforcement is breaking the law.
Eva Henkel, a city official in Berlin, stated that because tourists enter illegally and at their own risk, police have a negative opinion of such urban excursions.
If you had any sense at all, you wouldn’t enter, she said.
This is just as alluring to Urbexers as a travel guide, and the hospital is definitely on their list of places to see in Berlin.
