My family had a cabin in southern York County along the Susquehanna and I roamed the woods and farm fields for miles in all directions from age 8 to 16.
In those roaming I found three abandoned farmhouses, whose long dirt drives hadn’t been used in years and were impassibly overgrown. Two were not visibly from any dirt country road and they all were well built, still sound and in decent condition, if musty inside.
Musty, and creepy awesome to explore as a bold youngster. All three had been abandoned with everything still inside. Everything; clothes, furniture, Mason jars of home canned goods in the pantry, cups and plates in the cupboard, chairs around the kitchen table. Cue creepy music.
There was a Victrola in one with bunches of 78 records. One bedroom dresser drawer in another had stacks of 1940’s or 50’s baseball cards (had I only known).
The barns and outbuildings were equally fascinating. On the third floor attic of a barn, set inside double doors and a pulley wheel, a one-horse sleigh. A massive two-man bucksaw in another barn. Old wagons and implements, a cast iron corn shucker with flywheel, and pails and chains and objects unknown.
At least two of those old farmhouses were layer renovated in the ‘80’s or 90’s, but they were first abandoned in the 40’s and 50’s and sat that way for decades. It is a lingering mystery to me why families would abandon everything, even their clothes, and just disappear.
That part kinda freaked me out as a kid, wandering around inside a ghost house (not enough to not keep exploring), and to this day I wonder WTF happened. Still wish I had pocketed those baseball cards, but they were just old paper to me. And even back then I wanted that bucksaw.
We never took much from those abandoned farm houses. One thing I took and kept for years was a Civil War era letter, dated 1863, written in a weird paper-saving method; script in “portrait-mode”, with additional script in “landscape” atop that, both sides of a single piece of paper. It was overlapped hard to read, but decipherable; eventually given to a friend with an interest in that era.
Confession, we did take some of the 78’s outside and Annie Oakley them. Boys will be boys.
Confession #2, we eventually set the kitchen table in one farmhouse with plates, cups and cutlery, and mason jar preserves from the pantry. It was either an offering to the ghosts, or something to really spook the next visitors.