My Fascination with Abandoned Places and Ruins

Suddenly, this week I'm on a castle kick. I'm looking at pictures of castle ruins and trying to find time to put some on my website at http://www.rhettaakamatsu.com. Last week it was ghost towns. I have to find time to put some of those on there, too. I've got Abandoned Places on Ghosttocoast.us, where I have pictures of abandoned mental hospitals.

If I could travel, I would love to go to Pompeii and to look at other Roman ruins, and all over Europe to see the castles, Roman roads, and any other buildings and places that have stood for centuries.

The common thread seems to be that these are places where people did live, but they don't anymore.

And I realized yesterday that when I think of these places, I'm thinking, "If I could go see those buildings or touch that wall, what would it FEEL like?"

You see, I'm an empath. That means that I pick up on other people's emotions to the extent that sometimes I have trouble telling what I'm feeling as opposed to what someone around me is feeling. And I pick up feelings from places, too. In the last few years, since I'm finally mature and educated enough about my gift to embrace it a little, I've started to even on rare ocassions get words and quick images from places, but mostly I just get feelings. It's still hard for me to understand that not everybody does this.

Now, I know you might be wondering how I can tell if it's something I'm picking up or just my imagination. The answer is that I can't always, or even usually. But sometimes I know things through the feelings I pick up about places that I could not know, and that backs up my feelings.

I like empty places because when I see them, and especially when I touch them, I know those feelings are probably from the past and not from an hour ago. (Although it could be somebody else that touched the wall, I suppose.) and I like places with buildings or statues or at least roads because open fields, even battlefields, don't seem to offer me much.

I've never been able to go to a very, very old place yet (more than two hundred years or so old) except for Etowah Indian Mounds in Cartersville, Georgia. There, I did pick up feelings, but only those of children and only near the water. Those were joyful, playful feelings. I don't know what I would feel at those old places in Europe, but from the way I feel looking at pictures I think it would be intense. I really would like to find out.

What is my idea for how these feelings come to me from places? I think emotions cause energy, and energy can be stored in stone, wood, and other natural material. Some people are sensitive to that energy, and can feel it. There are plenty of empaths like me, some who know what they're feeling, and some who are just overwhelmed and don't know why.

Anyway, so right now it's castles. But only the ruined ones.