Altered States of Agoraphobia: Motels (III) The Most Haunted Places in America

Friday, February 25, 2011

Motels (III) The Most Haunted Places in America

Holbrook, AZ (Wigwam Motel II)

Knob Hill, KY

Conway, TX

Little Rock, AR

This is a selection of images from my on-going series about Motels (The Most Haunted Places in America).

When I'm traveling I like staying in cheap motels. There's something about them which captures my imagination. I love the atmosphere, the dated and crumbling decor, the buzzing neon signs, the musty smell of the rooms and the people that use them. I love to listen to the stories of those that work in the office. I love the plastic dusty flower displays, stale coffee, the old TV's and faded pictures hanging on the walls. I love the cracked cement parking lots, the broken coke machines and the Bible in the bedside draw with the broken back. What I love most of all are the dreams I have in the bumpy uncomfortable beds after a day of driving. Laying in the darkness listening to the trucks thundering past on the road outside I think about all the people who have stayed in the very room I am in. I imagine all the things that could have possibly happened and feel the fleeting ghosts of their presence echo around me. In the darkness I contemplate my own flickering sepia place in it's transitory history. For me they are the most haunting and haunted places in America.

Please follow these links to see more images from this series:

Part One: http://simonkossoff.blogspot.com/2009/12/motels-most-haunted-places-in-america.html

Part Two: http://simonkossoff.blogspot.com/2010/07/motels-ii-most-haunted-places-in.html

5 comments:

MoxFebruary 25, 2011 at 8:05 AM
Nice work, Simon
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Simon KossoffFebruary 26, 2011 at 6:51 AM
Thank you Mox
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motels in santa anaMarch 18, 2011 at 10:45 PM
I like the photos that you took and I wonder where that motel is located. I also love the article that you write about motels. Very interesting.
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motels in santa anaMarch 19, 2011 at 2:49 AM
Thank You for the photos. I appreciated your post regarding with this Most Haunted Places in America.
Motels in Santa Ana
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Simon KossoffMarch 20, 2011 at 7:58 AM
Thank you for your comments 'Motels in Santa Ana'. All these photographs are from different motels scattered around the USA. Re, your other comment in a previous post on this subject. You're probably right that there can be a lot of crime in these cheap motels and a few times that I have arrived at one I have encountered either a police presence in the form of an arrest being made or a questioning. I have also witnessed criminal activity such as drug dealing and prostitution in these places. This is only part of the reason why I consider them haunted though. My article is intended to take a more 'romantic' view - from that of a traveling outsider, rather than that of possible supernatural experiences, though I certainly believe I have encountered them.
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Welcome

About the photographs: These images are a search for a personal orientation between the dream or idea of a place and my actual experience of it in reality. They can be described as a collection of psychic coordinate points which I have plotted between the imagined America I brought with me from England and the real America I found on my arrival in 2008. These images are half truth and half fiction. They are a psychogeography, filled with personal symbolism and tangled with influences so old they were already part of me long before this journey ever began.

A note about the title:  The compulsion to travel, to move from one place to another, has been with me my whole life. Whether it be local, national or international, I have always found myself either in motion or, if not, I have been dreaming about it. Paradoxically, it has been in the periods of dreaming that Agoraphobia, (which Google defines as “Extreme or irrational fear of entering open or crowded places, of leaving one's own home, or of being in places from which escape is difficult”) has gripped me and, at times, crippled me. These photographs are my continued (once secret) revolt against it in the United States of America today, despite recent quarantines.