Laura Stotts embarked on a road trip spanning thousands of miles between Utah and North Carolina, taking detours along the way to satisfy her passion for exploring and photographing abandoned old buildings and ghost towns.
Stotts believes that she is alive for a reason – to document forgotten places through her camera lens. For her, preserving the memories of these places is deeply connected to her past struggles with addiction and near-death experiences.
She told Epoch Times, “God has performed miracles in my life, saving me.” A painful experience in 2016 almost brought her to the brink of death.
From abandoned houses dating back to the colonial era to the 1950s scattered across the United States, Stotts feels a spiritual connection to these places from past times. She has even formed connections with people who once lived in these abandoned houses.
Last winter, she visited a community in Idaho consisting of about 30 18th-century old wooden cottages where Mormon pioneers originally settled along the Oregon Trail. The town, Chesterfield, saw its decline as the Pacific Union Railway bypassed it in the 1880s, rendering the trail obsolete.
Armed with her camera and nostalgia for simpler times, Stotts navigated through the snowy landscape, capturing sturdy red brick schoolhouses and older dilapidated wooden cabins.
She described them as reminiscent of primitive log cabins from the late 18th century on the East Coast. The hardships of their lives in such remote towns, surviving under snowy conditions, resonate clearly.
Legend has it that snow in Chesterfield piled high, burying the houses, causing them to collapse with a loud “snap.” As the town dwindled, drought, the Great Depression of 1907, and the 1918 flu pandemic added to its woes. By the 1970s, the last few scattered residents had mostly fled.
“Chesterfield has faded like a photograph left in the sun,” Stotts said. “The creaking windmills sound like their final moans.”
She remarked that the endurance of these structures standing tall is a “miracle.”
Throughout her journey, Stotts visited over a thousand abandoned houses and buildings across dozens of states, including Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she currently resides. Her own survival story began in this area nine years ago.
Following a suicide attempt, Stotts’ life took a turn. One day, while intending to seek permission to photograph an abandoned house, she encountered Mr. Nanney, a 98-year-old man living in a nearby shanty with a grapevine-covered house. They became best friends.
“I listened as this elderly man unlocked nearly 10 locks from top to bottom. He let me inside, I introduced myself, and then I said, ‘Hey, I want to know your story,'” Stotts revealed.
The man’s story inspired Stotts. Since then, she has been eager to visit more old houses to hear more stories, lest these stories fade away with these people and their homes.
“This reignited my passion,” Stotts said. “I realized these homes are disappearing rapidly.”
Over the years, as she visited these abandoned places, Stotts’ journey was filled with precious moments, forging friendships with the almost forgotten former homeowners. Sometimes, the nostalgia she felt in these abandoned houses was so intense that the past scenes they depicted came vividly to life. For instance, an early visit to a mid-20th-century house in North Carolina left a lasting impression on her.
When she stepped into the yard of the house, Stotts experienced an almost full-body sensation. She recalled her feelings, a blend of illusion and reality. She felt as if bathed in sunlight, with the scent of flowers wafting distantly, imagining her parents hanging clothes outside.
Stotts discovered that the house belonged to one of two affluent Italian brothers who had built houses and engaged in an epic rivalry to outdo each other in luxury.
At times, she sensed being repelled by the house, as if by a supernatural force. Describing it as an oversized mid-19th-century house with tall doors and a massive columned porch, entering the house overwhelmed her with negative energy, making her gasp for air, prompting her decision to leave, despite not typically believing in such feelings.
She explained, “Do you remember trying to push two like poles of magnets together and feeling the repulsion that prevents it? That’s the feeling I started getting. That’s the only way I can describe walking into that house.”
To tell the stories of the abandoned house owners, Stotts conducted extensive research on the places she visited. Using apps like Find a Grave and Ancestry, she found names like Martha Simmons. Martha got married at 16 and moved into a small wooden house her husband Joel Simmons built in 1870 in Stokes County, North Carolina. Stotts visited this small wooden house.
The 1880 census data showed Joel as a farmer, likely sustaining their growing family by planting tobacco or crops. The couple had 12 children. The small house made it hard to imagine such a large family living in such cramped quarters.
To commemorate their story, Stotts created a family tree for the Simmons couple, listing the names of Martha, Joel, and their children – Rilla, Calvin, Mary, Powell, Fletcher, Frannie, Martha, James, Robert, John, Joel, and Roy.
Having been sober for seven years now, Stotts attributes her life-saving transformation to a miracle and now seeks to repay that favor. She said, “There was a time when I felt my existence and my story no longer mattered. Being able to document history and people’s stories through photographs over the past decade has been a beautiful thing.”
(The original English piece was titled “Nostalgic Beauty: North Carolina Woman Photographs Abandoned Houses—Here Are the Shots” published in the English edition of Epoch Times.)