Abandoned $1,000,000 Mansion With Steel Grates, Mold and a Burned Master Bath

This was the nicest mansion in the neighborhood when a family built it in 2001. The owner passed away in 2020, the bank foreclosed on the property, and it has been sitting ever since. Over that time it has been severely vandalized and even set on fire multiple times.

The exact location stays off this page. The whole house is dog doored, which means steel grates over every window and door. The drywall had rotted away so badly in one spot that you could just push right through it. I didn’t do that. It was already like that, and I’m only showing you how it was open.

What we found

The first level is a lot of decay. There’s a pretty gross bathroom, some binders, a walk in shower, a pool table that is very, very moldy, ceiling tiles that are all moldy, doors falling apart and water damage everywhere.

A Christmas tree is still in there. So is a lot of storage stuff, including toys, a ping pong table, printers and a nice fireplace, plus a little bar. The books are really moldy, and one thing had literal fuzz on it. I didn’t want to be breathing that in for long, so I headed upstairs.

Upstairs starts with tons of broken glass. It looks like the house was boarded up at first and people took the boards off. There’s a kitchen with a fridge, some macaroni and a nice grill, and another kitchen with dishes still in it. The fridge was empty and pretty clean. Some of the owners’ original clothing is still here, along with the original blinds, a fireplace, a couch tipped over and a big spiral staircase.

There’s a mattress and a room I guessed belonged to a little girl. Another room had boys’ clothing, so they must have had several kids. One ceiling says global, and the fan below it is a nice one. Up here the smoke damage starts to show, and there is lots of graffiti inside the house.

The master bedroom is where the damage is worst. The tub in the master bathroom is burnt, and as far as I could tell that’s where the fire started. The walk in closet smells like fire damage, and the other closet is covered in smoke damage.

Then there’s a room called the happy room, with a happy face and a frowny face on the walls. In another room there was original writing on the wall that said family only, and somebody had crossed it out. One tag says the writer is a loose screw. More rooms look burnt and charred, there were some computers, and one room had stuff that looked weird, but it might just be cobwebs and smoke damage.

It was dark out by the time I got outside, so I didn’t spend long. The pool is covered, and the cover is starting to tear. There’s a really cool slide, a gazebo and a hot tub, and from the back you can see some of the fire damage. I forgot to show the three car garage in the video. There was nothing really in it.

Why places like this end up empty

A foreclosed house can sit with nobody in it for years, and empty houses burn. The U.S. Fire Administration counted about 23,800 fires a year in vacant residential buildings from 2013 to 2015. That was 6 percent of all residential building fires. Intentional actions were the leading cause at 34 percent, and 53 percent of the fires spread to involve the entire building.

An earlier federal report found the same thing from the other direction. It estimated 16,800 intentionally set fires a year in American homes and apartment buildings, and 41 percent of them happened in vacant buildings.

That fits what we walked through, with fire damage in more than one part of the house. I don’t know who set any of these fires or when. The numbers only show that a house with no one living in it, a bank holding the paperwork and steel grates on the windows is a common setup.

The last thing I filmed was the front of the house, and it still looks like the nicest one in the neighborhood.