What Still Runs at the Dye Works Mill

The Ashford dye works has been dead since the early eighties, a huge brick carcass on the river with most of its windows gone. Urbex folks in my area talk about it the way sailors talk about a wreck -- worth seeing, but respect it. Four of us went in on a Saturday morning, which is the smart way, in daylight, well fed, no drinking. We are not idiots. We just like old buildings.

The main floor is a cathedral of rust. Rows of looms frozen mid-motion, belts hanging slack, pigeons in the rafters. We spent an hour up there, and it was beautiful in the way only ruined industry can be. If the story ended there it would be a nice afternoon. It did not end there.

There is a stairwell down to the dyeing rooms in the basement, and the guidebooks all say the same thing -- skip it, it floods, it is not worth the risk. We went anyway, because we always do, with headlamps and a rope and one person staying up top as the rule requires. The basement was better preserved than upstairs, oddly. Great steel drums the size of cars, the vats where they used to dye the cloth, catwalks over channels of black standing water.

And one of the drums was turning.

I need you to understand what that means. This building has had no electricity since before I was born. The lines were cut, the transformers stripped for copper decades ago. There is no power in that place, nothing, we checked our own devices and there was not even a phantom hum. But the third drum in the row was rotating, slow and heavy, with a deep mechanical groan that I felt in my teeth. My friend put his hand near the shaft and pulled it back and said it was warm. Not the metal warm from friction. Warm like a body.

We stood around it, four grown adults, and watched it turn, and nobody could make it make sense. Then the one filming pointed his light into the mouth of the drum where the cloth would go, and inside there was water, dark and slow, and steam coming off it. Warm water. In a drum that could not turn, in a building that had no power, in a basement that floods with cold river runoff.

That is when we heard the whistle. Not a person whistling -- the mill whistle, the big steam whistle that used to call the shifts, mounted on the roof five floors above us. It blew once, long and low, the sound rolling down through the whole building, and every one of us felt the floor tremble the way it would if the machines above had all started at once. Our lookout upstairs heard it too. He was already at the top of the stairs yelling for us to come up.

We came up. I am not ashamed to say we came up fast. The main floor was exactly as we had left it -- dead, silent, the looms frozen, dust unbroken except for our own tracks. Nothing had run. Nothing could have. But the whistle had blown, we all heard it, and when we got outside the caretaker from the neighboring lot was standing by our cars looking pale, and he asked us if we had heard the shift call, because he hears it sometimes, always at the same time of morning, always the same single blast, and it always means the same thing.

I asked him what it means. He said it means somebody down there thinks the workday just started, and they are waiting for the floor to fill up. Then he told us to go home.

We did. I have the footage. The drum is turning in it, plain and undeniable, and you can hear the whistle if you turn it up. I have shown it to people who know old mills, and they all say the same thing -- that drum cannot turn. I know. That is the entire problem. It cannot, and it did, and I have not been back.