Hobo Discovered In Self-Built Underground Abode

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Hobo Discovered In Self-Built Underground Abode

Postby judasdisney » Tue Nov 27, 2007 6:13 am

Inspiring true alternative lifestyle/self-sufficiency story:

Homeless Man Found Living In Elaborate Underground Home
State Says Home Is Danger To Residents

POSTED: 8:25 am EST November 23, 2007

PHOTOS

FRESNO, CA - A homeless contractor known as the "mole man" dug a multi-room 200-square-foot home underground in Fresno that surprised police when they recently stumbled upon a hidden entrance.

Police said Bruce Tracy dug the underground home in an area near Roeding Park in Fresno.

The home had a bed, a leak-proof roof, a kitchen and escape hatch, Local 6 reported.

Tracy said it took him about 2 months with a shovel and other tools to carve out the underground rooms.

The state said it is a danger to people living nearby and plan to demolish it.

Tracy said it is no big deal and he is already looking for a new location for his next underground home.

Tracy said he has built several underground homes.
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Postby chiggerbit » Tue Nov 27, 2007 2:02 pm

Other than the risk of a cave-in, I'd say it works. Maybe we should ask our Aussie members to fill us in on how-to's of some of the mines/homes of the opal miners.
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Postby Brighid_Moon » Tue Nov 27, 2007 2:09 pm

That is amazing! :D

Though homelessness sucks, many people choose to live that way for one reason or another (not saying that many who are that way are there by choice either). It truly shows the creativity, inventiveness and tenacity of the human spirit, doesn't it? Gives one hope!
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australia underground

Postby annie aronburg » Sat Dec 08, 2007 4:20 pm

chiggerbit wrote:Other than the risk of a cave-in, I'd say it works. Maybe we should ask our Aussie members to fill us in on how-to's of some of the mines/homes of the opal miners.


I'm not Australian but I have a fascination with the underground dwellings of Coober Pedy, the whole town, really:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/35025258@N ... 171296592/

http://images.google.com/images?sourcei ... a=N&tab=wi

http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=c ... edy&m=text

Living in the earth is energy efficient and occasional quite beautiful:
http://www.malcolmwells.com/

Coober Pedy has some problems:
http://www.viceland.com/int/v13n11/htdo ... country=ca
http://www.viceland.com/int/v13n11/htdo ... country=ca
http://www.viceland.com/int/v13n11/htdo ... country=ca
"O Oysters," said the Carpenter,
"You've had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?'
But answer came there none--
And this was scarcely odd, because
They'd eaten every one.
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Postby chiggerbit » Sun Dec 09, 2007 11:06 am

Hehe, I love it:

The name 'Coober Pedy' comes from the local Aboriginal term kupa piti, meaning "white man in a hole".


I wonder if there are ever cave-ins. Thanks for all the links, Annie. I was trying to remember the name of the area.
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Postby chiggerbit » Sun Dec 09, 2007 11:14 am

...and the fact that CP has at least seven of the world’s ten most dangerous snakes blending in with its dirt...


Ok, that just ruined my dream vacation.
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Postby Joe Hillshoist » Mon Dec 10, 2007 3:53 am

Chig I have seen 2 of the 10 most dangerous snakes in the world on my front doorstep, and had one in the kitchen once.

There are at least 5sp living within 5 km of here.

So long as you look where you are stepping you should be fine.
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Postby chiggerbit » Mon Dec 10, 2007 10:09 am

I detest snakes, especially if I'm surprised by them. I know I shouldn't be that way, but I am. But it's kind of funny--I don't mind so much the poisonous snakes that are here in my own neighborhood (rattlesnakes and copperheads), but the thought of the other ones just makes me shiver. And to think of one in my kitchen? I would stop cooking. Oh, wait, I've already done that. Nevermind.
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Postby Joe Hillshoist » Tue Dec 11, 2007 1:46 am

My old man hates snakes.

He grew up in Fiji where the only snakes are coral snakes, in the ocean.

but is Indian, and they have a huge lore of snakes - nagas, kundalini, charmed cobras etc etc.

Once he found a 7 foot tiger snake, and not content with killing it (something I have never done, well not deliberately, I've run over the odd snake) hee chopped it up into inch long segments so it wouldn't grow back together and come after him. This is the same man who doesn't believe in anything scary (even if its real), who rode 70 miles through a hurricane to see a holy man to lift a curse on his family that he didn't believe in, but couldn't stand the effect it was having on them.

Who basically says "if I can';t see it its not real" to anything weird.

Chops a snake into 50 or 60 pieces so it wont grow back together and come after him!!!

But the ones here are no different to the ones in your neck of the woods. Its rare that they will attack someone, and rarer that they do that unprovoked and with an escape route.

Once my cat was curled up, asleep in the sun, and less that a foot away, curled up asleep in the sun was a red bellied black snake. One of those deadly ones, tho I am not sure where on the scale they are. probably in the top ten tho.

They were less than 18 inches apart!!! Their heads were facing away from each other and they were curled up back to back in the sun.

That was truly fucked. I went away and tried to forget about it, figuring if they went to sleep they must be cool with each other. Went out for a few hours and was so nervous about finding a dead kitty when I got home. of course the cat had no idea what all the fuss was about once we got home. They looked so cool tho, two black predators lying next to each other asleep in the sun.

I have got so many snake stories.
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Postby chiggerbit » Tue Dec 11, 2007 1:13 pm

We have blacksnakes here, non-poisonous variety. They can get pretty long. There's quite a bit of old, pre-Civil War brick houses with triple walls, and people like to have a blacksnake keep residence in the walls, to keep down the mouse population.

What's creepy about them is that when it's breeding season, it's said that they hang from branches of trees. I saw one doing that when I was a kid, didn't know it was about breeding, though. Creepy.
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Postby lunarose » Mon Apr 14, 2008 11:40 am

that is so hilarious it's in fresno, because fresno is famous (other than the raisins) for an underground garden:

'The Forestiere Underground Gardens were designed and hand-sculpted by Baldasare Forestiere, a Sicilian immigrant. A vineyardist and horticulturalist, Forestiere began in the early 1900s to carve and sculpt a thoroughly unique underground retreat to escape the San Joaquin Valley's excessive heat. After nearly forty years with hand tools and persistent effort, he succeeded in creating a cool subterranean complex fashioned after the "visions stored in my mind." Forestiere worked without blueprints or plans, following only his creative instincts and aesthetic impulses. He continued expanding and modifying the gardens throughout his life. Baldasare Forestiere died in 1946 at the age of sixty-seven. After his death, the Underground Gardens were opened to the public as a museum.'

http://historicfresno.org/nrhp/forest.htm

i was born in fresno, and though i have gone to the gardens several times, i have never managed to get in there. its very frustrating. it gets so damn hot there, for so long, and the tule fog is so awful and deadly, and lasts so long, that going underground sounds very appealing.
"Some people just want to believe that there are nude space people out there somewhere." John Keel
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Postby chlamor » Tue Apr 15, 2008 9:37 pm

Similar story came out about 7-8 years ago with the locale being of all places Martha's Vineyard.

The underground bungalow was discovered when some boy scouts were out hiking and one the kids tripped on the Chimney pipe.

The locals were mostly in support of the guy, who everyone kinda' knew as he did odd jobs all around, and thought he shoulda' been allowed to stay in his underground abode.

The local engineers, city planners whatever were just stunned at how sound was the construction of the place and bewildered at how he got all the materials down there.

The guy himself was an ex-con who had problems with addiction, I think heroin, but had turned into a recluse of a spiritual sort. One thing that was interesting is that he was about 6 foot 3 and he had lived in that underground place for several years before being noticed.

I'm going to try to look it up. I first read about this in the Boston Globe when we lived in W. Mass.

I always liked these kind of stories for some reason.
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Postby chlamor » Tue Apr 15, 2008 9:44 pm

Got it wrong it was in Nantucket. And it was a deer hunter not a Boy Scout. it seems it was on land appropriated by The Scouts. Here's the story:

Copyright 1998 The Washington Post

December 29, 1998, Tuesday

A Nantucket Hermit Is Pulled From His Shell; Discovery of Subterranean Home May End Man's Quest for Serenity and a Simple Life

Pamela Ferdinand, Special to The Washington Post

NANTUCKET, Mass.

Tucked away in an island wilderness of bayberry bushes and pine trees, Thomas Johnson's front door lies hidden beneath a twisted mat of dead twigs and fallen leaves.

Brushing aside the natural camouflage, he opens a wooden hatch and descends a built-in ladder, legs first, hand under hand, until he feels the stone floor of his home eight feet below. Three cedar-paneled rooms contain a queen-sized bed, stove and pantry, and the dreams of a latter-day Thoreau who went to the woods to soothe his soul.

For a decade, Johnson has lived underground in one of the most charming and desirable corners of New England, this island off the Cape Cod coast where inhabitants pay a premium for beachside mansions and gray-shingled cottages along cobblestone streets.

He calls it his "self-help" cocoon, a spiritual retreat for a man uneasy in society. Johnson said in a recent interview that his underground days have appeared to be numbered since November, when a local deer hunter stumbled on a black stovepipe sticking out of the earth and discovered his home. A subsequent police investigation and charges of health code violations led to eviction proceedings by the Boy Scouts, who own the land on which Johnson built his home. The process could take up to 90 days.

In the meantime, the 38-year-old hermit has emerged as a folk hero and eccentric renegade in a tiny community where traditions of Quaker asceticism and Yankee ingenuity combine with intense respect for the law.

"This is my church. This is my factory. This is my school," said Johnson, during a lengthy interview aired repeatedly on Nantucket television. "It's more than an experiment. It's an adventure in lifestyle. It's a rebel creation."

Islanders long heard rumors of an "underground man," and some of Johnson's friends have even visited him over the years. But they kept their lips sealed. The wider community learned of the secret habitat only after Jack Hallett Sr., a local builder and hunter, discovered it while trying to locate a deer stand.

"I was down on my hands and knees, crawling under a real low branch, when I came upon it," said Hallett, a 50-year-old father of three who has lived on the island for years. "I opened the hatch and thought, 'Oh my God.' "

Hallett left a footprint to let Johnson know he had been there. The next morning, he brought back a friend, a part-time police officer. Johnson answered their knock, freshly showered and so shaken by the strangers' arrival that his trembling hands sloshed coffee out of the cup he held, Hallett said. Realizing his time was up, Johnson invited them in.

What Hallett saw amazed him: A wonder of craftsmanship, planned and constructed in five weeks for less than $ 150. "Absolutely gorgeous," he recalled.

The structure, whose main room measures 8 feet by 8 feet, stays dry and warm because it is wrapped in a rubber membrane and layers of insulation. Two inches of topsoil and sand cover the roof, and there is no running water, electricity or piped-in gas.

Johnson cooks on a small stone stove built on top of a Hibachi with a single burner. He sleeps in another room on a day bunk or a queen-sized bed that pulls down loft-style from the ceiling, and he showers in the kitchen using a plastic tube attached to a water jug. Transom windows in dug-out spaces, similar to those in basements, provide light and ventilation, and a chemical toilet takes the place of modern plumbing.

"I wouldn't consider myself a survivalist or survival nut, but I'm a survivor," Johnson said on the television program. "I consider myself a fort builder. That's something I never grew out of."

He told Brian MacQuarrie of the Boston Globe: "I can hear the heartbeat of the island here."

In fact, Johnson has built homes for himself in the sky and in the earth for more than two decades, including a stone dwelling in the Catskills and a treehouse in Hawaii, among others. A second home in Nantucket, a log cabin, recently was discovered on public land and may be dismantled.

Publicity apparently forced the hand of Nantucket officials, who were otherwise inclined to let Johnson stay, and of the Boy Scouts, now seeking to evict a man whose outdoor skills could easily merit an Eagle Scout badge.

"If nobody was the wiser, he would have been able to stay there," said Nantucket Police Chief Randy Norris. "Now the town knows about it and has to do something. It sets a precedent, and the next thing you know, we're going to have a dozen of them."

Johnson hardly looks the part of a man who lives in an underground cabin. Clean-shaven and tidy in khakis and buttoned-down shirts, he has had girlfriends, frequents local establishments and earns a healthy living as a carpenter. Friends describe him as an intelligent man with simple tastes, a volatile temperament and a hilarious knack for imitating accents. But he also is intensely private and introspective, they say, and can seem inconspicuous, even at 6 feet 4.

"He's the kind of guy who could be standing here and you wouldn't see him," said Rick Kotalac, a friend and former employer who owns Brant Point Marine. "He moves kind of slow and meticulous and gets things done."

Raised in a Catholic, upper-middle-class household, Johnson grew up in Binghamton, N.Y., with four sisters and two brothers. When he was 20, his father, a city judge, died in his arms. He stayed behind to comfort his mother and attend community college, but his life took a turn for the worse.

Drug involvement led him to Italy, where he was arrested for smuggling heroin in 1983. After serving 2 1/2 years in prison, he escaped house arrest and fled the country in October 1985, according to the Italian consulate in Boston. An arrest warrant was issued but extradition is unlikely, officials said.

Nantucket had captured his imagination during visits in the late 1970s and '80s, so Johnson returned to the former whaling port to settle into his kind of ideal existence: a solitary life. A life where he did not have to conform or become what he calls a "social cardboard facsimile" of his real identity. Where he could commune with nature and face his inner demons to "get right" with himself.

He wanted to be away from people, consumerism and corporations, away from the sounds of slamming doors and refrigerators clicking in the middle of the night, he said in a recent interview. Alone underground, he rode out hurricanes, endured five-day rainstorms and shoveled out from beneath inches of snow.

"The stupidest question I get is: Am I lonely?" he said, his hazel eyes clouding with tears, a freckled hand nursing a pint of dark beer at a local pub swathed in Christmas decorations. "Of course, I'm lonely."

All this has made for plentiful gossip and sharply divided opinions around such places as the lunch counter at Congdon's Pharmacy on Main Street. "The guy sounds a little loose upstairs," "It's ingenious," goes the talk, "How'd he get the stuff in there?" and "Did you see the size of that hole?"

"It makes sense," said Mark Mattoon, 37, a bartender. "I always thought an underground house would be a good thing."

Many locals agree, saying Johnson should be left in peace. With seasonal rentals averaging $ 2,000 to $ 5,000 per week, they half-joke that earthbound homes could solve the island's severe affordable-housing crisis.

Yet others resent Johnson's tax-free existence and protest that he stole -- in his own words, "liberated" -- some materials to build his home. Court records show that he has twice been charged on Nantucket with assault and battery in the past decade.

Some here have seen his calm demeanor turn to raging storm, as it did on a recent weekday.

One moment, he was interrupting a lunchtime interview at the local pub to give a Christmas card to a woman eating alone at a nearby table. "To a shy friend," he scribbled, signing the card, "Dug Underwood." Silent for a moment after handing her the sentimental message, he wiped tears from his eyes.

The next instant, he was lighting a Camel cigarette and rambling on, regurgitating pithy thoughts he has woven together over the years on life, the pitfalls of love and the wonders of nature.

And the next, he was bolting upright and screaming at his interviewer in a fury.

"That's the real Tom," observed one diner who has witnessed similar rants, as the "underground man" headed out the door.

For a decade, Thomas Johnson, 38, has lived in his "self-help" cocoon, a three-room home built eight feet underground. Thomas Johnson descends into his home, which was discovered in November by a deer hunter who came across a stovepipe sticking out the ground. He has been charged with health code violations and could be evicted.

http://www.pamelaferdinand.com/wp_0028.html
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Postby chiggerbit » Sat Dec 13, 2008 11:57 am

I love this thread.


A couple of years ago a young man did some bobcat work for me, and he was telling me about how his family houses their many dogs (near twenty, if I remember right). They take empty 55 gallon plastic barrels and bury them on their sides horizontally in a slope, with one end exposed, the rest buried, with a hole in the lids large enough to allow the dogs to squeeze in and out of.
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Postby stefano » Fri Oct 16, 2009 7:34 am

Just stumbled across this thread - odd how the guy is described as 'homeless' just before we hear about his big house?

In Tunisia there's a ruined Roman town called Bulla Regia, in one of the hottest parts of the country. The Romans built two-storey houses, a summer house underground, and a winter one above. On the day I went it was 50 degrees, the hottest day of the year, and when you went downstairs into the house it was completely comfortable, and enough light came in through the skylight for reading (the skylight opens up onto a little courtyard, and the bedrooms are off the courtyard with no openings at all).
Image

About 150 km away is a town called Matmata where people have always lived like that, in a little kitchen/courtyard with cave-like rooms branching off of it.
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