The Creeping Panic of Hasard de Cheratte - Urbex of Abandoned Coal Mine in Visé, Belgium, circa 2005
On July 21, 2005, I left Antwerp and arrived in Liège, a sizable city in eastern Belgium with a long history and, importantly for my purposes, a couple of abandoned institutions that I was intent on visiting. A Belgian pilot named Henk who owned and operated the http://abandoned-places.com/ website, had been kind enough to tell me about these places and how to gain access. I was touring Western Europe for five months with a fairly high end digital camera and the express purpose of documenting how surfaces and materials age, so getting into abandoned places was a high priority. I had already infiltrated a derelict military hospital in Antwerp that he had alerted me to, and I was looking forward to what Liège had to offer.
First on the menu was Le Valdor, an abandoned hospital built in 1889 with a distinctly Gothic quality. The site has since been renovated, as can be seen in the following photo:
...and by checking it out on Google Earth now, but in 2005 it was locked up and falling apart. Unfortunately, the way in that Henk had told be about was blocked by a mass of bushes and undergrowth that proved impenetrable. Here's how it looked when I rolled up in the afternoon after checking in to the local Youth Hostel.
Frustrated, I returned to the hostel and engaged with the two young guys behind the desk there, who, it turned out, had grown up in Liège. They told me about the Fort de la Chartreuse, a massive abandoned military complex in the area. In 2005 it was home to a substantial squatter community, and so these local guys told me to proceed with caution. I did so the following day, and my experiences there were remarkable enough to warrant their own blog post. When I emailed Henk later about my time at la Chartreuse, he told me he hadn't mentioned it to me because he considered it too dangerous to visit, with a recent history of heavy drug use, assault, and murder.
While writing this, I asked Google AI to tell me about the criminal history of the site at the time. It seems that Henk was right. At any rate, please stand by for a write up about my extremely unsettling time there.
Henk's next recommendation was the abandoned coal mine of Hasard de Cheratte, a short bus ride away in nearby Visé. At present, part of the facility has been bulldozed as can be seen via Google Earth, but in 2005 the mine and all its buildings were still intact. According to Google AI, "The site is no longer a sprawling, fully abandoned ruin. ... A multi-million euro government remediation project officially kicked off in February 2017. Large portions of the unlisted, hazardous structures and annexes have since been completely demolished." It has a long and varied history, being first dug in 1850, closed in 1877, reopened in 1907, and then finally decommissioned in 1977. Following the final closure, it became quite famous as an urbex destination as the practice became more popular.
Henk visited there at least three times, and documented his time there on his website. You can find those pages here, here, and here.
It's at this point that I should mention the dead body in the showers.
During my research prior to the trip, I read Henk's accounts of his visits to Cheratte on his website and noted that he had found a dead body in the showers there. I filed that information away for future consideration, but by the time I actually stepped off the bus on the morning of July 24 it had more or less slipped my mind. I'd had a pretty crowded week leading up to that point, with my experience at la Chartreuse very fresh in my mind.
By Johan Bakker - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21005226
The facility is backed by a steep wooded hill, and it was from this approach that a window could be accessed at the rear of the central, original tower. The last photo above shows that Malakoff tower, being the highest structure in the photo, as well as the hill behind (photo credit). If memory serves, that gained me entry to the fourth floor of the tower.
One of the first photos I took once inside remains one of my favourites from that day:
Initially, I restricted my exploration to the main building that contained the tower and the wings attached to it. There was a slight Mary Celeste quality to the place, with clothing, equipment, and administrative debris scattered about, looking as though these items had simply been dropped in place when the last whistle blew and everyone just walked away.
I thought I detected the work of some earlier urbexer with an obscure sense of humour, however, as some of the clothing had been arranged into groups of four. This leads to another observation about the place, which is that it was entirely devoid of graffiti at the time, with one major exception. Throughout the site, people had hand painted with a brush the slogan "Votez 2," as well as the numbers 2 and 3.
These tags were obviously quite old, showing the effects of many years. I wondered about them as I walked around, taking pictures. I remember thinking that maybe they were some kind of artistic statement made by an urban explorer thirty years earlier. It turns out I was wrong about that. According to Google AI,
"...the "VOTEZ 2" (or similar historic union "VOTEZ") tags are interpreted as original trade union and syndicalist slogans left by the miners themselves, rather than modern urban exploration (urbex) graffiti. [1]
The primary context behind these tags includes:
Union Elections (Elections Sociales): In Belgian workplace elections, political/trade union lists are historically assigned ballot numbers. The phrase "Votez..." followed by a number or a union acronym was a rallying cry for miners to elect their union representatives. [1]
FGTB Slogans: Many of these historical inscriptions directly alongside these staircase and shower areas read "Votez FGTB" (referencing the socialist Fédération Générale du Travail de Belgique), which historically occupied ballot positions like "List 2" in specific social elections.
Historical Preservation: While the mine spent decades abandoned and covered in modern street art, urban explorers and industrial historians explicitly distinguish these faded, historical inscriptions in the shower halls and stairwells as authentic remnants of the mine's active social and labor history right up until its closure in 1977."
At this point, a couple of hours had gone by. I decided to take a short break and indulge in an ale (Chimay blue, if memory serves) and some food snagged from the hostel's breakfast options - a couple hard-boiled eggs, bread and cheese, and some kind of sliced meat. I found a ledge that opened on to the exterior at ground level, and tucked in. Here is my view while I ate, drank and, inevitably, smoked:
It was during this break, while I smoked and reflected on yesterday at la Chartreuse and today at Cheratte, that I remembered that Henk had mentioned that he had found a dead body in the showers. That threw a chill into me, but I reasoned that Henk, being the responsible guy he was - he was a professional pilot, after all - would surely have called the police after he left. There was no chance that the body was still there. Was there? I pondered that for a while, deciding that even if there was still a corpse in the showers, I could handle it. A dead body is just a dead body, after all, just meat and bones. And if, by some extremely remote chance, the body was still there it would have rotted away to just a skeleton over four years unprotected in the air. I packed up my stuff, girded my proverbial loins, and decided to climb all the way to the top of the tower to find out.
I should describe my mental and emotional state as I started mounting the stairs up to the top floor. I had experienced a little burst of adrenaline when I recalled the body, but that had ebbed by the time I got up and started climbing. I was feeling pretty good about myself, thinking that this suggested I was a fundamentally resilient and rational person. Entering these kinds of places alone was a way of demonstrating to myself that I could overcome fear. So it's more than a little ironic that as I mounted the steps, arrived at the first floor landing (being the floor above ground level, in the European fashion), and stepped into a series of rooms that looked promising, I was suddenly plunged into an ice cold terror that spun all of my dials up to full panic in an instant.
Of course, I have experienced fear before. Everybody has. But I had never before been gripped with such an intense fear so suddenly and for no apparent reason. I stood there, camera in my hands, looking into these rooms as seen in the photo above, with my heart hammering in my chest so hard I could hear a faint clicking sound. All the hairs on my limbs and neck were raised, my body was vibrating, I felt a deep coldness, and I could hear a faint roaring sound. For a moment I thought I might actually faint. I didn't, thankfully, but the panic remained. Somehow, I raised the camera while taking a few deep breaths to steady my shaking hands and took the above picture.
I knew, intellectually, that this was one of those times that might define me for myself. If I didn't go in there or, worse, if I ran, that knowledge would stay with me. It would be part of the story about me that I told myself. And after all, why was I here? To take photos, yes, to acquire experiences too, but also to test myself. Wasn't this a test, right here at this moment? All of that flashed through my mind in a second or two.
I stepped forward and entered the rooms.
I stayed in there as long as I could, about five minutes I think, although when activation levels are jacked up so high time does funny things. As I look back on it, it feels both longer and shorter, simultaneously. The initial panic spike lessened a bit as I walked through and took the photos, but the fear did not go away. There was that heightened clarity that can come with such states, everything very sharp and volumetric. An increased awareness of the size, shape, and relative positions of things. An awareness of the shape of the air between the walls. The place had more weight than it should have, a gravity well that deformed reality around it. I traveled through in slow motion, with my breathing loud in my ears.
When I had finished with the photos, I walked out and returned to the stair landing. The fear drained away in less than a minute, leaving behind a low key feeling of exhilaration. That emotional boost came from passing a test I had set for myself, I knew, but was also the opponent process in action once again.
I supplied some of these photos to Google AI and asked about these rooms, getting this response:
"Based on historical records of the site and the visual evidence from 2005, these photos show the administrative offices and paymaster rooms located on the lower, masonry-built levels of the Malakoff tower.
These rooms served as the operational heart for the mine's daily logistics, workforce management, and record-keeping before the site was abandoned in 1977.
Functional Details of the Rooms
The Paymaster and Timekeeping Office: The room featuring the large blackboard and the shattered wooden-framed windows (image_oGDQJF.png) was where miners checked in and out. The blackboard is highly significant, explicitly titled "¼ d'HEURE PRESTATION" (Quarter-Hour of Work/Service). It lists fractional hours paired with specific numerical decimal equivalents (e.g., 1/4 = 0.03, 1/2 = 0.06, 1.00 = 0.13). This matrix allowed clerks to quickly calculate standardized payroll, shift durations, and overtime conversions for the 1,500 workers who once populated the site.
The Archive and Registry Room: The space shown in image_EfH7wV.png and image_Au7Yd8.png served as the mine's document registry. The heavy metal chests and tables were designed to hold daily ledger logs, architectural blueprints, safety documentations, and employee files.
Visual & Architectural Characteristics
The Signature Tiling: A defining feature of these administrative areas is the geometric wall tiling. The bottom half of the walls is clad in dark brown, orange, and tan ceramic tiles. This heavy tiling was chosen for its durability and ease of cleaning in an environment constantly exposed to coal dust and damp air brought up from the extraction shafts.
The Condition in 2005: Taken roughly 28 years after the mine closed, these photos capture the site at a peak structural decay window often romanticized by the urbex community. The floor is carpeted with decaying paper archives and water-damaged logs. The ceiling plaster is peeling away due to moisture, and the window panes are thoroughly vandalized. You can also spot early 2000s graffiti on the blackboards, including references to early urbex websites (HTTP://...)."
Incidentally, I have read a few accounts of urbexers exploring Hasard de Cheratte and none mention having a feeling like this in these rooms.
With that behind me, I continued up the tower, taking photos as I went.
I did not find a dead body in the showers, to my relief. However, my recent look into the history of Hasard de Cheratte using Google AI suggests that there never was an actual corpse:
"The "dead body" mentioned on that specific webpage from April 2001 was actually a morbid joke or artistic installation, not a real deceased person.
When urban explorer and Belgian airline pilot Henk van Rensbergen originally documented the Charbonnage du Hasard de Cheratte, he included a photo on that page captioned "the dead body in the showers."
Here is the context behind that famous urbex myth:
The Photograph: The image showed a dummy, mannequin, or a bundle of old miner clothes and boots arranged on the floor of the locker/shower room to loosely look like a human corpse.
The Explorer's Tone: Henk van Rensbergen is well-known in the urban exploration community for his dry sense of humor and dark aesthetic. The mention of the body was a tongue-in-cheek reference to the spooky, frozen-in-time atmosphere of the abandoned bathhouse.
No Police Record: There is no official police report, criminal investigation, or news archive from 2001 involving the recovery of an actual human body from the Cheratte showers.
The rumor spread widely in early internet urbex forums because readers took the brief caption literally. In reality, it was just one of the many eerie sights left behind after the mine abruptly closed."
You will have noticed that I have used Google AI as a reference a number of times in this post, and here is an example where it has turned up some genuinely useful information that would be difficult to even be aware of otherwise. I'm aware that LLMs can confabulate, but I'm fairly certain that none of the information provided in this post is made up for two reasons, neither good enough on its own but each providing support for the other.
The first is that this is the AI that Google has included in their search service, the one that absolutely everyone who uses the internet at any level uses (or explicitly rejects). That means that Google has heard the jokes and the bitching and will have by this point in late 2026, I hope, made triply sure that this particular instantiation of their AI is as confabulation free as possible. Perhaps I'm giving them too much credit, but if I were Google, I would make the current AI responsible for fetching information as conservative a verifier as possible.
I asked Google AI what anti-confabulation measures are currently in place, despite the glaring recursive and self-referential nature of such a query. They provided an answer.
The second reason is that I have been wrestling with the problems and issues around data authenticity - a condition that I call Signal Drift - for many months now. If you like, you can check out any number of recent posts in my blog feed that touch on the matter. That means I'm particularly alert to the possibility of confabulation, and have become pretty good at detecting some of its indicators in a context like this. None of the information smells fishy to me, in other words.
Back to the day. After exploring the main tower, I crossed the worryingly deteriorated concrete deck that constituted the ground between buildings to check out some of the other structures. I had already made up my mind before entering that I was not going to descend into any of the mines below - that just seemed foolhardy. But there was plenty to check out on the "surface." The photo below, taken just after I arrived, shows the roof-like nature of the ground - you can see it in cross-section at center frame - as well as some of the other major structures. It also shows that a thriving ecosystem had established itself on that deck, and that was the main reason I had thoughts about its integrity. I proceeded with caution.
I spent another couple of hours exploring these other structures, taking photos, and feeling quite comfortable and productive. Nowhere else provoked any kind of strong feeling in me other than curiosity and the thrill of discovery, and the environment was compelling enough that it absorbed almost all of my attention. Stairs down to the mines, industrial stairwells, open pits, hoist equipment, and everywhere the passage of time frozen at that moment.
Not too long before this trip, I had worked as a draftsperson and maquette maker for Ken McDonald, a set designer of some renown, whose sets tended to either the large, bold and abstract or the intensely distressed and broken down. It was Ken who originally told me about abandoned-places.com, so in a way he was part of the process that brought me to this place. He would have loved all this decrepit industry. The walls of windows and rusty steel arches in particular seemed tailor made for the stage.
Finally, I entered what would prove to be the last building I visited at Cheratte. I have indicated it with an orange arrow in the photo below.
When facing the complex from the street, this was the building furthest left. It was quite large and consisted of mostly empty space under very high ceilings with a distinctive sawtooth profile. Once again, Google AI was able to provide some information about this building, confirming what I had long suspected - it was the main shop where mechanical fabrication, maintenance and repair took place.
"This building housed the main maintenance workshops and machine shops (les ateliers) of the Cheratte colliery complex. [1, 2]
... it functioned as the critical industrial garage, mechanical repair facility, and fabricating plant for the mine's heavy machinery. [1, 2]
The Purpose of the Building
An underground coal mine required constant, complex mechanical support to stay operational. The massive open layout with high clearance was designed to handle the scale of the machinery used on-site: [1]
Heavy Equipment Repairs: This is where the colliery's mechanics, blacksmiths, and machinists repaired mine carts (berlines), conveyor systems, pneumatic drills, heavy-duty pumps, and underground ventilation gear.
The Overhead Cranes: If you look closely at the upper walls... you can see structural metal rails and brackets. These were built to support heavy overhead traveling gantry cranes (ponts roulants) used to lift massive iron parts, gearboxes, and electric motors off the floor for servicing.
On-Site Fabricating: Because custom parts couldn't be easily ordered off a shelf, a major portion of this building acted as a machine shop where workers forged, welded, and lathed replacement pieces to minimize operational downtime.
Architectural Features of the Space
The specific design elements you captured directly tell the story of its industrial utility:
The Sawtooth Roof: The zig-zag shape indicated by your orange arrow is a classic sawtooth factory roof (toiture en dents de scie). The steeper vertical sections facing away from direct sunlight were filled with glass panels... This engineering style allowed maximum, uniform natural daylight to flood the workshop floor so mechanics could work on intricate machine parts without heavy shadows.
Large Open Gateways: The wide openings allowed small internal rail tracks or heavy loaders to haul bulky equipment directly from the pit-head towers ... right onto the workshop floor."
When I walked into the big shop, I was taken by its size and also the intricacy of the wooden latticework holding the roof up. It was also perfect for texture photos, being so well lit by the windows around and above. The place had been cleared out long ago, but there were still random items around the periphery. I started taking photos, with the above gallery in rough chronological order. I had just finished taking a shot, probably the rusty shelf or the growth by the window, when
CRASH!!!!
A very loud explosion of noise coming from above and at the far end of the room. It was a heavy breaking impact sound that put me in mind of a big earth clod with a lot of stones in it, while also having a brittle shattering aspect that suggested something ceramic. Or maybe a big chunk of crumbly mortar and cement? If the building was located along the Mediterranean, I would have thought a stack of ceramic roof tiles. Whatever it was, it had been very loud and very sudden, startling me out of my mini flow state. I was, once again, flooded with adrenaline.
The last two photos in the above gallery document my reaction to the sound, first with a shot of the ceiling, because that's where the sound came from. As I was looking around up there and taking that particular photo, there was another
CRASH!!!!
I looked down the length of the room and up towards the ceiling. Took another photo, the last one in the gallery. Stood listening as intently as possible, trying to hear some other sound, voices maybe, when
CRASH!!!!
Well, one time could be some bit of masonry dislodged and falling on the roof, perhaps. Two times could be that the falling masonry was followed by another chunk of falling masonry from the same source, maybe. But three times and it's intentional. Somebody was out there throwing big chunks of something onto the roof.
CRASH!!!!
The question was, was this directed at me because somebody had seen me enter the building, or was the thrower just throwing for the joy of it and the timing was just a coincidence?
CRASH!!!!
If it was directed at me, they were really trying to make a point...
CRASH!!!!
Fuck it, I'm out of here. I put the camera away in my shoulder-strap day bag, slinging it across one shoulder, with the bag under one arm. I exited at a motivated walk, mindful of the cement cap I was walking over, back across the courtyard, into the tower, up to the fourth floor, out the window and up the hill. The crashing repeated a few more times behind me as I left, diminishing in volume the further away I got.
When I got back down to street level, I stood looking up at the complex, looking for some clue as to the origin of the hurled missiles. I saw nothing except broken windows, weathered brick and stained cement. No movement, just silence.
That silence was broken a moment later when two young boys accosted me, addressing me in French. They were about 11 or 12. I have some bad French which I put to ill use with them, and we managed to have a short conversation to the effect that yes, I had just been inside there, and no, you shouldn't do it because it is too dangerous. It occurred to me afterwards that these two were likely the culprits behind the final dramatic finish. I could see them sitting on the hill behind the site and throwing stuff down. When you're 12 and bored in a small Belgian town, what else are you going to do?
Back at the hostel that evening, I used their internet to book a bed in Paris the next day and look up train details. It had been a very full day, rivaling and perhaps exceeding la Chartreuse for weirdness and intensity, and I slept very well.
