A Photographer Thought This Spooky Old House Was Abandoned - She Was Wrong

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A Photographer Thought This Spooky Old House Was Abandoned - She Was Wrong

Leslie is better known as The Tourist, the name of her popular photography project.

She visits abandoned homes and buildings, capturing the creepy and unexplored parts of our world that are hiding in plain sight. Her work is full of chance encounters, like when she stumbled upon this old red brick house falling apart in the countryside.

Leslie had been photographing other empty buildings on her birthday when she discovered the house, but decided to make one last stop and get some interesting photos. But when she stepped inside she got the shock of her life: the run-down home wasn't abandoned after all.

A man named Lawrence was living inside. He was missing an eye, and his one good eye was full of cataracts. He also had trouble getting around, so he rarely left the old house. But he was very polite to Leslie, even though she was trespassing, and let him take a picture to remember her visit.

"He is a beautiful soul and I plan on visiting him a lot," she told her followers on social media. "I'm posting this picture in hopes that it will inspire at least one person to reach out to someone they may have lost contact with or perhaps just forgot about."

In fact, Leslie turned out to be that kind of person for Lawrence...

Over the next few weeks, Leslie continued to visit Lawrence, and brought him home-cooked dinners.

They talked for hours, and Lawrence revealed the sad details of his lonely life to her. It seems he used to be more involved in his community, but after getting older he became confined to his home with only his dog, Violet, for company.

He even revealed that he had suffered a stroke in his home, which paralyzed his hands, but had to wait four days to visit a doctor because no one visited him that week. "He just needs a friend," Leslie wrote on Instagram "Someone to make sure he's okay [...] Reassure him he is loved."

So Leslie kept visiting her new friend. A local business heard about Lawrence and volunteered to help tidy his home. Leslie even took Lawrence to see a doctor, where she learned his health is failing quickly, and Lawrence made her promise she would attend his funeral.

Until then, Lawrence is living happily in a retirement home, where he's attended to by professionals and is making new friends. Leslie has adopted Violet, and the pair visit him to lift his spirits.

"He shared something with me that will stay with me forever," Leslie revealed to her followers. "He said the day I showed up was the best day of his life."

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