Welcome!

Hello,

Ever since I can remember, I’ve loved the macabre.

Anything eerie — monsters, the supernatural, ghosts, sci-fi, and tales of the unknown — has held my imagination since childhood. As kids we were drawn to cartoons and superheroes, but I was also captivated by the strange and the unsettling.

I got my first real taste of horror in the early 1970s when I was about six or seven years old. I used to try to stay up late — long past when I was supposed to be asleep — just to watch Sinister Cinema.

Sinister Cinema was a hosted horror movie show that aired in Portland, Oregon. Victor Ives and Jimmy Hollister, as “Ravenscroft,” presented double-feature B-horror films on Saturday nights at 11:30 p.m. For three and a half years in the mid-1970s, it became my gateway into a darker, more fascinating world.

The double features of the Universal Monsters were always my favorites — Frankenstein, Dracula, and Creature from the Black Lagoon. I was fascinated by Bela Lugosi’s portrayal of Dracula. I was genuinely frightened of Frankenstein’s Monster. After watching the Creature rise from the water, I developed a very real fear of swimming in open bodies of water.

But more than fear, what those films sparked in me was curiosity.

I wasn’t just scared — I was hooked.

I’ve also always been fascinated with history. I am curious about how we arrived at this exact moment in society. It took a long chain of events to build the world we live in today. That’s part of why I love documenting moments in my own life. My wife always jokes that I’m the designated photographer on every vacation — and she’s probably right.

“Photographs feel like doorways to me”.

(Michael Freed)

I often imagine stepping back in time through an image of some long-forgotten place — stepping through the frame of a photograph or into an old black-and-white film reel — and feeling what it must have been like to stand there in that exact moment.

That’s where everything began to blend naturally.

Historical locations. Abandoned structures. Places whispered about in local legend. They aren’t just “scary.” They’re fragments of time — pieces of stories left behind.

That curiosity that began in front of a flickering television eventually led me to walk the darkened halls of the abandoned St. Ignatius Hospital, camera in hand, listening to the silence and wondering who — or what — might still linger there.

As I grew older, horror became less about jump scares and more about atmosphere, mystery, and the quiet weight of forgotten spaces. Every abandoned building was once someone’s dream. Every so-called haunted home once held birthdays, arguments, laughter, loss and tragedy. And sometimes, when you stand in those spaces long enough, you can almost feel the echoes.

And so beginning with my brother in about 2021 we started collaborating together on documenting some of our travels. We take video and photographs , and of course, ghost hunting gear. I joined him on his YouTube channel “Saages Abandoned”, and then shortly after, I launched my channel on “YouTube and TikTok.

That’s why I created Forsaken Fragments.

Through this blog and my channel, I want to document those fragments — the history, the experiences, the unexplained moments, and the beauty hidden in decay.

If you’ve ever slowed down when passing an abandoned house…
If you’ve ever stayed up too late reading ghost stories…
If you’ve ever felt drawn to the unknown…

You’re in the right place.

This is just the beginning.

— Michael
Forsaken Fragments
Where the Forgotten Still Whisper