Eight years after closing its doors for good, the inside of Flint Central High School looks more like a haunted asylum than a school.

Flint Central High School rang its first bell in 1923, when students moved over from its original location to the building on Crapo St. Actually, back then it was known simply as Flint High School until Flint Northern opened up in 1928. The school once had roughly 2,000 students in attendance. Attendance was around half of that when the school closed due to the rising maintenance costs and declining enrollment on June 11th, 2009.

Any school that size that stays open that long has a ton of alumni, and Flint Central is no exception. The now devastated campus holds a special place in the hearts of many former students, so it's no surprise that new photos of the school are in high demand. Travis James, who posts YouTube videos and photos he's taken of abandoned places in Flint and Detroit as a hobby, visited Flint Central to document the current state of the deteriorating school a couple of months ago. He's since been bombarded by requests to share his photos, and the resulting Facebook post went viral overnight.

The photos capture the beloved institution in a sad state of repair, but they are also hauntingly beautiful in a weird way. Several of these photos could be easily confused for set photos from John Carpenter's 'Escape from New York,' which is kind of cool to a nerd like me. Of course, that's probably easier for non-alumni like myself to say, I imagine it would be heartbreaking to see my alma mater like this.

Travis was kind enough to allow us to use his photos for the article, and you can check out more of his work, like his video of the abandoned Whittier Middle School (seen below), on his Crypticfilth810 YouTube channel and via Instagram under the same handle.

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