Interview With The Urban Explorers Who Sneaked Into Michael Jackson's Abandoned Neverland Ranch

Before Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch became a controversial place it was a place of wonder, with its own zoo, amusement park rides, and two trains, not to mention Michael's magical 13,000 sq. ft. mansion.

The 3,000 acre Ranch was worth an estimated $100 million dollars before Michael abandoned the property after it was searched by police officers during the People V. Jackson trial back in 2003, and in 2006 the property went into foreclosure.

Michael left most of his stuff behind when he abandoned the property, and all that stuff plus the strange and sordid history of the place made Neverland Ranch a very enticing place for urban explorers to visit.

Four such urban explorers (nicknamed after the TMNT by VICE) broke in to the place repeatedly between December 2007 and March 2008, and the stuff they found there really adds to the MJ mystique:

Donatello: The other thing was that he collected memorabilia that had him on it, he had Pepsi bottles and books and other promotional material in boxes. He also had stacks and stacks of fan mail, and one of the ones that really grabbed me was some fan had drawn the prosecuting attorney of his molestation case with devil's horns. That was just laying on a tabletop – maybe a Pac-Man table?
Raphael: You were reading his fan mail?
Donatello: We were flipping through some of it.

Raphael: One thing that really sticks out in my memory was drinking his grape soda from that walk-in kitchen storage area and then very carefully wiping the fingerprints off the bottle and hiding it in the bushes.

Was it actual grape soda?
Raphael: Yeah! It was actual grape soda! In the kitchen there was this "Children of the World" menu. Everything in there was geared toward children. I'm not sure he had any, but...

He did.
Raphael: Having that menu there, on a permanently printed chalkboard it had peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches and macaroni and cheese or something, that sticks out in my mind. The general strange hodgepodge of s#%t that he had bought that didn't have any relation to his house. His entire house was filled with these really expensive looking one-off random, semi-artistic things.

Read Four Photographers Sneaked Into And Explored Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch at VICE (NSFW language)