Firefighters Enter an Abandoned Building — What They Found Wasn’t Supposed to Exist

Pay attention to the engine company pulling up to the warehouse on Lamont Street.

It's 11:47 p.m. on October 3rd. The dispatcher reported smoke visible from the second floor. The building had been condemned for six years—no power, no water, no legal occupants. This should have been a routine investigation. Clear the structure. Confirm the source. Get out.

Engine 47's captain was a twenty-two-year veteran named Frank Donovan. He'd worked hundreds of abandoned building calls. Most were false alarms. Some were homeless encampments with makeshift heating. A few were arson.

None of them were like this.

At 11:52 p.m., Donovan and his crew forced entry through the south door. The smoke was light—not the black, chemical churn of a real fire. It smelled wrong. Organic. Almost sweet.

They climbed to the second floor.

What they found in the northwest corner wasn't smoke damage.
It was a room.

Furnished. Heated. Occupied.

The walls had been insulated with foam panels. There was a space heater running off a stolen electrical line tapped from the building next door. A camping cot. Bottled water. Canned food stacked against the wall. And in the center of the room, a laptop computer connected to a portable WiFi hotspot.

On the screen: a live-stream video feed.

It showed a woman.

She was sitting on a concrete floor in what appeared to be a basement. Her hands were bound. Her mouth was taped. She wasn't moving.

Donovan radioed dispatch immediately.

Within eighteen minutes, Columbus Police Department had cordoned off the entire block.

The woman on that screen was 29-year-old Julia Brennan.

She had been missing for eleven days.