Weird stuff keeps happening at Fort Ord.

Much of the former-Fort Ord Army military base is an array of abandoned buildings. It’s a ghost town, and that has its own charm. But one building stands out, visible on Highway 1 near the 12th Street on-ramp. It’s an old storage building with red and yellow flames shooting out of the roof. Not real flames, but ones painted elaborately on the roof by a graffiti artist.

As it turns out, that slice of property is owned by the Transportation Agency of Monterey County (TAMC), which allows different organizations to use the buildings for different purposes. And over the last two weeks, one of these agencies had an accidental run in with another one of the agencies. Not just once, but twice.

“THEY BROKE DOWN THE DOOR AND WERE, LIKE, ‘UH, WAIT A MINUTE, THIS PLACE IS FULL OF STUFF.’”

During a training session for firefighters from different jurisdictions in Monterey County, trainees were asked to break some doors down and rush inside as if there was a fire going on. During one practice run, they discovered that the room they had broken into was being used by Monterey Peninsula College’s theater department. Inside were rows and rows of furniture, props and stage backdrops.

Dan Beck, technical director for MPC’s theater department, was nearby when it happened.

“They broke down the door and were, like, ‘Uh, wait a minute, this place is full of stuff,’” Beck says. That was the first time. Then, a few days later, it happened again with another group of firefighters.

Beck isn’t worried about what happened—the firefighters fixed the doors every time. But he says what happened isn’t all that uncommon on the former Fort Ord.

“You have people working out there in abandoned spaces, and people often don’t know what other people are doing,” Beck says. “In a lot of cases people aren’t sure what area is under their control or not.

“It’s kind of like the Wild West out there.”