No More Movies: Check Out This Abandoned Theater [Pictures]

WARNING: Under no circumstances should you enter this property. By doing so you risk bodily harm and/or prosecution for trespassing on private property.

I bought my ticket, probably got a soda, and ambled down the aisle of this theater auditorium my skin hurting from a wicked sunburn I had gotten earlier at Royals Stadium. A movie I thought was a good idea. It would take my mind off the sunburn. It would be cool, and I didn't have to move much. That's how I wound up, at 20 years old on my first solo road trip to Kansas City, seeing a movie at this now long-closed, abandoned, Kansas City area movie theater.

If I had done my homework, I wouldn't be able to tell you this story. If I hadn't bought those left-field seats in the sun at Royals Stadium or had bought some sunscreen I probably wouldn't be able to tell you this. Heck, I probably would have taken my trip another time if I did my homework because I preferred watching the Royals at night.

I could find stuff to do during the day, but at night, at 20 years old in Kansas City, by myself? I wasn't that adventurous.  No, I'd be a prisoner bored in my hotel trying to find something on television with a pizza, a six-pack of Coke, and a box of Twinkies or Ho-Hos.

So anyway, I would up at this movie theater and decided a movie was a good idea. It'd be cool inside. No sun. And maybe if it was a good movie I'd forget about the sunburn, at least until I tried to fall asleep with my sunburned skin rubbing against the rough hotel sheets.

At the time the theaters still had that new theater look, heck, the whole strip mall it was part of still looked new, although at that point it had been there for six years. Part of that area's redevelopment. It was amazingly different looking, disorienting from what remembered during family vacations years before.

If it sounds like I'm being vague I am. It might not be that hard for you to figure out what movie theaters I'm talking about, however, customarily, when talking about abandoned places where urban explorers have been, one is vague about where that abandoned place is, and I want to honor that code.

These theaters opened in 1986 as part of the Dickinson Movie Chain, closed for a couple of years, then re-opened as a second-run theater that tried to give people a night out for less money than renting a video at Blockbuster. They closed for good in 2014.

The night I popped in to see a movie, the Dolly Parton James Woods movie "Straight Talk" was showing. According to IMDB, the plot revolves around a woman who ditches her small-town life for Chicago and becomes a sensation as a radio host. Yeah, I pretty much chose that movie, because radio. Anyway, keep scrolling to see this now very abandoned Kansas City area movie theater. A place where I spent a couple of hours back in 1992 as a 20-year-old on his first solo road trip.