In North Charlotte was an abandoned warehouse. It was run down and derelict. The place has not been used in decades.
Southern Railway and Seaboard Coast Line Railroad used to own it jointly. All sorts of materials and goods were stored there. It was about 25,000 square feet of indoor space. Side tracks on the front and one side were the loading stations. The warehouse had loading docks here to transfer cargo between the warehouse and rail cars. Behind the warehouse was a large old unkept cemetery with weeds, shrubs, trees, trash, and bums. A dirt road through it went to a large back garage doorway in the warehouse. The Satan’s Skull gang had used this dump for a hideout for nearly ten years. The dirt road was an excellent secret entrance and escape route for gang vehicles going and coming to and from crime jobs. The building was dirty, dusty, and overloaded with cobwebs and rodents. It was built of brown brick. The windows had wire mesh in them for safety. Some were broken by passing vandals. The metal bar truss roof was tin covered. Cement columns were white on top and red on the bottoms. Chipped sections were evidence of impacts by vehicles that were driven carelessly. Pigeons and swallows lived inside the leaky warehouse roof. Their droppings were piled up everywhere on the cement floor in a nasty mess. There was a row of offices along the back wall with bathrooms and a lunch area. This was where the Skulls held court. The front wall had ten garage doors. They were ten feet by ten feet steel hinged openings for trucks. The inside was littered with trash, empty cardboard boxes and wooden crates. Wooden and metal shelves and racks were there near the left wall. A stencil had been used to spray paint gray skulls in many places both inside and outside of this warehouse as a marking the building officially as the illicit property of the Satan’s Skull gang. They had named it the Skull’s Castle.