“Five years on from his death, Michael Jackson’s fabled Neverland Ranch still stands as a hollowed-out effigy to the fallen King Of Pop and still acts as a constant reminder of the most controversial element of his career.
In 2005, Jackson abandoned his Californian residence and private amusement park after his acquittal on charges he had molested children at the 3,000 acre property, two years on from the estate being searched by squadron of Santa Barbara Sherrif’s Department officers, a major ‘violation’ according to Neverland’s owner.
By 2006, the Ranch had reportedly gone into foreclosure proceedings, leading to a sticky financial saga that would dog Michael Jackson until his death in 2009. In the time where Neverland was left unattended, frozen in time, as Vice reports, “a group of photographers snuck onto the grounds and explored the abandoned kingdom, returning several times between December 2007 and March 2008.”
The trespassing shutterbugs, who choose to remain anonymous (and are humorously referred to in the Vice article as Leonardo, Raphael, and Donatello), captured a powerful range of images of Michael Jackson’s abandoned home, indelibly creepy yet giving a previously unseen intimacy of the pop star’s dream of a perpetual Peter Pan fantasy land.
The photographers visited most of the 10-room mansion, including “the arcade, the mansion, the amusement park rides, the railroad train station, all of the statue areas … all kinds of crazy shit in the garden” but didn’t visit the built-in zoo “because it’s so far away” from the main property.
They also visited the kitchen (with a “menu, on a permanently-printed chalkboard with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and macaroni and cheese”) and spied Jackson’s ‘playroom’; “it was maybe 60 feet by 30 feet, and filled with every toy you could imagine. Life-size Lego models, Darth Vader—all sorts of awesome toys,” says Raphael. Plus a fully decked out videogames room (speaking of which, do these photos remind anyone else of Bioshock’s Rapture?)
The images also reveal “the strange hodgepodge of shit that he had bought that didn’t have any relation to his house. His entire house was filled with these expensive looking, one-off, semi-artistic things.”
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The foursome also discuss rifling through Jackson’s personal property – including memorabilia and fan mail – but stopped short of visiting the private quarters of the pop star, which were the subject of his high-profile court case of the time. “We did go in Michael’s room, but both of the kids’ rooms were locked from the outside,” admits Donatello; Raphael adds: “We decided not to get into the kids’ rooms, because it didn’t seem right.”
The strangest thing the snappers found in the property? A 60 foot wide mural of the Neverland logo of a “little boy in pajamas sitting on the moon” which was branded all over the property; “It was on the signs, on the bumper cars, it was on the coach station where they parked the coach, one on the ground.”
View more sneaky insider images of Neverland and read the full interview over at Vice. 
