I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one on MA that enjoys snooping around in places I'm not supposed to be and I figured this "hobby" deserves a thread of its own. My interest in exploring abandoned places began when I was still in high school and curiously chasing after ghosts and haunted locations. While I try to shun that little ghost-hunting phase from my memory, I still have a great time going to old, secluded places and absorbing the eerie atmospheres. Just the thrill of being behind a fence with a "no trespassing" sign and stealthily creeping around to avoid attracting the police makes the miniature road trips worth it. Though it is inevitable that you will run into police if you make a pastime out of this, you will more than likely escape any criminal punishment as long as you respect the property and any neighbors around it. I've gone on a dozen or more of these trips and only had two encounters with the authorities. The first time was just stupidity on my part as I had parked my car in a well-lit area... I returned to the parking lot to find two deputy sheriffs waiting for myself and my friends. We were threatened with vandalism charges only because some dumbass kids we didn't know apparently knocked some wooden fence posts over while we were out exploring. However, we were let go with just a warning. The second time I was busted, I had been walking around a two-lane country road looking for an old train bridge said to be haunted. A cop pulled up to us and questioned what we were doing. We improvised a story that our car had overheated and we were just killing time walking around while the engine cooled off. To my surprise, the officers bought the story and even gave us an ride back to our car. I wouldn't recommend bullshitting the authorities if you get caught unless you have experience dealing with them. Like I said- most people really don't care what you're doing as long as you aren't breaking things, stealing, or being loud. Don't panic if you're approached by the police.

As far as the places I have explored, there are two locations especially worth blogging about. My most recent was the Chippewa Lake Amusement Park outside of Medina, Ohio. Apparently, it was a big attraction back in the day. Now it is mostly demolished and overgrown. Getting into the park was an adventure on its own. There is only one way into the park which is through a gap in the fence. There's a lake to the north and the rest of the perimeter is surrounded by a densely populated housing development. For every single person we spotted- we got a glare from them. It was in mid-summer so everyone was sipping cans of beer on their front porch. And it didn't help ease their suspicion that I was walking around in a Vital Remains t-shirt and my friend a Carnifex shirt (inb4 "ZOMG, scene fag!") and we were among radical Conservatives with pro-gun signs posted on their windows. The friendliest [and only] greeting we received was from a skinhead passing us by on his four-wheeler. He gaves us a Nazi salute and we just kinda waved back.

We eventually end up at the main gate. Too bad it was closed, locked, and had razor wire at the top of it. We stood there looking for a way in all the while trying to act like we had no intention of breaking in (neighbors were watching us). Luckily, an attractive girl from Akron Uni. was parked near us and gave us a tip. She got out of her car just to lead us to the spot in the fence that we could slip through. We went through and had to walk through a maze of thick woods before finding the once-developed amusement park. Most of the structures were reduced to piles of rubble but they were big piles of interesting shit. There were remains of a wooden roller coaster track and some of the cars. Meh. Move along.

My friend and I did come across an old car in the woods that looked like the site of a wreck. It was obviously totaled and beaten in enough to make us wonder if somebody had actually died in it. My friend tried to pull the steering wheel off to take as a souvenir. He failed. In retrospect, it probably wasn't where somebody wrecked. I've been to fairs and other events like that where vendors bring in junk cars and let you beat the shit out of it with a sledgehammer for some cash. That was probably the case, here. It was still an exciting find at the time, though.

One of the few structures still standing was a pretty big ferris-wheel. There's a massive tree that grew through the ferris-wheel so it obviously hasn't been used in a long time. There wasn't much for us to do with it but stare at it for a minute or two. If I had a camera, I would have taken a picture of it because it did look kinda cool. My friend was going to try climbing up to one of the seats but that wasn't going to happen and I knew it. I wouldn't even attempt it even if it was practical because I'm not ballsy enough to confront my fear of heights. So we moved along.

We found our way to some piers and stood on the lake for awhile, watching some monstrous fish jump out every once in awhile. We smoked a cigarette and decided to check out some more demolished buildings. We didn't come across anything else that interesting. It seems like the hudreds (if not thousands) of other tourists who came through to explore the park since it closed already grabbed every artifact there was to take. We discovered one of the buildings was probably unintentionally burned to the ground at some point. A lot of the material in the pile was charred black and burnt. I did remember reading about that somewhere on the internet...




Anyway, I just spent a good thirty minutes typing this out and I'm at the library so I have limited time to do my other internet-related chores. I know I mentioned how I have two decent stories and that I only mentioned one... I will post about that later today. So for naow, everyone will post their related stories so I have something interesting to read.

Cool thread. When I was younger (about 11/12 years old) my friends and I used to try and get into "forbidden places". Places like other schools, fenced off storage facilities, giant villa backgardens etc etc. It was all in good fun though, and more often than not we didn't even set foot into a truly private or abandoned building/place. I never done anything like that again, but the subject does interest me a fair bit. Maybe I'll try and get into it a little more.

If there's no freerunning, to me there's no deal.

Well, you could still try freerunning up the part of the roller coaster track that's still standing and leaping across the gap.

Just use common sense and you'll be fine. I don't know how old you are, but you could always carry a camera on you so that if you get stopped by the police you can play the "I'm an innocent college student who is going somewhere in life... do you really want to fuck that up?" card and just say you're doing a school project or something.

I used to snoop around dark and very shady areas of the city with my friend. While I still enjoy walking through them on my way to a certain destination, snooping around and exploring is something that proved to be more dangerous than it's worth. I would not advise it.

As for harmless trespassing, I seldom did that. I'm too much of a fucking pussy with a conscience. Besides, I go to lawschool.

I'm 19 years old, but it doesn't really matter. Dutch police are (normally) very laid back.

Nice!
I use to do it because I like to walk (in the country or not), the creepy places, taking photographs and I use to ride my trail motorbike looking for nice places!
This one is a roman time mine (it has been used after using industrial methods too) we explored before it was, recently, opened to the public (though, not entirely):
http://www.arditurri.com/English.asp

http://67.205.124.70/c/3/d23e7cc0-6002- ... 2009e9.JPG

http://67.205.124.70/c/3/68cf827b-bf3c- ... f9cb35.JPG


Uhm... not so nice. LOL!

I go a fair bit with friends and the girlfriend around the suburbs of Melbourne, we usually use this website as a guide where to go:
http://psalmantics.blogspot.com.au/
Good fun too.

The abandoned cement plant in eastern Oregon, off I-84 near Durkee makes for an interesting day trip... I took a bunch of pictures a couple years ago but I haven't tried to go back up there recently. Tresspassing was never encouraged, but there were no real signs or fences when I was there.



There are a number of abandoned and semi-abandoned old mining towns in central Idaho. Some you can visit and wander around freely, some have a caretaker and a few token residents who restore and keep the place up. Rocky Bar, Yellowjacket, Bonanza, Silver City, Bayhorse, and De Lamar in Idaho, and Cornucopia over in eastern Oregon are a few I have been to and photographed. Nevada reportably has quite a few more such places.

Empty places, what are we looking for? Abandoned places, I guess we know the score.

A friend and I used to go to this construction zone where they mine shit. Every Wednesday afternoon there's a rumble from the pit which is an explosion from their mining so we decided to check it out. We were nervous at first because the people that work there apparently have been known to chase kids off the property, but that didn't happen to us (at least not the first time). We would get in there by walking under an overpass, squeezing through a fence and taking a short walk down a path. It was pretty cool at the time because we could basically do whatever we wanted as it was a Friday night and there was only one guy (I think) on the property about a kilometre away in his trailer doing blow or whatever. So we climbed on this fuckhuge pile of just rocks, nothing else. It had to be about fifty feet high, it was massive. We spent a half hour there throwing rocks at bits of machinery before we got bored and decided to climb the machinery. That was fun and all but we saw a truck coming in from the adjacent waste treatment facility so we got the hell out of there.

I haven't been there for months, though. Last time I checked, the fence we had to squeeze through was reinforced so now you have to climb a hill up to the overpass and race traffic and jump off on the other side.

Seeing this thread has sparked my interest again so I may end up going again soon to take pictures to post here.

I used to do this all the time as a kid (8-15, so we're talking up to nearly 20 years ago) but job, music and family and the changing times have stopped me doing any exploration too recently. The best place I used to go with one of my friends aged about 9 was an abandoned stately home about a mile away from our old school. You had to go through a load of woods and bogs to get there, then through some overgrown former private gardens where all the old topiary had totally gone 'back to nature' so you'd have these giant outlandish overgrown bushes everywhere like a Tim Burton movie or something. When you got there, the first thing you could see were the old kennels where they kept the hunting hounds, complete with rusty chains and cages, and the groundskeeper's cottage which was totally collapsed. You couldn't get too far into the house itself, but for us the most exciting part of the site was an old delapidated caravan parked in some bushes where a hobo had been or was currently living. He was clearly living off the land because there were animal bones around the place and loads of spoiled food in the caravan itself. We never saw them, but someone was clearly coming back periodically because things would be moved around each time we visited. The whole place had this great eerie atmosphere.

I was about 13 or 14 I think when I went into my first 'forbidden area.' I grew up in a shitty little town called Waterman, which was home to a tiny distribution center for a company called Nations Pizza (super cheapo frozen pizza) that went under. My buddies and I would go palsing around and adventuring looking for cool stuff to do, and one day when we were walking down the one damn alley-way that Waterman had to offer us, we stopped by the back door of the place. I thought it'd be awesome if the place was unlocked, so I gave it the old middle school try and turned the door handle. Without much force at all, I heard a snap, and clink on the other side of the door, and it opened right on up. We spent the next week so messing around in there and exploring all the rooms, and it was awesome. Unfortunately about a week later, we were walking to this place to see a guy screwing a padlock to the outside of the back door. The place has since been demolished. We had a good time putting on the labcoats and yellow coverall cleansuits that were in there. Never did find the keys to the fork lift, thought :/

probably the best website for urban exploration and draining, covers sites across the world, so surely you could find something from your area on there

http://sleepycity.net/

any people from brisbane who are up for draining send us a PM as ive explored a few of the tunnels under the city and surrounding areas and always interested in finding more people keen on the idea who arent CC or Urbex (nothing personal against the groups, just i prefer discovering the sites myself and the rush that goes along with it)

There's an abandoned subway system around the city. I've been down there a few times, its pretty cool. Probably the best place to check out some graffitti. Only thing is you need to watch out for bums/drug addicts/other creeps who might be hanging out down there. There are also some abandoned buildings around that are cool too, such as a tuberculosis clinic and a hospital (which I believe is really hard to get into, security is hard to get past but I've heard of people managing to sneak in).

id suggest this docco on the abandoned and semi active trainlines in new york, quite interesting how the homeless have made there own community http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0235327/ (movie is called Dark Days)

theres a town in Illinois that was evacuated a while ago, I want to find this place and explore it.

there was a place like that in Pensylvania as well, Centralia; which is somewhere up in the Appalachian mountains. It was a coal mining town, and somehow the entire underground coal seam caught fire; there was no way to extinguish it, and they had toxic plumes of carbon monoxide and smoke coming up out of the ground right in the middle of the town. They evacuated the whole place and now it just stands empty; I think you can still drive through it but I don't think anyone lives there. I guess the coal seam is still smouldering underground and emitting fumes.

It would be a total trip to visit the Chernobyl area; that place had over 66,000 people at one time, and now it is just a maze of overgrown high rise apartments and abandoned stores and schools. They do have tours that go there now, but basically the place is pretty intact since people are understandably afraid of the radiation. The whole once-modern city is just slowly crumbling and being reclaimed by the Ukrainian forest- how black metal huh?

I've been to Centralia a couple times, never stopped to look around though. A portion of PA Route 61 leads through Centralia and on a couple of occasions we drove through - there are almost no buildings at all. Quite eerie.

My brother and I explored this old abandoned factory in the middle of my town today, it was great. Pretty much every area looked like a potential album cover for The Axis of Perdition. It was about 3 stories high, and we used ladders (improvised or normal) to get from place to place.
Someone had also spray painted on a wall saying that a girl we know is a slut, we thought that was hilarious.

Turns out that place we explored has a large amount of asbestos hahaha

I really wanna go visit the Takara Hotel at some point while I'm in Japan:

http://abandonedplaces.livejournal.com/2026855.html

Quite the story behind it:



I found out about it because it's on the big long list of places the USMC has banned us from going on Okinawa, lol. Me and some fellow Lance Criminals who are fresh out of fucks to give might go check it out anyway.

I've posted pictures before in the landscape thread of a place called "the flats" outside Virginia City, Nevada which is an old cyanide mixing plant or something. I've also attempted to visit an abandoned military facility near Kramer Junction- about an hour away from me on Hwy395. Unfortunately there's a ten foot barbed wire fence and a security car and I wasn't able to check it out or get any good pictures.

When I lived in Seattle I used to go to ghost towns in Washington and Oregon. Really cool stuff. I felt like I was in Silent Hill.

When I was in Japan, there were tons of cool places to go to that were abandoned. My favorite was an abandoned asylum. It was out in the woods so it was really creepy. I saw these glowing eyes bounding around. Not sure what animal it was but it was cool. And the indoors area was creepy too. The art and statues that decorated the place were all demonic and creepy looking. Not even sure if it really was once an asylum or if that was just based on word of mouth, but it was really cool whatever this place once was.

I also went to abandoned schools and allegedly haunted houses in Japan. I didn't go to any of the cool abandoned amusement park type areas. That would've been so badass.

I wish I got out more and did stuff like this, but the only stories I have are from when I was really young at my babysitters house, her daughter took us into the woods and showed up this area her and her friends used to hang out at, and then some other kids came and fucked up their little fort hammering wrestling action figures into the tables and trees they made. At the time the area was a little creepy to hang around,e specially when I went back with only one or two other people. The woods were on a dead end and that's the street my babysitter still lives on, but whenever I pass by it it feels like a ghost town, no one is ever home, never any cars in the driveways on the streets, fisher price jungle gyms and outdoor toys from the 90's that are worn and beat up like they have been sitting int he same place for ten year, one house still has tables setup from a yard sale they had over ten years ago that my babysitter took us too, always gray, houses with wood panels that are rotted, that road isnt an abandoned factory, but it feels really dark going back.

I remember seeing that Virginia City abandoned factory pic and thinking it looked pretty cool to check out. Along the 1-80 corridor in Nevada, there are a couple places like that which look cool that I've always wanted to check out- like the old Toulon mill (which is all abandoned and creepy looking) and that wierd ass Indian fortress thing outside the Imlay/Mill City area. I've heard Nevada has all kinds of cool stuff like that.

By the way, the abandoned military facility outside Kramer Junction... if there is a security patrol vehicle and a 10 foot razor wire fence- chances are it may not really be abandoned! We've got some wierd military stuff here in southern Idaho too- with the INEEL over towards Pocatello and some of the ICBM sites (plus some bombing ranges and radar tracking places) out towards Twin Falls.

Definitely. I've heard of an abandoned insane asylum too somewhere out by Elko or Fernly... I forget which, I've never been. That could explain all the crazy bums in downtown Reno I-80? I've only taken that as far as Sparks so I don't know too much in Eastern Nevada. 395 however has tons of abandoned hotels, smaller factories, gas stations and the like which are fun to explore and right off of the highway.

Unless there's some super-secret, highly classified underground facility in that one location, I doubt it's being used. It's probably fenced off because junkies like to steal sheet metal and the like to by their dope. I'm considering sneaking in at one point, parking the car five miles off in the desert and hiking in at night.