Growing up there was only one house in our small town that sat empty with all the deceased owner's possessions left behind.
From time to time, kids would go in to look around.
With urban environments and major economic downturns, large swaths of cities around the world have abandoned homes, businesses and public spaces.
The urban exploring hobby was spawned then expanded greatly with the advent of social media giving explorers a place to share their photos and videos. Some areas are interesting time capsules, while others are creepy scenes from our darkest imagination.
Reddit user notmyrealname004 asked:
"People who explore abandoned places; what’s the weirdest/creepiest thing you found?"
Shelter
"A homeless man sleeping on the 8th floor in a back room of an abandoned hotel."
"He pretended to be asleep after we clearly woke him up."
"Probably scared him as much as it startled us to find him. We just left after that."
~ kgb17
Copper Shop
"I once ran into a full blown wire stripping operation. Just 3 dudes sitting in a 3rd floor processing room in an old asylum."
"Piles of plastic wire coating on the ground and a giant birds nest of that sweet, sweet copper wiring. It was pretty cool."
"They were actually pretty chill once they realized we were just 16-year-old kids looking to do some illegal artwork."
~ Cautious_Ability_771
Scary...
"There's a long bike path at the top of the street I grew up on with a strip of woods separating it from the nearest highway."
"When we moved in, our subdivision was only about half finished and the rest of the lots were construction sites."
"Some of the older kids who lived around us used to tell us about a weird guy who would sneak around our neighborhood and look in people's windows at night, but we never believed them because we thought they were just making sh*t up to scare the new kids."
"One night I was staying over at my friend's house and we stayed up really late playing Halo on the original Xbox. It was storming really heavily outside, and we decided to sneak down to his kitchen to grab some more Pepsi, hoping his parents wouldn't hear us with all the noise outside."
"We were standing in his kitchen after grabbing the sodas when there was this huge flash of lightning, and we saw a guy standing in the middle of his backyard in the storm staring straight up at us through the kitchen windows."
"We ran upstairs, but when we looked out the window to the yard, he was gone."
...But...
"We didn't really talk about it after that night and figured maybe we just imagined it because neither of us wanted to admit being scared sh*tless."
"But a couple weeks later we started exploring the woods around the bike path and found a kind of weird dug-in fort full of a lot of stuff that appeared to be stolen from the construction sites around our neighborhood."
"One of the things we found was a pretty distinct And1 Mixtape basketball that belonged to my friend. It went missing right around the time we saw that guy watching us from his yard."
"Right as he and I locked eyes, we heard what sounded like a grownup thundering through the brush and trees so we ran out of there as fast as we could."
"We didn't even ride home, we rode our bikes maybe a mile and a half to our elementary school before we stopped and it seriously felt like we had just escaped something really bad."
...True
"I stayed over at his house again the next weekend, and when I went to ride my bike home the next afternoon, both tires had nails in them, and his And1 basketball was sitting on the driveway next to his hoop, and it had been slashed open."
"The next week, my parents left me at home to go to a soccer game with my brother and sister and someone rang my doorbell while I was playing Unreal Tournament on my PC. My parents told me never to open the door for anyone, but when I yelled through to ask who it was, they said it was the police, and I could see a few cruisers sitting across the street."
"When I opened the door, they had an older guy in handcuffs, and they asked if my parents were home and if I knew the man. I told them I didn't, and my parents would be back soon."
"I later got the full story from my dad which was that the guy had been messing around in the under-construction house directly across the street and somehow managed to cause enough structural damage to collapse in part of the second floor. When the police arrested him the only thing he would say was that he was friends with the kid across the street."
"That was the last I ever heard of it, but I'm pretty sure he was the one that was watching us through the windows and who popped my tires."
~ MikeOxbigg
Dumping Ground
"A few thousand brand new AA batteries, here 37°25'15"N 76°47'04"W"
"I lived in a semi-rural area growing up. Once I got a car I'd just drive back roads, sometimes literally all day, all across the eastern half of my state. I'm just wandering down this old a** dirt/gravel road and I see what I thought was a super deep black hole in the road."
"As I got closer I realized it was actually just a massive pile of f*cking AA batteries, probably six feet across. It looked like they were just spirited there by a wizard that morning, I never saw a single other human on that road."
"They were Kodak brand, of all things."
"I took a few dozen home and they worked fine, so the next day I went back with a huge plastic container and drove the 3 hours again and grabbed probably a thousand. Unfortunately they must have gotten wet, they only lasted about a year and they started corroding and lost charge."
"They were so sh*t too, I'd get maybe a week out of them in my Xbox 360 controller. Gave away so many as well."
"A few years later, looking at Google Earth, I realized there's a recycling plant about half a mile away. My theory is someone wanted to recycle them, but got turned away due to the chemicals or something, and just dumped them there."
~ napleonblwnaprt
Records
"Abandoned hospital last used in the 1970s that still had file cabinet after file cabinet of patient records. Apparently they mostly treated patients from a nearby asylum."
"The entry I'll never forget is 'Patient 1873 bit her nurse today. Please ensure she is restrained during feeding times'."
"It was an actual name, not a patient number, that I'm purposely not writing."
"Reading through some of those was way creepier than the morgue and incinerator in the basement."
~ JeevesTheRunner
Prank?
"An abandoned armory that was about five levels deep underground."
"One room was full of headless mannequins (all standing) and the other was a room with just one chair and a doll sitting in it, facing the door."
"I'm trying to imagine someone bringing almost 30 mannequins and a doll to an abandoned underground facility JUST for a prank, seems truly insane."
~ digitalWizzzard
Dark Arts Class
"One time I was drunkenly exploring an abandoned building outside my college town with four friends when a group of five cloaked people slowly walked in in a straight line with the one in front holding some sort of walking stick?"
"One of them- a girl, says 'hello' in the creepiest f**king way possible. I grabbed everyone and jumped out the side window and ran."
"In my infinite wisdom I returned the next night with other friends not telling them what I saw and went to the side of the building where they came in from."
"There was another smaller adjacent building (think like a really large shed) filled with what I assume to be satanic type writings on the wall, with bloody pikes around but nothing on them and a corner full of black gunk."
"This time a security truck with high powered lights came by but we jumped in a bush and got away."
"Ah, good ol' college days."
~ danxy29
Secret Stash
"A client of mine back in New Jersey had bought a restaurant space and wanted to dig out the basement so he could put in sinks, plumbing, freezers, prep area, etc... When he got the place the basement was literally like 5 feet tall. So you'd have to duck the whole time going anywhere in it."
"The crazy thing though was that it was still laid out with doorways and stuff so there were clearly delineated rooms. It also had no electrical whatsoever, so there were no lights."
"Well I had to go over there one day to do site measurements and was told to measure the basement in its entirety, which I was dreading because it was spooky as f*ck already and I'd only seen it from the bottom of the staircase."
"As soon as I got in there with my flashlight, I'm going through the space avoiding cobwebs and scaring myself with my own f*ckin' shadows."
"I go into one of the rooms and it is piled from floor to ceiling with old pornos. Tons and tons of VHS tapes and magazines."
"We ended up having to get two dumpsters to handle all of it. My boss kept a big box of it."
~ cheeseburgerwaffles
Hidden Flame
"While exploring the desert we found a campfire deep in a mine entrance."
"The room was not filled with smoke so it must have been recently lit but the mine was far into a desert so there were not many places a person could hide. They could not have been further in without gear as there was a big hole they would have needed to traverse."
"We explored for a little bit but decided to not stay due to it being an older mine, the campfire, and not having the climbing gear and a climber with us."
~ not42sure
Hazardous Materials
"Huge amounts of exposed asbestos insulation in buildings on a former Nike Missile site."
"We opted to stay out of those buildings."
~ ARandomPileOfCats
So That's Where They Go
"A basement where the entire floor was covered in socks. Not just a few socks, but a 12 inch layer of loose socks."
~ ORNG_MIRRR
Treasure Trove
"Worked with some really cool people at a deli , who at night would all go explore abandoned places together."
Explored an abandoned house and found a bunch of Freemason stuff from what seemed like the 40s. There were fictional books with notes written in them on the lessons to be learned , some clothing items, tons of paperwork."
"I was with my boss at the time, and they didn't let us take anything, but they did take a book with some really cyprtic sh*t in it."
"Another abandoned hospital had some bloody clothing."
"In high school , there was this abandon house known as the 'hoarders house' (HH) that had been left alone for 30ish years. During a house party near the HH, some kids (not me) broke in and found a bunch of civil war memorabilia."
"Everything from rifles to coats , journals , hats. It was a real trip through time."
"Unfortunately, that incident caused a bunch more people to raid it , and the house was eventually torn down."
~ Polarpituh
Fasteners
"A huge pile of buttons and zippers by a giant pipe outside what used to be a psychiatric hospital and later a TB sanitorium."
"Apparently the patients were dressed in disposable clothing which they would flush down oversized sewer pipes when it, uh, wasn't needed anymore. The cotton rotted away, leaving the fasteners in a big pile."
"This was from the lobotomy and electroshock age of mental health care. The hospital still had a sign for the 'Phychiatric Surgery' wing."
~ MrSnappyPants
Have you ever explored abandoned places?