i'd love to. there are tons of them around here, i'm just too chicken of pests and shit.

the only time i got close was walking home from school once. there's this old, yellow house across the street from where i usually walk. i crossed one day, stepped up onto the porch through all the kudzu, only to find the door boarded up and entirely immovable. great disappointment.

I've never found anything cool, so today I decided to leave something in an abandoned house. It's a clue leading to this very thread, though I doubt it will be solved, assuming whoever finds it even cares enough to try.

Protips:

1. Bring a flashlight and a crowbar. You never know how the lighting will be, and you never know if a closed door will open again.
2. Remember that the abandoned property may still be owned, which means you are tresspassing. And if you take anything, you may be stealing. The legality of treasure hunting is dubious, but that's half the fun!
3. I shouldn't have to tell you how to talk to police officers. Use your head, it may be the difference between a warning and an arrest.
4. Never treasure hunt after dark (see 3).

Anything I might have missed?

Exploring abandoned buildings is something I've always wanted to do what with my interest in amateur photography and all. But there aren't many I know of around here.

Also, I don't fancy bringing a tool like a crowbar to get into places. It's like building rape.

Also also: http://abandoned-places.com/

Last edited 11/08/13(Sat)08:40.

I would love to, but there aren't any abandoned buildings around here let alone ones that would make good photo shoots.
Back when i was very young there was this old mill, but it's been changed to a housing estate now.

I have a fascination with them, to me they have a very nice serenity about them.

>>1165 I don't fancy bringing a tool like a crowbar to get into places
It's not for getting in, it's for getting out.

You never know when a door is going to close behind you, and if you're going to be able to open it again. One-way locking doors are rare, but it's a legitimate, potentially deadly danger you should be prepared for.

Hey, it's also a handy deterrent for belligerent hobos.

>>1167
I concur, good point. I'd still regret having to use force though.

The closest I've come was occasionally sneaking onto an office building floor that was under construction. I'd eat lunch and watch the cars pass beneath the window-holes, like an effete white-collar Charles C. Ebbets subject.

I love stuff like this. There are these warehouses in my city that caught fire last year, and I used to spend a ton of time creeping around and taking pictures like an idiot. There are these huge piles of scrap metal everywhere and homeless people hoard stuff under the floorboards.
Pic is of what appears to be supertoothy pacman grafitti'd on one of the walls.

Last edited 11/08/15(Mon)22:57.

>>1170
Am I the only one seeing this?

>>1171
Oshi-
I swear I didn't see that when I took the picture.
(I think it's a piece of pipe or metal or something, but still...)

>>1171
It's...kinda cute. I think it's a lamb-crab-person : 3

Well, once upon a time we came across a curious abandoned house. In fact we had got a nice ruined building not far from our uni, but it became a favourite place for recreation for too much people, so we decided to find a new one. The place itself was filthy as hell, with syringes scaterred all over some rooms, and rats lurking in garbage heaps behind the building. But what was rather interesting about it was its elaborate structure. I am not keen on architecture so I cannot describe it properly, but there were really lots of crooked corridors and rooms of irregular shape, and there were no staircases there, so we had to use palette boxes to climb from floor to floor.
And the best thing about that place was a graffiti on its roof. It was as striking as an encounter with Aztec Monkey in the game.

Hm. My post has disappeared, but the pic can still be found in src. Sure some paranormal activities are occuring here.

In my town there is an abandonded residential care home (Where old people were dumped by their families) The building itself is fairly large and situated next to a sports facility. Even though it is quite big it is still fairly hidden and I didn't know about it until recently when a friend of mine told me that he would go in there to smoke weed and chill out.

The first time I went with him he gave me a "boost" up to a second floor window which he had left unlatched from the previous times he had visited. After I got in my friend laid down a few logs and pieces of scrap metal and pulled himself in as well. The building was badly lit due to a lot of the windows being boarded up but the inside remained almost unscathed, apart from the third floor which had caught fire and was pretty much fucked.

The rooms still had beds and chairs, the kitchen still had cutley and glasses and pieces of paper littered the hallway along with broken shards of glass from people smashing the windows in the doors. It is a fairly spooky place to be in at night but one of the most poignant memories I have is when I first saw the "bathroom". The bath was a turqouish colour and had these huge metal mechanical arms with leather straps (presumeably for helping the elderly in and out).

(I didn't have a camera at the time but this picture is the only "shot" I can get of it from Google Maps Street View. The part that you are looking at is the "main entrance" and we would go round to the left of it and, after a first trip, go through a back exit which we had left propped open)

Newb to the board. Might as well jump in head first, since this is one of the few interesting threads I've seen...
I've done a lot of urban exploration, as it's usually called, over the years, and it continues today. I usually follow the "take only pictures, leave only footprints" maxim, but I collect old lighting and electrical fixtures, and I will take these if the place is already being hit by metal scrappers or if it's about to be demo'ed. First rule of exploring is always "don't go alone". Best bets are with two to five people; any more and getting in gets tricky. Most places in the US will only kick you out if there are no "no trespassing" signs.

I'm about 50/50 believer/skeptic when it comes to paranormal stuff, but I have seen a few unexplainable things in my explorations, and I'll post a few here, in separate posts for easier reading... These places where odd things have happened are in the extreme minority. But if you feel unsettled going in, even to a place you've explored before, it's not at all uncommon for abandoned places to just set you off - this doesn't mean something paranormal is going on. Hope you like long stuff, so you've been warned... I'm verbose, but I hope this stuff will be interesting.

First place I remember was just down the hill from my house. Trees covered the entire front, you could NOT see the house at all from the street - you had to duck under a canopy to get to the door, which I never could see. The house had begun to collapse in the back from rot, and the owners were living in the basement: guy, mentally unstable teen son, gramma, guy's bud and guy's bud's girlfriend. Son and gramma used bedrooms on the main floor. Gramma died (in her room, apparently). I used to see the owner and a neighbor sitting in lawn chairs out front, drinking canned beer. When neighbors complained about the rear tilting, the city sent an inspector-- who came when only guy's bud was home. He let them in. They condemned the house, and demanded that the owners get permits, demo, and clear the site in two months. Instead, they took anything of value (meaning money & jewelry), boarded up the house, and left. Two months later, some friends and I went for a look. The lawn chairs were still in the front yard. Turns out we could never see the door because there was a steep flight of concrete steps up to it.

We unscrewed the board over the door into the sun porch and climbed in. It was FULL of old junk. We must've spent twenty minutes alone exploring the 4' x 10' sun porch! Then we tried to go in, but the front door only opened about 10"...because the living room, and every other room, was full of junk to a depth of maybe four feet!! The kitchen cabinets were full, drawers pulled out and overflowing with stuff! The bathtub was FULL OF BLOOD-- oh, wait, it was hair dye, the boxes were everywhere. The master bedroom was the only one with a bathroom & closet, and had a six-foot heap of junk filling the room (under which, we later discovered, was a bed, up at a diagonal due to more stuff under it!) The bedroom closet was empty save for a pair of skis! This room also contained a creepy Walter Keane-ish "waif with huge eyes" velvet painting. Sonny's room had smashed windows and walls decorated with gory metal album covers. The back bedroom was mostly in shambles due to the collapsing wall, and contained a perfect horror film set: a rusty metal chair surrounded by huge, dusty floor-to-ceiling cobwebs.

We ended up bringing home loads of stuff: a full set of china, some nifty Catholic icons, some lovely light fixtures, the old door chimes, all manner of stuff from the kitchen drawers ranging from dice and Zippos to old Crackerjack toys, some lamps, etc.

On one occasion, a friend wanted to check it out, but I was busy working, so I thought it'd be neat to give him my cellphone and have him call me and do a "remote explore". I walked him through the house until he got to Granny's room, at which point he yelped and thumped around. Phone went dead. Called me back, said he was outside and there was a big guy (homeless) snoring away in there! I dragged my tail down, knowing the only exit was the front door (back was heavily boarded, and we hadn't yet found the tiny kitchen trapdoor to the basement, it was still buried). We went in together, heard nothing, made a bunch of noise, still nothing. Went in there, and there was a sort of 'dent' in the junk, but no guy. We were wierded out, but I continued the tour. 1/2 hour later, we climbed into Granny's bathroom, and I tried to get the light fixture... and my bud isn't shining the flashlight on me. I look back, and he's standing in mid-step (stepping down off the heap of junk to the bathroom floor) in a position you physically cannot hold without toppling forward. He looked terrified. A moment later, he "unfroze" and fell into me. We ditched, fast!

Later on, metal scappers found the place and began ripping it apart to get at the pipes. I tried to go in, but it felt REALLY unfriendly. A friend did go in, and she took photos; Granny's room has some "orbs" but they may be dust. However, I snapped a shot of her and her BF out front, and it has a white fog and a big hazy dark spot.

A month later, someone who told us he was a family friend came and bulldozed the whole thing. We stood by and watched, wierding him out by pointing out objects we recognized and saying exactly where they were in the house. Today, it's a gravel lot, but I think most of the smashed remains are in the basement, filled in with gravel.

Next one as soon as I type it up.

Nearly forgot, regarding the first place: the back yard was all ivy, and when we walked back there, it went crunch. Ivy shouldn't crunch. Turns out, under the ivy were all those empty beer cans, in garbage bags. I guess the guy never threw anything out! We also took a thermometer off the wall on the back porch and found another older one UNDER it!

Another house was called the Elliot House. Google that, you might find photos. It was a huge old farmhouse, the remains of a long-gone farm, white in color, and several attempts to get it restored had failed. It had been abandoned since, I dunno, the 70s, and in the 80s was known as a party spot, being out in the valley in the boonies. In the early '00s I and some friends made a number of trips through it, and it was in awful condition but still had that "faded glory" thing going on. On our first visit, we met a guy who had a big metal prefab building there, and told us we could "fall through the floor" all we wanted, but do NOT go near that shed! A month later, the shed was gone... we think it might've been a grow operation. The house was three stories including the attic, plus a basement, which had satanic-ish graffiti on one wall in red, and Christian graffiti in black countering it on the opposite wall, funny stuff - oh, and lots of old cans and bottles. The garage out back was built for carriages. Nothing weird happened until our 5th or 6th visit... The house had two staircases: one, just inside the front door, led upstairs, while the other mirrored it on the other side of the same wall, ending in the kitchen. That room also had a staircase into the attic: it was the way the servants got downstairs without disturbing the house. This room (2nd floor) had its window board - all the windows were boarded except those in the attic - nailed at the top, but it bent outward and had a short length of 2x4 holding it open, presumably for circulation.

On this visit, we brought some newbs. After seeing the crumbling back porch, they declined to go in. We noticed the board was no longer braced open, and pointed this out to them, explaining that it must mean there were other visitors. Once we got upstairs, though, it WAS braced open, and in fact we saw our friends wandering around the yard; I'm still kicking myself for not yelling down at them. Why? Yeah, when we got outside, it was shut again. On a later visit when I wasn't there, three guys were climbing the stairs from the basement, and each got a bump to the shoulder in succession as though someone was passing them walking downstairs. The house was torn down last year. Sadly, these explorations all occurred before I began carrying a camera every time; these were usually spur-of-the-moment, "Hey, I'm bored, wanna go to the Elliot Mansion again?" so I never did take photos.

Yes, don't bring a crowbar. If you must, bring a cheap screwdriver you can ditch if you have to. Bring a flashlight, wear a dust mask, and if a floor looks unstable, chunk a chair or something in there. If it falls through, be glad you didn't walk in there. If you suspect there may be squatters, unless they're strung out or truly crazy, chances are they want to be left alone, but you can bring a pack of cigs. If you give a bum a smoke, he may be willing to tell you about a place: how to get in and out safely, where not to go, etc.

This one is a place I never actually explored. It's located at Union & Terry, just east of downtown Seattle; I don't mind giving the location because, unless you can convince the new owners you're professional paranormal hunters or something, you probably won't get in. I have no idea what it's being turned into, but it WAS the First Hill Care Center, at various times a clinic and a nursing home.

The building is a squared "C" shape, with porches screened by louvers (now removed) on the recessed front wall, air porches for elderly who couldn't go downstairs easily. My favorite exploration partner took me there with his GF, who used to work security there; at this time it was unused, but fenced and locked. The building was "unsafe" and security only went in as far as an office and a restroom, walking a beat around the outside. Her boss only came by once a night, so one night after he made his visit, she headed into the cafeteria for a look. She started to go upstairs, and says that at this point, she got a feeling so powerful she could put it into clear words. It wasn't oppressive, or scary, or anything like that, but the message seemed to be, "You shouldn't be here. You do NOT want to be here. Time to leave now!" She left and went back to her office.

The patient rooms had no curtains any more, and the hallway lights were on, so you could look up and see the bedside lights and the tracks for privacy curtains. The ground floor was all lobby, cafeteria and intake area. The patient rooms' windows all had a big center pane and two narrow side panes which probably swing open. Back faces an alley and, while back there, we all watched in amazement as only the far right pane of one room slowly fogged up; it was fogged on every subsequent visit! On a later visit with two other friends, we were standing in the alley, looking diagonally up at said fogged window; about a foot to its right, inside, was a wall. And as we were looking up, a "shadow person" (all we saw was a silhouette) walked left to right, and vanished behind the wall on the right, where we knew there was nothing but a corner! I know I took a hardcore-skeptic buddy there, and I know we saw something small, but I can't seem to remember what it was...

On my next visit, the building had begun to be renovated; windows were all either boarded or covered with asbestos-removal plastic. While walking by the corner, we heard a loud BANG! inside the 2nd floor, sounded like a door slamming shut. Shrugging that off, he carried a camera and he wanted to take photos, so he did around the back and sides... except, when he tried to photograph the front, it refused to close the shutter. Turning to either side or about-face, it worked fine. The front, being recessed from the street, was VERY dark, so we assumed there wasn't enough light, and crossed the street to stand under a streetlight. His camera still wouldn't snap when pointed at the building! He finally got it to work on a manual setting, resting the camera atop the construction fence for stability since he didn't have a pod, but nothing unusual showed in the still somewhat blurry shots. Excepting manual setting where he opened, waited, and closed the shutter manually, no setting on his camera would take a shot of the front - must've tried for ten minutes straight.

Again, no clue what it's becoming now. I never did get inside, and the place gave off creepy vibes, but it was NOTHING compared to the next location...

Last is the longest, and this place is still there. This was the wierdest place I've ever explored. It's located in the Seattle area, across the lake. Beware, if you thought my other posts were long...

This story starts in 2002, when some people I knew pointed me to this house. It is completely choked with trees and brush, and can only barely be seen from the street, by day, if you're on foot and look, or at night if you shine headlights straight up the driveway - being white, it reflects light. It seems to have been abandoned for at least 20-30 years before then. Downhill about a hundred yards, you can look up diagonally and see the side of the house at the top, a roof peak and a small window minus glass. They swore there was a ghost in the window, so we went at night... and you could easily see something white swaying in the window. 2nd visit, one guy brought one of those coffee can-sized spotlights that're claimed to be a million candlepower, and THAT made it look like curtains blowing. So out came the binoculars... and at close range, you could see NOTHING, just a dark window, even though others could still see the movement with the naked eye. The gate to the driveway had a chain and padlock (and a faded No Trespassing sign) and we clipped that off with bolt cutters... and I swear, the house itself briefly flashed as though a light had reflected off it! All of us saw and commented on it. The only one of us with any info on paranormal stuff suggested the lock might have been a ward, keeping someone/something inside or out of the property, but I have no idea. The rest of the exploration, actually, was uneventful; the living room's floor was collapsing into the basement, the window upstairs was high over a staircase and had no curtains or anything, and none of us got creepy vibes or saw/felt/heard anything odd, unless you count the many Mason jars full of ancient canned veggies and fruit on the basement shelves. Mmm, forty-year-old peaches... We did not have a camera. The only thing we couldn't get to was the front door; we went in the back, and to the basement door on the side.

Cut to, oh, 2004 or so. Got some new friends who moved from out-of-state, they wanted to go exploring, so I took them there, but during the day. Just as we were about to climb in the still-open gate, a minivan stopped and the driver, a guy in his 30s, rolled down the window. The woman in the passenger seat never spoke. He said, in a somewhat fake curious tone, and spoken slowly, "You're not thinking of... going IN there... ARE you?" Uh, well, we were just looking-- "It IS marked no trespassing" True, true. Do you know how we could contact the owners and get permission, I asked? He gave us this weird smile and said, very slowly, "...THAT... MIGHT be difficult...", rolled up his window and drove away. Needless to say, we left.

Cut to 2008. I told a guy I knew about the house, while discussing our mutual interest in abandoned buildings. He had a bud with him, and we drove by at night for a look. I had him turn around across the street, and shined my flashlight up the driveway so he could see the corner of the house... and his bud in the back seat almost lost his dinner. Said he caught a huge wave of nausea. A week or so later, I drove another friend by, and we didn't need a flashlight, because the moon was reflecting off the white house, giving it a nice eerie glow. I love that effect. Only now, there was a shiny new chain and padlock on the gate. Only after we drove away did I look up and realize there was no moon out. Finally I got the message: there was something wrong here. A guy in a tabletop RPG I was in claimed he and his buddies were a "demon hunting team". Rolling my eyes, I told him I knew of a really, really creepy abandoned house, and told him the backstory. Wanting a look, I took him out there. Here we are, rolling up a winding, wooded road, with no streetlights and no indication that there's a house anywhere. Just as I'm about to point out the driveway on the left, which you won't notice unless you stop, he stomps on the gas! I ask what's going on, and he says, "I don't know, but... BAD! On the left, right back there, bad, bad, bad!" I told him that's where the house was. He told me he'd 'get his team together'.

A week or so later, we met there; I had called two friends who claim to be sensitive, and they were halfway there when I arrived. We stood outside and talked about the house. Half his team had already gone in; finding the driveway impassible due to bushes and having no bolt cutters, they had climbed through the woods at the other end of the property. The girl who told me she was the head of the group exuded "Pompous!" from square one. I had had a dream a week or so before that was completely unlike my other dreams, and contained what I thought might be a guardian of sorts, so I asked her about it, just to see what she'd say. She told me the (very male) creature in the dream was her, coming to me to get my aid in going through this house-- and my bullshit meter exploded.

She and the rest of the team climbed on in, and I waited for my buddies. When they arrived, I called one guy, who came out and led us in; this route went past a greenhouse, which contained some unopened boxes of stuff that I'm told may have been a poor attempt at starting to make meth. Now the house's FRONT door was accessible, but the back door and basement door weren't. The house was in about the same shape as it was in 2002, didn't seem to be taking a LOT of damage and the roof wasn't leaking - it WAS still weathering, it was just not crumbling. And wouldn't ya know, once again, it was singularly un-paranormal, despite all the other creepy shit that happened on and around it from outside! Someone else had brought a camera, and she got my email so she could send me photos. The leader sat on the staircase, and told me that ghosts, spirits and demons are all attracted to her, so if I took a photo of her I'd be sure to get lots of stuff! The girl took three shots of her. Nothing showed up in any of the photos... especially not those!

One more post coming...

One place we explored in which we took LOADS of photos was this place, way north of Seattle, now demolished. Nothing paranormal occurred here-- well, not exactly.

See photo. This house was HUGE. It contained at least five bedrooms; a covered roof patio; ten fireplaces/wood stoves - these included one on the roof patio, a tiny woodstove in the kitchen, one in the guest house and one on the guest house's rooftop deck; three spiral staircases; intercom with stereo speakers and coms in every room; central vacuum, a fancy long-tube doorbell in a recessed, arched niche (I wish, it had already been removed), swimming pool, garage, two barns, a HUGE property behind...

The house was wood and stucco over a steel pipe frame. The basement rec room had two steel pipes running up, which were hidden by a square wooden column with illuminated glass panels in the sides. The basement had a BBQ and fireplace, a huge bar with a cultured marble top, and a cedar-lined sauna and showers. A curved stair headed up to the ground floor, which had two living room spaces with fireplaces. A huge kitchen had two sinks, a huge pro fridge, a curved leather banquette with an island and electric BBQ, and a nifty mural of a bullfighter made of mirror tiles. The two-story foyer was divided into front and back areas by a massive curved staircase with iron railings - there was wrought iron everywhere. There were loads of closets, every lone lined in cedar. ALL the secondary bedrooms had a vanity with a sink and mirror, and we joked about it maybe having been a bordello, because one of the living rooms had a separate entrance with a retail store-style glass door - that room also had a huge curved leather seat around the fireplace. The master bathroom had a shower with five showerheads, one of them confusingly mounted almost at floor level, and the bathroom for the other bedrooms had a huge jacuzzi tub. A sort of gallery went all the way around the 2nd level of the foyer: on three sides, hallways from the bedrooms and a window looking out from the master bedroom, on the 4th side windows facing an outdoor catwalk from the master bedroom to the roof patio, which then had an iron spiral stair down to the ground. This place was glorious!

On a later visit, we found several light fixtures gone. Uh oh, metal pirates looking for scrap! So we set about getting everything of interest: intercom panel, stereo speakers, the MANY light switch and outlet plates which were faux hammered iron, the huge "wrought iron" (cast aluminum) door handles... only to look out the back, and see a pick-up truck in the back by the garage--!!

WE put down our swag and strolled out, cameras in hand, and talked to the guy. The apt. complex next door had bought the property, intending to demolish the house, and he'd be getting the salvage contract as of the next day. He said we could have anything we'd already removed, but call him tomorrow and we could take everything we wanted. Seems the former resident was a widow, and the house was foreclosed on about five years before. He also claimed that the house was haunted, hence the lack of squatters or scrapping damage - the ghost scares them off. We never did feel anything in there, but he said he'd been in many, many abandoned houses at all hours, and he would NOT enter this one by night--!

Called the next day-- and he said the old lady wanted to get some personal photos (they were all over the kitchen table) so the bank granted her a few days. We kept calling. Then she got sick and needed more time. And more. And suddenly we got a call-- Now, it's extremely common for people whose homes are foreclosed to steal everything of value and/or wreck the rest-- "If I can't have it, the bank can't, either!" I understand the anger, but... It seems this lady, being old, had been unable to do this, but (assuming the new owner intended to sell the "nice house" for a huge profit) had taken this opportunity to send in some help to do the job for her. The guy told me someone had destroyed the house, and I mean DESTROYED it, but had left the street-facing side looking good. He had been told, he hadn't seen it himself, but the sheriff told him when he patrols, so he told me, "If you want anything, get in there and get it, and don't get caught! I won't be getting a thing." We snuck in at night - formerly, we'd always explored it by day. And y'know what, did NOT get creeped out, it felt as relaxing as it did by day. We even went back in the dark sauna, which we'd never done before. And... oh, wow...

...they had bashed holes in the walls. Knocked in intercom panels. Smashed lights. Demolished the mirrors and walls in the bathrooms. They rolled an armoire down the stairs so that it knocked out some of the ironwork, then hacked it to bits at the bottom. All the drawers were removed from the kitchen and bathrooms and were then thrown through every window, after which they ripped the window frames out of the stucco and bent the iron security bars. The cedar was all hacked up. The basement bar was smashed. They had opened the lid of a phonograph in the rec room, ripped down the ceiling and wall over it, then shut the lid again. The drawers and every chemical they could find in the garage had gone into the pool, which had been filthy enough before, and old paint was slopped on all the concrete. The only sign from the front was the removal of a huge lantern, which had been smashed out back!

In the end, they DID leave some stuff. And after removing the front door's fancy handles, we discovered dragons on the bottom - they had been installed upside-down from the start! We did not take more photos then, wanting to remember the house the way it was before the destruction--

Attached: The house, from the street. Note big iron lantern on the wall on the right and their personal streetlight! The roof patio was under the plastic roof at the top right.