I thought this would be a fun topic to discuss. What was it that got you to start exploring? For me, it was 4 key elements combining together. The biggest factor was driving past an abandoned mental hospital regularly, and being curious about its secrets, which leads to the second factor, curiosity. As a child I was always curious, whether it was exploring a forest or the neighboring abandoned house in which the residents perished, my curiosity has always been there to push me to explore. The third was, as stated previously, exploring the local abandoned burned house. It acted as my first explore and a kickstart to the hobby. The final factor was seeing videos or pictures of other's explorations online. This acted as an eye-opener to the hobby. How about you?

I grew up next to a long abandoned factory. The neighborhood kids and I would play paintball and hang out there when we were like 12-13. Then around 16-17 I found out about other places by word of mouth. I was mostly into the solitude and eeriness at the time.

Father took me to an apartment building one day when I said I was curious about it, sparked kind of an obsession

I've always thought abandoned places were fascinating, exploring the history and things left behind, watching nature retake what we 'borrowed'. I also like traveling, and taking pics. Urban exploring also offers a relatively cheap outlet for all these things (assuming, of course, that one doesn't get arrested, eaten by a bear, or has to drive several hundred miles to a site).
Years ago, I read a short story by Dean Koontz that took place in an abandoned town that had died due to underground mine fires. After doing research, I found out this town wasn't authorial invention...so I decided to explore it. Since then, I have really gotten into urbex, and have explored several locations. (Sooner or later I'll start posting pics here) The name of the album I use on my computer for these pics is called "Abandonment Issues", it's a pretty addictive hobby!

I was on the set crew for the school play in middle school, and we assembled the sets in the basement of the school. The basement was fairly extensive and mostly unlit, having been originally built as a public fallout shelter designed to hold thousands of people during the Cold War. In modern times, it is used as general storage by the school district, so there was several decades worth of junk stacked down there. I would wander off when we were making the sets and explore it, though nothing came of it at the time- but it did spark an interest that was dormant for a few more years.

In high school I would ride my bike downtown during the summer and poke around under bridges and among the back alleys all day. This culminated in the summer between my sophomore and junior year, with me and a friend exploring an abandoned riverside warehouse, the pictures from which I posted to UER as my first exploration. I've been exploring ever since.

I've told it before, but: in 2004, shortly after I moved to Korea, someone in my hometown started infiltrating explorer networks. A friend confided this to me, introducing me to the whole concept, and I suggested we use me to lure this person out into the open, since I had a watertight alibi if anyone tried to charge me with anything. So I talked to this guy on MSN and began feeding him bullshit stories, since my first instinct was he was a reporter. After about a week, his MSN account was hacked, and they discovered he was a private detective a property owner had hired to gather a list of explorers who'd trespassed on his property. A few months later I realised I was living in an urban exploring frontier with an uncountable number of abandoned places nobody had ever explored before.

Granddad used to take me exploring in the woods behind their house (now mine) when I was a toddler or kindergartner. There was also this shuttered (but not abandoned) gelatin factory across town that I was always fascinated with.

In 2004 a local mall that had an anchor store I was fascinated by was torn down. It was Googling that place where I came across the website, Deadmalls.com, and quickly discovered Dixie Square Mall - which had been abandoned since The Blues Brothers was filmed there in 1979. I was instantly hooked on the work of Chuck Janda and others who were filming a documentary there (which unfortunately was never finished), but it would still be another five years before I finally got to see the place myself -- what would become a turning point for my photography and the start of my exploring projects.

I grew up in NYC.

I was running around abandoned buildings and riding my bicycle in incomplete subway tunnels in the 1970s.

Never had a name for it. Just out having fun and I still am.

I have family living in the Niagara falls/St. Cats area. So everytime i'd go down there from maybe 13-18 years old my cousins would take me to abandoned farmhouses, small apartments in the city, the tunnels etc etc. That really got me into starting to look for places where i live.

From a very young age I always loved ruined castles. Living in the UK they are everywhere and I was fascinated by them. The next street over from mine had a pair of dilapidated abandoned houses sitting side by side which I was also always intrigued by, even now I can remember seeing the tattered curtains in the upstairs windows and a pile of possessions in another window. We used to walk our dog to a small village not too far away from us and for years there was an abandoned thatched cottage in it which used to captivate me whenever I went past, as a kid I'd always look through the letterbox of it.

I guess you could say I've always been interested in derelict stuff. I was an armchair explorer for at least five years prior to me making my very first foray into actual exploring thanks to a good friend of mine.

My dad was US Airforce and worked with NATO so I lived in Belgium and Germany as a kid. We traveled regularly to places like the Berchtesgaden Salt Mines, Many WWII bunkers, Castles and castle ruins. When we moved back to the states we lived near (and frequently visited) Fort Pickens in Florida.
As I got older I got involved in Scouting, and later, photography. I got into punk and goth so spent a lot of time taking pictures of graveyards and urban decay. Through URBEX it all sort of came together.

Over the last several years I've been daily riding a dual sport motorcycle and finding places to ride is much like finding places to explore. Google maps, GIS database searches, and on-site visits to see if it is worse the effort and if I can find a way in. Often times, trips will play double duty - If I find an abandonment while out looking for trails I'll make a note for later, the same is true if I find a fund dirt road or a twisty track of country road.

Posted by Radio2600 Never had a name for it. Just out having fun and I still am.

Yeah, we used to ask, "Wanna go do some stuff?"

I have always had an interest in history, castles and ancient locations. I spent my time as a child exploring the woods and moving from place to place in New England. Many of the houses I moved to were a bit "odd" or run down and two ended up becoming the "abandoned haunted house" in their respective areas. Back then in Maine there were many old farmhouses that were rotting away with distinctive turrets and architecture reminiscent of a castle that left me an interest in old abandoned buildings.

Later in college I ended up studying anthropology, archaeology and history. After graduation I eventually started to explore old ghost towns, mills and other sites and discovered UER which made me realize that this is an entire hobby with accepted rules. I then started to document my trips via photography and haven't looked back. Sadly, I did attempt to return to the two childhood homes, but one is renovated and the other 1700s home was knocked over literally a month before I arrived, and was just a pile of rubble and boards.

There was an abandoned textile mill right in the middle of my neighborhood when i was a kid and me and my friends used to sneak in.

we liked hanging out in there because adults would never think of entering and it was our own little sanctuary. somebody even built a plywood skate ramp in there.

so i never really thought twice about entering abandoned places. it always just seemed like a fun thing to do and i never knew it had a name til i started posting pics of Flickr years ago.

I grew up outside of Chicago.

The first time I heard about something abandoned was the Dixie Square Mall. In 7th grade (2011-12), our Social Studies class did a Chicago History Fair. Students could pick what they wanted to do their project on and I picked the I&M Canal, unfortunately many other students also picked it as well. Our teacher asked many of us if we wanted to change our topics. One topic that stuck out was the Dixie Square Mall. I was confused, why would he give us a topic about some random mall I've never heard of. Halfway through the project, the name still stuck with me so I actually did some research and I found all sorts of great information on it! Too bad for me, but it was too late to switch topics so I was stuck with the Canal. But that didn't stop me from continuing research with the Dixie Square Mall, I found the Blue Brothers scene, explorations of the mall and articles about demolition. I also found a gallery on Flickr of the Brach's Candy Factory which also interested me. At some point, my abandoned research died down.

Eventually I found the Proper People in 2015, and watching their videos sparked some interest in finding some abandoned places in the Chicago area. I had very little luck only finding the Damen Silos and Cook County Hospital. And in 2015, during the summer, my friend and I finally went to explore our first abandoned place, a century old farm house down the street from us, and behind it was an abandoned waste transfer station. It became our little hangout place for a while until word spread about it and the waste warehouse was trashed and some idiot closed the entrance door leaving no access inside. The house became boring because it was just a wooden house with nothing inside it and we stopped going to it.

Eventually I went off to college in Chicago and I had my friends come downtown. We ventured out to the Silos which was a failed attempt, but that's what really got us started. Now I'm all over the city and I've picked up so many locations! And just a week ago, my friend and I went to Gary, Indiana and it was a great day!

A long time ago when I was in Virginia I watched a video on Facebook about that Disney River country and thought it was pretty cool, fast forward to last year. I stumbled on that exploring with josh guy on you tube and decided to do my own research on locations and found this forum and decided on spring break of this year I was going to go to my first location:

https://uer.ca/loc...ow.asp?locid=29944

We got there as they were tearing it down and got some cool pictures and never looked back! I've been exploring and doing photography ever since.

I was always super curious as a kid, so seeing a nice open drain outfall in our neighbor's backyard was one of two reasons. The other reason was that I was (and still am) super interested in things that the general public doesn't really know/care about, or are "off-limits" to most people.

My dad drove a tractor-trailer, and I rode with him a lot as a kid in the 70's . He had an affinity for abandoned barns and farmhouses, and a few of the plants he delivered to had abandoned areas we would wander through while waiting to unload. We also made a fairly regular habit of wandering the old power plant at High Falls State Park ( Georgia ) when we went there to fish or camp. When I was 4 we bought an 1890's farmhouse. Then, we moved to Ft Lauderdale in the mid 80's. The group of kids I hung with were constantly riding all over the area on our bicycles, and exploring any place we could easily gain access to. We moved back to Georgia in 85, and resumed our occasional barn and farmhouse jaunts. In high school, I worked weekends and summers in a textile mill originally built in 1888. There were many parts of the mill that were unused, cluttered with old machinery, that we would explore during breaks and lunch. I've been doing it most all my life, just never new it was a 'thing' until the internet became so big. Now I plan motorcycle trips around places I'd like to see, and spend a fair bit of spare time scouring Google Earth for new places to see.

My father worked at Plymouth County Hospital in South Hanson, Massachusetts as an orderly in the 1980s. Upon reconnecting with my father down in Georgia when I was a teenager, he said in his own words "When I was in the basement, gathering clean sheets and walking passed the morgue, I felt like I was being followed. Once I felt whatever was following me physically touch me, I ran like hell out of the basement and never went back to work". He said a co-worker re-watched the security tape from the camera in the tunnel-like basement and though nothing was there his reaction was terrifying...

That got me into the paranormal aspect of it all. I ended up forming a paranormal research group which later led me to photographing the buildings in an architectural style and abandoning my once belief in spooky beings. I guess after so much some in asylums and the like, you just get used to creeks and cracks. Now I can just camp out in those buildings and not worry about being possessed. LOL.

Posted by Doug Yeah, we used to ask, "Wanna go do some stuff?"

I LIKE STUFF!!