Posted by spetsnazbear This. I personally have run into this many times living in southern WV. We are currently contemplating a op on a house, but we cant tell if its abandoned or if some low income person or hobo lives there.

Drive by it at night and see if any lights are on. Or, drive by it several times throughout the week and notice if any cars are there.

I get some locations on the internet and do my work on google,but for the most part I drive and drive and drive..I found some good places that way

I look for

1.Overgrown driveways (obvious in warmer months)

2.Boarded anything (no durr)

3.Just a look of emptiness (not always appropriate as some people are just slobs)

Sometimes in an old village,I will even ask the old timers if they know of places.I once got an excellent lead this way to a gorgeous old farm house owned by boarders.The people in the area were actually scared to go near the place (better for me)

Great tips here, thanks for posting.

Dunno bout you, but I`ve lived in cities with a lot of urban development, so there's always a construction site going up with some decently tall building. I can post some pictures later if you like.

edit: I walk by big construction sites all the time, but they're not usually that fun until later in development, when most of the building has gone up already.

some photos (it was dark, and i only had my phone to take photos with1.


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Great thread guys! Really informative. I am trying to establish the status of a few places near me. One place is missing all it's paint, overgrown weeds, just looks like shit but their is a newer car parked in the driveway always. There is also another that is boarded up and in rough shape yet someone still does lawncare and garbages possibly.

this is what i need.. i struggle to find places

Posted by ThatTeenPhotog (First post!) I unfortunately live in a small town like 45 minutes out of Cleveland. We really don't have any thing abandoned. In a couple years though when I'm driving I'm planning on spending a lot of time in Cleveland. Fucking goldmine. This is helpful though! Every time I'm in a big city I just look around, it's not too difficult to find places.

im stuck in lima.. i wanna go to that mall in cleveland. one of like 3 places i know of in ohia

Posted by Remora I agree - it took me a while to find this thread, and it is super-duper! I'm living in Lyon, France for the year, which is an incredibly old city with umpteen abandoned/not-open-to-the-public buildings around, but as I'm not experienced I wasn't even sure how to go about finding places to explore.

i just found it and like, this is just a gold mine of motivation honestly.

there was an app called abandoned that had pretty much every single abandoned location in the US and Canada on a map. I think it's a bad idea personally because it gives people who want to ruin the place all the help they need

I love these suggestions!


Here's a good one that I don't think has been mentioned:

There are tons of real estate apps out there that allow you to filter all kinds of results. I use an app called Zillow. I filter out all of the actual houses and look for LOT/LAND sales only. About 1/3 or more of these results actually have structures on the property, but they are deemed basically worthless, or the area is being rezoned for commercial, etc. Zillow also allows for keyword searches that provide results with limited to moderate success, (i.e. "value in land" sometimes is helpful). This works great in areas of expansion, because the developments are constantly pushing out the homesteads and farmhouses. I've found a lot of places this way, (and many of them have been demolished by the time I get to them, unfortunately). This works particularly well if you live in an urban area that is expanding at a decent rate of speed.

The rail road suggestion is also one of my most used tools, along with Google Earth/satellite.

Most of my findings come from getting in the car and driving around from small town to small town. In doing this I have a few things that I have started to look for. Sometimes they pay off sometimes they do not. But I thought I would share them here. These may not be ground breaking discoveries, and they probably do not apply everywhere, but they come in handy in my parts.

The photos are just pulled from Google Earth/Street view, so I apologize for the quality. Actually they might be better than some of mine that I take. lol

1. Old culverts/driveways to no where. I have seen a lot of culverted driveways leading off the road that seem to lead to nothing but trees. Sometimes these are easy to spot, but sometimes they are overgrown as well. The culvert and drive might be completely hidden, but I have started to pay attention to even smaller details. In the below picture there is a very slight remnant of a drive way, more so you can see just a few inches of asphalt that at one time tied into what was probably a gravel drive. Looks like absolutely nothing there right? When I see these I try to snap a pic with my phone, I keep location services turned on for photos for this reason, then when I get to a computer I will look the location up on Google Earth.

1. - Arrow pointing to old driveway.

So yeah, in photo one there is nothing there, but Google Earth reveals in photo 2 a nice place to visit in the future.

2. One arrow pointing to old driveway from previous picture, second arrow to old house.


2. Power lines to no where. Every so often you can see some individual power lines that branch off the main lines only to vanish into a group of trees. Those are not electric trees. You might not be able to see it from the road, and there might not even be anything there anymore. But at one time those lines brought power and happiness to a building that once was occupied. Also, the mentioned group of trees sometimes hides something. There are a lot of farms and ranches in these here parts. Sometimes if you see a grouping of trees in the middle of a field, there might be a building in the middle that has been vacated. But, most of the time it seems that these groups of trees are just, groups of trees.
1. - There are actually two houses in those trees. First arrow to power pole, second to group of trees.

3. Vehicles. I was all set to pull up to and check out this one house. I drive by it at least twice a week on the way to a client site. There is this old abandoned looking truck that was always in the same spot. Last time when I was about to check it out I noticed that dang truck had moved to the back of the house. That could have been an awkward explore… Pay attention to details. Notice the vehicles and if they have moved, do they have foliage grown around them?

4. - Seriously how can this not be abandoned? Truck actually was not there in Google Earth, it is in fact shown parked in back of the house. I swear that truck has not moved in months. lol


Hope this helps.

something I do that I did not see mentioned:

Download google earth to your computer and use the time hop feature. Its useful in understanding a layout for a campus where some of the buildings are gone. I find it to be really useful for scouting as it gives a birds eye view for all different times of the year for a span of up to about 20 years. It makes mapping forests easier too.

Posted by Kil.lil something I do that I did not see mentioned: Download google earth to your computer and use the time hop feature. Its useful in understanding a layout for a campus where some of the buildings are gone. I find it to be really useful for scouting as it gives a birds eye view for all different times of the year for a span of up to about 20 years. It makes mapping forests easier too.

Same goes for Google Maps street view. The date of the imagery should be in the upper right corner. Click on it and you can see previous street views. Make sure you're not using the "light" version of Maps, I don't think it displays the date. This doesn't work on a mobile phone, unfortunately.

A few more search tricks:
MyMaps is another Google gem. Sadly, they killed the search option in the Maps gallery where you could search actual maps made public by others. There are a couple workarounds and you can still search for maps of others:

Open the Google search engine (this works on some other search engines as well) Search: inurl:mymaps urbex(or whatever keyword you want to look for in the map title or description)
Don't put any spaces at the colon - only your keywords are spaced. I used MyMaps as an example of a specific site search but you can replace that with whatever site or constraint you choose.

This last one I only recently discovered and it has a lot of potential. Google allows you to make your own custom search engines. Here is one I made specifically for finding exploring maps:
https://cse.google...513855:jg_kxirwvqi

There's a near infinite amount of info one can access if you learn some basic search techniques.

Supplemental to the last post:

I have recently noticed that sometimes I get different results when I type in site:blahblah.com instead of inurl:blahblah.com.

I'm not totally sure why, but I think it has to do with opening up the parameters to search other sites that simply mention the site in your query and not limited to only that site itself.

If your really want to limit that site command, add the www. to your blahblah.com (site:www.blahblah.com space and your search words no commas), and you will only get info from that particular site and nowhere else.

BTW, these are only a handful of tools and a fraction of what you can do with Google (it's a little scary, actually) searches. type "google search tools" or "boolean search commands," into your search bar and see what comes up.

It'll blow your mind.

Oh, and a lot of these work on Bing, but not all of them do. I'm not sure about the other search engines.
Duckduckgo has been good to me in the past as well, offering a slightly different perspective. Duckduckgo seems more diverse in its general searches than Google or Bing, but that's just my opinion. Oh, yeah, Duckduckgo tries a little harder to maintain your privacy - at least to a greater degree than most of the other big ones. Sometimes we might need that extra discretion when looking up ... certain places.

(I'd probably prefer Duckduckgo to Google if they had all of Google's wonderful search options included. Not all of these tricks work on the other search engines, unfortunately).

Thanks for the tips! I'll definitely have to check these ideas out.

going on a drive every once and a while helps finding some fresh abandonments

Geocaching members can filter caches that are hidden near abandoned sites. Atlas Obscura directs to some good ones too. I love finding flickr images with co-ords.

Capital gems.ca is a map of abandoned places, mines and caves around Ottawa.