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I started urbexing a few weeks ago and I’m just curious about how other people got into it
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TBH I couldn't say of one specific source, but a lot of little ones.
When I was really young, there was a park in my home town that to access, you had to walk under an overpass for a fairly busy freeway and a train line. I always thought that being under those was cool (and just a bit scary) and when exploring the more wooded areas of the park I found some small but neat finds such as an abandoned zip line. fast forward to midddleschool/highschool and there were always rumors of cool abandoned farmhouses out those always peaked my interest but were always called meth houses or homeless camps by classmates so for safety I never bothered to visit them. A bit after that I found a few YT channels I grew to really enjoy watching (Shiey and The Proper People come to mind) With a few classmates before graduating Highschool I ended up doing 2 infiltrations and the rush was such a blast. (one got us very very close to getting caught by police) I've always had it in the back of my mind that it would be something I wanted to do but until fairly recently never seriously looked into.
The abandoned is a beautify and interesting thing to me and understanding and learning about it is something I hope to do by being a Urban Explorer
-Toba o7 | |
most of the stuff i've done has come through friends who share an interest or through my own curiosity and desire for thrill. i think most people on uer could relate to identifying as a thrill-seeker. curiosity really does kill the cat -- at least i think, most people seem to have enough brains to not get hurt here.
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Weird New Jersey back in like 2003. Then some local forums until I started meeting more people.
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Was thrift shopping with a friend and we ran out of stuff to do, decided to go to a spot I'd heard of previously and we found that it was still open from a previous visitor. We didn't explore the entirety of the structure but that ended up being the main start to urbex for us.
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It was in my blood for as long as I can remember.
The Urbex Zine Guy
https://www.cavecl...wtopic.php?t=12259
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My origin story has a bit of intrigue. Though I had visited an abandoned farmhouse as a teenager and had spent a few childhood summers playing in construction sites, I didn't learn about urban exploring until I moved away from my hometown.
Shortly after I moved to Korea, a friend back home told me over MSN Messenger about urban exploring and got me interested. Shortly after that, a suspicious person contacted him trying to learn more about the city's UE community, and really wanted to contact as many explorers as possible. He was suspicious of this person because their story about meeting was full of holes ("It was last Tuesday" "I didn't meet anyone last Tuesday" "You were pretty drunk" "No I wasn't").
Being in another hemisphere, I had a pretty airtight alibi for absolutely any possible accusation, so I agreed to let this person contact me and I'd claim to be a leader of the local UE community in an attempt to find out his deal. At the time I suspected he was a journalist, and my friend thought he was a cop.
So I was put in touch, and this guy was primarily interested in asking me for more contacts. He might have asked me if I had gone to a particular site. I was feeding him a story about planning to go in a tunnel under a government building, and I was planning to tell him the next day that I had found a dead body, and see what kind of mess that would kick up.
But when I logged in next, his profile was missing. Finally I found it, renamed as "THIS ACCOUNT HAS NOW BEEN HACKED."
Other explorers had gotten to him first. Turns out he was a private detective hired by a site owner looking to prosecute as many trespassers as possible.
After that, I heard from newer friends over here that Korea has some abandoned buildings, and was soon brought to see some examples for myself. I later found out they were understating it.
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I always liked ruined castles and the like (living in the UK there is an abundance of them), and I can distinctly remember as a child when we would walk our family dog there was a derelict thatched cottage in a village very close to my house that I was always interested in looking at. There were also a couple of abandoned terraced houses in the next street to mine as a kid which I would always stare at when going past.
In about 2005 I stumbled across the Derelict London website whilst looking for photos of old abandoned cars, and then I saw Cane Hill Hospital, found the early days of internet forums, and I was hooked - I was an armchair explorer until June 2009 when one of my friends from another area of my life told me he was really into urbex and asked me if I'd like to come along to Hellingly Hospital one weekend...and the rest is history.
June 2024 will mark 15 years of me exploring, I do wonder what my life would have looked like had I not taken that step.
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I actually got into it through my dad. He was friends with Ninjalicious, the creator of infiltration, back in the 90s. He showed me the infiltration website and from there I started trying to explore for myself.
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A window.
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When I was 5 years old I started looking down into storm drain grates in the parking lots, streets, ETC because I was curious to see how deep the shafts were and I've seen some fairly deep shafts but I was never sure how deep they were. I also enjoyed throwing random stuff down the catch basins (curb parts) just to watch it fall down the shafts and hear the cool sounds of that item hitting the bottom and if there was rushing water, I like to see the items (cans, bottles ETC) floating away and splashing in the water. Ever since I was 5 years old I've always wanted to go into a storm drain since I was little but I was too scared to go into dark tunnels back then because I was little and I have autism. Well my dream came true when I finally got to explore my first storm drains and I loved it ever since I was little! I've been exploring storm drains since I was 25 years old (10+ years of exploring storm drains to be exact) and to this day I still very heavily explore storm drains on a regular basis and I haven't stopped yet. This is a hobby I don't think I'll stop doing anytime soon because I feel that exploring keeps my body in shape and keeps my mind working if that makes sense. I'm a very psychically active person and I have to keep moving because I'm very hyper and adventurous.
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i grew up in a mining town where the mines had closed in 1973 and there was all this infrastructure that was left. Only recently have the last structures been demolished.
that and I am nosey fucker.
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Posted by Samurai
i grew up in a mining town where the mines had closed in 1973 and there was all this infrastructure that was left. Only recently have the last structures been demolished.
that and I am nosey fucker.
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Honestly my favourite response to the question sometimes asked, 'why do you do urbex' is to reply with a succinct 'because I can'.
Also 'because I'm a nosey bastard' gets used intermittently.
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The basement of my old middle school was a former fallout shelter used by the school district for storage, and there were a lot of dark corners I'd sneak away from after school clubs to poke around in. A few years later, teenage me would ride my bike around town exploring back alleys, fire escapes, and under bridges. That led me to UER, and I've been here for nearly a decade now.
[last edit 10/18/2023 6:33 PM by Aran - edited 1 times]
"Sorry, I didn't know I'm not supposed to be here," he said, knowing full well he wasn't supposed to be there.
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Scratch that... this old reply to the same question says it best...
My dad drove a truck, hauled natural gas all over the Southeast. I spent a lot of time in the truck with him from the time I could consistently not crap my pants until I was a teen. He liked old barns and farmhouses, and taking the back way. A few of the industrial places we went to had old unused sections that we would explore for a bit after unloading. I guess I got my wanderlust, my love of hole-in-the-wall diners and bbq shacks, and my love of old abandoned places from him.
[last edit 10/19/2023 12:39 AM by Wheedle - edited 1 times]
*insert witty quote here* | |
To be honest it was kind of by accident. There was a spot we would go to in highschool up on this hill with a bunch of radio towers. We noticed one didnt have a fence or security so we climbed it. It was probably only about 300 feet or so. We got that adrenaline, and were immediately hooked. We started mainly with radio/water towers. Then went to rooftops and added things like abandoned buildings, rooftops, A LOT of caves, drains, etc. Pretty much anything where you are somewhere you know you aren't supposed to be.
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To be honest, one of the strangest and creepiest stories of my life.
Back in 2006 I went to visit my family for Christmas. It was cold and dark, but there was no snow, which is extremely rare in that part of the country. This meant, that it was even darker.
I was still 17, but my family had bought me a car for my 18th birthday. I wasn't allowed to drive yet, but wanted to go on a ride anyway. So we went with my family.
We decided to drive to a village, where we lived in 1992-1993. I hadn't been there in 10 years, and when we started approaching it, I started feeling very uneasy. There was a sort of a tickling sensation starting from my lower spine gradually growing all over my body the further we went. Suddenly I saw a large, white building with a tower in the darkness. I was literally frozen with fear.
I asked my family later what the place was. They told me it was a former slaughterhouse, but it had been abandoned already by the time we lived in the village. I asked, if anything happened there, my family said no.
I couldn't sleep that night. I lay in bed and thought about my childhood a lot. And finally I found a memory. It was a very hot and very humid summer day, so hot, that you couldn't drink a glass of lemonade without breaking sweat.
My mom's cousin was babysitting me, and we had gone to the grocery store. Thunder was rising and the sky was turning very black very quickly. We walked under a railroad bridge, which made hissing sounds every time a train had just passed or was about to pass. A train had just passed.
After the overpass I looked straight to the tower of the building, which was rising towards the black sky. And I never walked past the building with my eyes open again.
I turned 18, I got my driver's licence and drove several times to the village with the slaughterhouse. I went there alone, I went there with my friends, but I just couldn't get past the gates to the area. Every time I was frozen with fear.
Two years later I was battling severe depression. I didn't leave home, I drank too much. Every night I had the same dream: I destroyed everything. My friends lost their loved ones because I couldn't keep their secrets, they died because of my shortcomings. And every time when things were really bad, I started running. I ran until it was dark and I was standing on stairs in front of the tower frozen in fear. That was when I woke up.
Finally one night my friend arrived with three bottles of wine. She said, that I will drink until I give her my car keys and we drive to that village. At around 1 am we left. My friend promised to come with me, but a night train had just passed, and the bridge's hissing scared her too much. She told me to go alone, so I ran until I stood on stairs in front of the tower.
I went in. I was so afraid I could only hear my heartbeat and my own blood rushing in my veins. I climbed the stairs to the top and suddenly found my inner peace. I sat there for 45 minutes drinking wine and daydreaming, until my friend called me asking if I was alive.
For one reason or another this experience brought me back to life and I started doing things again. A year later I told this story to a colleague. She told me she had worked for the museum authority photographing old, abandoned buildings and that we should go to this village and document the house. That was when I found out that abandoned places are lovely and fascinating.
And here we are, almost 300 locations later...
Deserted Finland - https://desertedfinland.com/ | |
When I was a kid, my dad would take me to check out old abandoned family farmsteads in Southwestern Minnesota where he grew up. We'd go in the homes that he spent so much time in as a kid. He'd tell me stories about memories and we would take a little relic, like a piece of wallpaper or a door knob. Later, when I was in high school, I started checking out all the abandoned houses I could find. I didn't take anything, I just liked that they each had their own story, just like the ones my dad took me to. Naturally, this led me to searching online and discovering that I wasn't the only person who enjoyed this sort of thing.
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Well I don’t remember exactly how, but as a kid I always had a fascination with history and abandoned places, and the two kinda go hand in hand because abandoned places can be “time capsules of the past” of sorts. I officially went to my first abandoned place freshman year of high school, which was a massive aluminum recycling plant. It was super neat with multiple levels and spanning over a massive area. That really kick started my love, and ever since I’ve been researching, finding locations, trying to get my friends into it, etc lol
just someone hoping to escape it all | |
I went to explore this rumored “haunted” house for the first time with a group of friends. It felt like we were living in a movie. After that, I wanted to romanticize my life like a movie and stay away from the mundane normal lifestyle. Urbex creates adventures that most people don’t get to experience.
[last edit 1/29/2024 12:58 AM by BatsandMines - edited 1 times]
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