Hi all, I just recently came across this forum. I am in the NoVa area. I've explored some of the more well known locations, but I am looking for some new places to go. Friends are going to be coming back home from collage over the holydays and we want to plan a trip.

The only 2 "real" urbanex locations i have been to are the reformatory and the nearby farm. I never really did it for the photography, and I almost always explore at night, so I don't have good photos but here are some:

As some of you know, the reformatory location was used as a training for firefighters and swat. This might explain the helicopter chilling on the roof of one of the prison buildings:



There where also a series of concrete sewer pipes laid out above ground to form a "maze"/obstacle course.


As for buildings themselves, they mostly just look like this:


I've also went to a big quarry pit, which is not abandoned. I specifily brought a DSLR to try to take a nighttime photo, but without a tripod, it didn't turn out good.

This photo is taken on the edge of one of the quarry cliffs. You can see the light from the processing plant illuminating the hill of dirt from the right. Later on, me and my freind walked around the quarry till we where able to get onto the road leading into it. After about 3 minutes of walking down the road, we saw headlights behind us and had to hide behind some conveniently located piles of gravel as a truck drove by. After that we got the fuck out and decided it was best to never return. Its hard to get the scale of the quarry across, but i believe some of the cliffs are around 50 meters tall.

But yea if anyone has suggestions of where to go next I would be interested. I've been looking at some of the abandoned hospitals/asylums around MD and VA, that'll probably be my next trip.

Yo bro.
Welcome to the forum.

Yah got some pretty sweet stuff there.

VA Explorers FTW.

Welcome. There are certainly some fun hospitals in Va and Md. A quick google search will give you enough places to occupy yourself until you learn how to find the good spots. Coming from a fellow Va resident, it's gonna seem hard to find places at first (especially abandoned places in Nova) but once you start to figure it out you'll be rewarded well.

Good luck and happy exploring!

Thanks guys. Do yall use google maps to find new locations, or just by driving around the area and then checking out anything that looks cool?

Most hospitals can be found with some google searches, and they're probably the easiest places to find because of that. Searching maps is most useful for finding industrial places because they're much easier to spot and will almost never come up in a google search depending on the place. Power plants and large factories are easiest to spot and can have some of the highest rewards but also tightest security. If you're good at researching stuff online, there are lots of places like hospitals and schools that are documented but won't come easily. Once you find them though, they're going to be much more untouched than any place that comes up with a straight google search. A good starting point would be to find a large institution or hospital that you know has been around for a long time and go from there. Chances are they've moved out of a building or 2, or have some unused buildings on their grounds. The NRHP can also be handy but a lot of these places will be sealed up tight or undergoing renovations. And if you ever get big into power plants, the EIA has a spreadsheet of every active and retired generating unit in the US from the past 20 or so years.
And yes, driving around will often provide some interesting places to explore. Mostly old houses but still interesting.

Those are some spooky pictures. Cool!!

Posted by volkmared Those are some spooky pictures. Cool!!

Thanks. Most of these images where either taken with a old chinese smartphone i had, or frames taken from videos. I feel like the poor quality adds to the spookiness in a way, although I do plan on learning how to take better photos in the future lol.

Posted by ryanpics ...

Thanks for the tips, i'll be sure to check out the NRHP and EIA

I ended up going to *that place* where everyone goes. Unfortunately, we only had a few hours to explore, and i haven't had the chance to return there yet. The whole place was in a poor state and had lots of graffiti. We also ran into 2 (or maybe 3) other groups of people. For context, i'v been to the abandoned prison i mentioned earlier many times, and not once ran into other people.





I was a bit disappointed, we weren't able to find anything cool like in the abandoned prison.

Every time I see new photos from this place it makes me depressed. Back in the days it was absolutely one of the best hospitals out there: Patient files, iconic shots, various things set up as if they were left. Check out the "Asylum" video on Vimeo for a better representation of this place.