1. Overstaying our welcome at Taunton State Hospital and getting trapped between workers, security, other explorers, and civilians outside the fence seeing us attempting to exit and alerting the police.
Socom Xe, Roland, and myself ran up to the burned out part and hid for a bit. We snuck back into the powerplant portion, and set Roland on lookout for seccers while the two of us looked around for another exit ... we found a basement window directly in line with the hole in the fence, but the hinges were rusted shut, and we can't risk making a lot of noise ... so we bust out our multitools and unscrew the window, call Roland back down to us, soundlessly pull the window out and placed it down gently in the cellar; hop out into this little dead garden with a stone wall in front of it. Hide on our stomachs amongst the dead plants and poison ivy, wait for the cop car to come around loop back and leave... We book it to and through the fence back to the cars and escape. That's right, a hospital we literally walked into a few hours earlier we had to commit an act of "breaking and entering leaving" to get away.

They were demolishing the location soon anyways and this was the least visible / best way out, and the window could be put back in place with six screws, so I don't feel too bad about it.

6. Following mistaken directions, trying to get into an active power plant at 4.30am on a weekday to use its tunnels, and inadvertently, apparently, setting off a silent alarm. A few minutes later, further into the same property, I am almost ready to enter building #15, when district, county, university and private cops/security all come after me. Otherwise out of options, I escape into the building, without being seen in much detail, and find a flooded tunnel. Sloshing through that in 3 feet of tunnel water, not using light just in case they looked in there for my flashlight, trying to reach another building, I stumble around in circles as the cops search the first floor above me. Thinking I had successfully reached another building, and at least finding a different exit, I get out...and run along the perimeter of an active jail, also featuring cameras. Somehow nothing comes of this, and the 4 cars worth of officers back at building #15 have started to search neighbouring buildings, apparently ignorant of the fact that their drenched, freezing suspect was already off the property. Panicked, I continued running any way I could to get away from there, eventually crossing the still mostly drained Erie Canal. (After all that, I still had my thermodynamics final in two hours...that's what I really wanted to escape)

Climbed a 50 story tower with a spiral staircase at an active (off season) amusement park. While on the roof, saw flashlights heading towards us through the woods. The only way out was run all the way back down the stairs, go underground and wait under a trap door, checking port windows on the way down to mark the guard's progress. When we got to the bottom there was no sign of anyone, so we started running across the grounds. The guards must have been lurking somewhere nearby, because some members of our group heard shouts. We crouched behind some bushes, and then saw flashlights right behind us, so we got up and ran the rest of the way, squeezed through the fence, and got off the grounds.


That and the time that i was in what was left of a tiny paper factory (had crawled through a relatively high-up window to get in) and saw flashing lights. A cop must have seen us come in and was shining his flashlight into the window we came in from. Me and my friends just walked over the other side of the building, (just out of his flashlight beam), crawled out a higher window, dropped down in front a busy intersection, and walked away.

Posted by TheVicariousVadder 1. Overstaying our welcome at Taunton State Hospital...

The best part about this is I was later told by another explorer who had a run in with security there later that day that security wanted to know who the Saturn with MD plates belonged to... it belonged to me, who had just left.

And of course I have to enter my prison escape story-


I feel obliged to lead up to the exciting part by describing the day of exploring in general, but it wasn't very different from the exploring trips we've all been on before. After a three hour drive we met in a parking lot by some ball fields, hiked through the woods to our target for the day, an abandoned prison that is slated for demolition in the future, hopped a fence, got inside and started exploring. I'm sure everyone here is familiar with the exploring abandonments routine, walk down the hall, look in the rooms, say "cool", take a picture, move on. Pretty common UE stuff, but it was a really cool place so I was having a pretty good time. Huge cell blocks, rust, decay, very little vandalism, everything you'd be looking for in an abandoned prison.

One thing to note is that in between the cell blocks was a small, narrow walkway that ran in between the cells, probably for access to the plumbing. The space extended through all the floors of the building, so if you were on the second or third floor you'd be walking on a rickety, rusted walkway two or three stories up, lit only by whatever you took with you.

Cut to the end of the day, we've been exploring for a few hours and had split up into two groups. While the other two in our party were exploring the power plant, me and Liz were in one of the main cell blocks taking pictures involving an orange prison jumpsuit that had been left behind. We're on the third floor when we hear the others coming back, and we spontaneously decided to hide inside of a cell and surprise them when they got to our location. We get inside, and before I can say anything Liz reaches out and slams the door to the cell shut.

"Um... are you sure that's going to open?"

Unfortunately I said it a little too late. We grasped the door and tugged on it and it didn't budge an inch. I've heard of people being locked inside of rooms in abandonments before, but not rooms that were designed solely to keep people inside. We were locked inside of a cell in an abandoned prison.

It was here that I discovered that the emotion of panic begins in a very similar way to grief. When I saw that the door to the cell was locked my first reaction was what is often considered to be the first stage of grief- denial. On some of the other cell blocks we had seen large levers that locked and unlocked the entire block, and it was the hope that this particular block had similar mechanism was the first thing that my mind latched onto. Liz started panicking almost immediately, but when I told her my hope that there was a lever that might unlock the cell I was probably telling myself more than anything. The levers I had seen like this were in a different building. I couldn't honestly remember if this building had them, but, at the moment, it was our only hope.

We called the others over. They thought we were joking at first, but I didn't even feel like trying to convince them otherwise, I just insisted that they check and see if there was a lever that would let us out. Long story short, there wasn't. This particular cell block had electronic controls, and the power in this building was long gone. But we weren't just ready to call 911 yet, because there was one other option open to us.

This particular cell block was comprised of cells that were made of metal. In that back of each cell was a small alcove that contained the toilet, which consisted of a molded piece of stainless steel that was fitted onto a hole in the metal that made up the cell itself. Since this particular building is awaiting demolition, that toilet piece was missing in many of the cells, including this one, leaving a small hole in the base of the alcove that was made even smaller by a pipe that jutted out of it and would have originally led into the toilet. The hole led into the space for plumbing that ran between the cells that I mentioned earlier.

I could partially see the walkway that ran across the length of this space through the hole, and I gently tested it with my foot. Not very good news, it had a lot of give to it. But there seemed to be no other way, so I was resigned to using this hole to escape until I stuck my head through and peered down the length of the walkway within. No two feet down the direction that we had to walk to get out the walkway was gone. I'm going to guess that there was at least a ten foot gap before it continued. This was bad for two reasons- one, obviously this walkway is in very sketchy shape and liable to fall apart the second one of us put any weight on it. Two- there was no fucking way to get across it in the direction that we needed to go! It was probably at this point that I felt the most panicked and was seriously afraid that we were going to have to call 911. Being pried out of the cell by some pissed off emergency workers and then taken to jail for trespassing (I couldn't imagine that after the trouble it was going to take for them to get us out that we would get off with a warning). So I put my head back through the hole and began to desperately look for any other way out that I could find.


One of the things we considered was dropping down to the level below us, but the walkway down there was even sketchier than the one on our level, it was made of rotting wood, and even doing a hanging drop would leave a good 6 or 7 feet fall before impact, which would very likely send us right through the wood into the bottom level. The walkway on our level did extend in the direction opposite the exit that we had hoped to use, but there was no way out on that side... or was there? If we could get out through the hole where the toilet was, surely there was another cell that was open and also missing it's toilet. The others went to check, and indeed there was an open cell missing a toilet two cells over, only a good 10-15 foot walk across the walkway.

Liz went first and had a somewhat easier time than I ended up having since she's a bit smaller than me. It actually took me a good few minutes to get myself mentally prepared. There are lots of explorers out there who just to climb all over all kinds of high places, but I'm not one of them. I wouldn't say that I'm scared of heights, but that I'm scared of falling from heights, which is to say that I can stand up on the Empire State Building and look down without getting the least bit scared because I'm on stable footing and there's a nice big fence in between me and the drop. But get me on unstable footing, like an ancient walkway that's rusting to pieces a good forty feet up in a narrow space in an abandoned building and suddenly I'm not quite so confident.

So after a few minutes of getting into a state of mental preparation not unlike that found in karate masters before they break a stack of bricks, I step into the hole. The walkway was almost level with the hole, so to get onto it I had to step onto a narrow ledge about 2 feet down, get my entire body below the level of the hole, and then slide up onto the walkway. There was a girder pretty close the where I was so the first step was at least somewhat stable. But now there was a good ten feet of walking across an extremely unstable, rusted walkway. Luckily there were pipes on either side of the wall that I could put my weight on, so I walked on them with my legs in a big inverted V, the walkway below me.

Getting from the walkway into the hole that led into the other cell was probably the part that had me the most nervous. The walkway also ended just after I got to the cell I needed, so I had to hold onto a pipe for dear life while I clambered down onto the ledge below the hole, and then crouched down as low as I possibly could so I could get directly under the hole. Did I mention how small these holes were? Well they were, and the pipe that stuck up right in the middle of them didn't help much. But after making it into the first one and then crouching down in a space two feet or so high there was nothing stopping me as I squeezed up through the hole, and then stepped down into the cell, a free man.

Got any pictures from this?

Hell of a story Roland, well done!