Urban Explorers Give Modern Ruins a Second Life

In photos and videos, researchers and thrill-seekers celebrate the allure of abandoned schools, factories, hotels, movie palaces and other forgotten properties.

For Jake Williams, nothing means success like wrack and ruin. Mr. Williams had studied business marketing in college before withdrawing and pursuing a full-time career as an urban explorer, researching and telling the stories of abandoned properties.

He films his excursions and, as the producer of Bright Sun Films, shares them on YouTube. The subjects of some of his more popular videos, like a former Days Inn hotel or an abandoned Walmart, are fairly mundane, but viewers are drawn out of morbid curiosity, he said… read more >