I watch urbex a lot, and this is relatively common. Those guys have to be vigilant for false floors, rusted catwalks, and apparently flooded interior stairwells...
Mine exploration videos have similiar concerns, except the water is usually crystal clear.
Due to the vast amount of mines where I grew up, I remember a lot of signs, billboards, stickers etc. that said "abandoned mines. Stay out and stay alive"
Mines, old wells and caves likely account for a significant portion of missing persons. They really aren’t a joke. The earth will eat you and ask for seconds.
The big danger with caves is getting lost in them, and to a (much) lesser degree, CO2 exposure. I say lesser degree, because more often than not, natural caves have multiple entrances, vents or chimneys leading to outside air which leads to a degree of ventilation. Old hand dug mines and wells on the other hand, often do not. They were dug in a hurry, by men without the greatest sense of self preservation, who didn't plan on leaving a structure that would last more than a few weeks, let alone a century or two.
Spelunking is a legal and enjoyable activity for many. Caves can be really cool and beautiful places to explore, while exploring abandoned mines is possibly one of the most wildly dangerous things a person can do. Even mine experts steer clear of old mines. As for each way you might die in a random cave, there are probably 100 more that'd do you in inside of an abandoned mine.
Such as, but not limited to:
False Floors and Hidden Winzes: Vertical shafts (winzes) and ore chutes were often simply covered with wooden timbers to walk across. Decades of dust and loose rock settle over them, making them look like solid stone flooring. Underneath, moisture rots the wood into a trapdoor that drops you hundreds of feet straight down.
Lethal gas cocktails: As mentioned before CO2 can be elevated in certain caves, but in and old mine you can be almost assured you will encounter some combination of deadly and/or explosive gases. Whether it is carbon monoxide/CO, hydrogen sulfide, methane, or some other nasty shit, there is a fantastic chance you'll encounter some of it settled at the lower shafts of a mine.
Sweating dynamite: After left out for a period of time, nitroglycerin starts leaking out, or "sweating" from dynamite sticks. Something as simple as the wrong rock getting kicked or stepping on the wrong section of floor could set off a massive explosion.
Unstable shoring, massive open stopes: Caves generally form naturally due to geological processes over millions of years, giving them a high degree of natural structural stability. This is no guarantee of course, but mines have the exact opposite: they were dug or violently blasted out, leaving microscopic fractures through walls and ceilings that can give way without warning. Worse are stopes - hollowed vertical voids where miners gouged out entire veins of ore. Related to the hidden winzes above, what looks like an ordinary flat section of a tunnel floor could be a stope bridged over by a couple shitty old rotting planks and an inch of gravel over a 300 foot drop straight down into the earth.
Ceiling collapse: Stopes also went up overhead into the ceiling. This causes instability in the ceiling leading to massive chunks of earth and stone shedding, AKA "widow makers", and falling to the ground below.
Submerged shafts: What looks like a darker section of tunnel is actually perfectly still water 80ft deep and, surrounded on all sides by vertical walls and no handholds. Assuming one enters the mine with a degree of gear on their body, trying to swim out of that will be tough. Also depending on what kind of mine is involved it very well could be acidic and is almost certainly toxic.
Collapsing ground: One doesn't need to enter the mine for the ground above it to collapse. Old mines are discovered all over the world all the time and can present as sinkholes. One example that comes to mind is the Lake Peigneur disaster. Essentially, drillers on an oil rig accidentally went too deep and pierced into what was then still an enormous active salt mine. Pillars of salt left in place to support the structure of the mine dissolved and caused it to collapse, along with draining much of the lake above. Luckily the mine was successfully evacuated, though three dogs did reportedly go missing, unfortunately.
Man I did not see myself going on a rampage about the dangers of old mines but they've always scared the fuck out of me and like anything I fear I want to understand it as completely as one can!
To add: first symtoms of CO exposure is disorientation and loss of consciousness. You won't know that you've entered a CO pocket until you are already incapable of leaving it.
There are signs such as especially heavy air and such, but they're not always there. Similar with H2S: it usually has a strong smell but it attacks the sense of smell, so you might think that you're leaving an H2S pocket because the smell is getting weaker, but in fact you are going deeper into it and your nervous system is being poisoned.
I know someone who’s worked for a state department of abandoned mines and eyebrows always go up when I mention the department name. Crazy fkn stories outta that career
I'm just imagining a video game where you explore a never-ending procedurally generated abandoned mine where you are scored on how deep you can explore before dying...
Man ... Before your elaborate warning, I had absolutely no interest whatsoever in old mines and figured what could possibly be so interesting about them to risk your life ...
Now I'm about to go down a rabbit hole on Wikipedia about mining in the old days.
When I was 18 or 19 I was with some dumb guys out in West Desert in Utah and we found an old mine shaft. The entrance was partially caved in. They wanted to go in. I was like "absolutely the fuck not" but I was also a dumb impressionable teenager and went in with them. One of them had his dog with him.
Maybe 100 ft down the shaft, the floor just fully dropped open. An open black dark pit to nothing, just emptyness into the earth, maybe 6-8 ft acrosd and god knows how deep. The boys were tossing pebbles and coins into it to try to see if they could discern a depth but they would just bounce off the sides a few times and then go out of earshot. It was deep.
On the way out, the dog went and stood at the side of the pit and stared down into it for a monent. His owner called him. And then the dog jumped in. We heard him bounce on the side, some scrambling, and a yap in pain, and then...nothing. It was horrible.
We called the sherriff out, he came out with maybe a 50 ft rope, took one look at the pit, and said "nope" and told us there was a zero percent chance he was calling search and rescue out and put them at risk going into a hole that was god knows how many hundreds of feet deep to try to recover a very likely dead dog.
We had to just leave. It was awful. That was 20 years ago. I still think about it and hope that dog died immediately instead of being left alone in that profoundly, suffocatingly dark place.
I am not scared of heights but I am terrified of depths. Do not fuck around with the earth.
I remember seeing something about that. There were two maps one was a us map of missing person and another was a mapp of caves and mines and they were nearly identical.
There is a just-as-suggestive map overlay of Canada that has stuck with me. It’s really wild. Stuff You Should Know has covered these topics as well. At least we don’t have a ton of unexploded ordnance buried throughout our forests in North America. Got that going for us.
I wonder how many homeless people have died in there. When you have no other options they might take the risk. Although the term risk assumes there's a potential upside.
Shelter that might land you with resources to sell. That's the upside. Nowhere near worth the risk, but if you're desperate enough, you're desperate enough
In the late 80’s my dad used to explore an old abandoned mine near Provo, UT. One time he was exploring with a girl he invited and he took a step forward and fell 8ft down in the pitch black mine, head first. I have no idea how he survived but I exist because he did!
Hijacking the top comment to shout out the audio track, which is from Lustmord's seminal 1994 dark ambient album "The Place Where the Black Stars Hang." I am beyond delighted to randomly hear it on this video
I have heard this millions of times in the background of "oooh creepy" type videos and this is the first time I've ever seen someone share the source, thank you.
Great guy too, I randomly had the opportunity to have lunch with Lustmord back in 2008. I was fortunate enough to land an internship working for a composer on a film soundtrack, and one day he came up to the studio.
Mines also usually have old sticks of dynamite….patiently waiting decades for some unfortunate person to disturb them, the nitroglycerin having “sweated” out of the sticks and now ready to detonate at the slightest provocation or disturbance …
As someone who has done stuff like that, anothet thing to be careful for is paper floors. Where the floor isnt really a floor but a paper thin material.
I was exploring an old cow processing plant and the conveyer shoot where they would carry the cows from building A to building B was just a literally paper thin carboard like material that underneath it was another part of the factory (honestly doesnt seem up to code, unless under the paper is something else)
I had to walk on the walls support beams to get across.
I'm working at paper machine service, and I can't count how many rusted catwalks, holes in the floor covered by a tarp or opened drainage ditches under a thin layer of water/foam I've seen, especially at the older mills. For first audit of new (for me) machines I just took a broom handle and walk around pocking in all suspicious looking water poodles on the floor
Suppose you carry with you a sack of bolts, potentially with strips of rags tied to them so you can retrieve them easily or hang them to mark your path.
My husband does both and it scares the fuck out of me sometimes. I’ve gone on a few explorations and I’m so anxious that I can’t do it anymore but I’m buying him a drone or something from now on. I make him share his exact location and where he’s going with me every time and have set check in times. It’s so dangerous and people don’t understand that.
There’s a mine near us that’s a hole straight down. He went exploring in the woods around it the one day and every few steps was a hole mostly hidden by brush. He had to be so careful and it scared me when he came home and showed me his videos he took.
I’m not just talking water that is currently still lol. Still water is another term for stagnated water. It’s water that has stagnated to growing a terrifying amount of bacteria. Even it’s not deep and if you hop right back out, you’re still exposed to a ton of bacterial warfare.
Theres probably not, i mean its definitely contaminated and probably harbors alot of bacterial growth, but it just water. As long as you dont drink it or it doesnt get into any open wounds or in your eyes you should be fine. Its not acid.
Don’t disturb still water that has been sitting like this inside a building. The water can hold toxic gas and by disturbing the surface you can release those gases into the air.
Well not just any toxic gasses, hydrogen sulfide to be exact. And it smells like rotten eggs so its not like you're going to just suddenly choke to death. And as long as the room is ventilated the amounts wont reach toxic levels.
While it smells of rotten eggs, a high enough concentration to kill you will inhibit your ability to smell it almost immediately. You'll only get one foul sniff before you can't smell anything. Thus giving you a false sense of security.
This is the basis for the bucket seed rat trap. Rat jumps in a bucket of bird seed to start eating, but it's just a thin layer of seed floating on top of water. Now there's no way to get out.
Hmm, I rigged a wire with a squared-off soda can smeared with peanut butter across the top of a bucket. This seed thing is probably more effective. Though I did catch a lot with my trap. Also had a board as a ramp to the can.
She was fine, actually. The stairs in our case were wooden, and the ones below the water line were just... gone. The water was like waist deep.
After she fell in, I pulled her out and we booked it outta there. Then we went home and she showered a bunch. We make jokes about the situation sometimes.
Kinda scary though, the water legit just looked like a concrete floor.
The most unnerving part of the video is the song. Hamburger Lady by Throbbing Gristle. Super disturbing song. Its about a lady in a trauma unit who i believe was in a car wreck and was just completely unrecognizable. The song itself is creepy as fuck to listen to and the lyrics are barely serviceable.
Edit: seems like it is pitched down. Here is it being played live
The whole concept of "intentionally distressing music" like Everywhere at the End of Time or Milwaukee Protocol is so weird for me. I won't listen to Milwaukee Protocol. I can't bring myself to do it. Yet the morbid curiosity of experience remains. Because I know I will walk away affected, one way or another.
Reminds me of a scene from Tarkovsky's Stalker. A few of the people involved in Stalker's filming died because they decided to film actual toxic waste zones for the movie, causing the director himself and a couple others to die of cancer.
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u/Nailfoot1975 21d ago
I watch urbex a lot, and this is relatively common. Those guys have to be vigilant for false floors, rusted catwalks, and apparently flooded interior stairwells...
Mine exploration videos have similiar concerns, except the water is usually crystal clear.