Follow an Urban Explorer Looking for Answers in Dark Places

There's a growing urban exploration movement in American cities today. People are going into abandoned spaces to reclaim their local history. These adventurers find one another online anonymously to trade information about how to locate and enter these off-limits buildings. Vocativ dug deep into into this world and followed explorer and researcher Will Ellis (creator of abandonednyc.com) into three deserted facilities to uncover how mental illness and homelessness were handled in the not-so-distant past.

First stop Kings Park Psychiatric Hospital on Long Island, New York. The hospital was built in 1895 and became a state-run spillover facility for New York City's mentally ill. Kings Park is known for being an early user of frontal lobotomies, and later for becoming one of the first facilities to administer pharmaceutical treatments for mental illness, thereby contributing to its own demise.


Next, we go into Letchworth Village, a home for the mentally disabled. The children residents were reportedly used to test the polio vaccine and other medical treatments. Local legend says the crumbling buildings are haunted.

Finally, we go into Sea View Farm Colony, a place created to house and care for New York City's homeless. The residents worked the land in exchange for housing and healthcare. After it was abandoned, urban legend confused it with the nearby Willowbrook State School, a mental institution made famous when Geraldo Rivera exposed the horrible conditions there. After it was shut down, Willowbrook's infamy continued when one of it former orderlies was convicted of a series of child murders in the area. He lived on the grounds and the shallow grave of one his victim's was found on Willowbrook's grounds.