Haunted Urban Exploration Explained

Overall, urban exploration is an adventurous activity that can entail witnessing abandoned environments, settings, buildings, or houses. The spaces found through urban exploration can help draw conclusions to the understanding of “the characters, plots and scenarios that give them shape and meaning” in their environment that make them of symbolic value (Shanks, Platt, & Rathje, 2004). Through urban exploration research, modern-day ruins, “haunted” landscapes, abandoned spaces, and industrial sites can be identified as traces of history that determined can hold meaning within cities past historic practices. Forgotten, destroyed, and abandoned urban spaces can benefit knowledge that “the ghostly atmospheric and material traces of the past – connects criminology’s renewed interest in the lived experience of (urban) space with a visceral apprehension of (sub)cultural history, and an appreciation of the discontinuous, distorted and multiple temporalities of the city” (Kindynis, 2019). Finally, current studies of urban exploration can aid to the understanding of how historic spaces and practices were used within buildings, artifacts are of value in urban sites, and how beauty can arise in decaying objects and implement it through personal interpretations of future urban exploration alterations within society.