- Rhode Island is a great place to be an urban explorer, because we have a little bit of everything.

(chiming music) You have the haunted Ram Tail Mill remains in Foster, Rhode Island, that goes back to 1822.

It's the only place actually designated as haunted in a state census.

We have an abandoned Gilded Age mansion in Newport that's just rotting away on the coast.

It's actually currently being demolished right now, so that history is being erased.

We have a milk can from the 1930s that was a crazy example of roadside vernacular architecture, which is when people would build these, like, huge, gaudy structures to try to attract people to come in and spend their money.

(rhythmic music) (Jason claps) My name is Jason Allard, and this is my take on urban exploration.

I've been an urban explorer for about 13 years now.

(chiming music) Urban exploration is the exploration of, or documentation of, hidden components or off-limit areas of the manmade environment, so picture almost anywhere that has a No Trespassing sign out front, chances are you can do some urban exploration there.

There was a huge boom of this after the recession in 2008, where a lot of businesses shut down, there were a lot of places that were abandoned, and then when social media came around, it just absolutely exploded.

(quirky music) There was a group of urban explorers who got into the Superman Building.

It's the tallest building in Rhode Island.

(birds squawking) It's like a famous picture in the urbex community of these guys at the very top of the Superman Building overlooking the city of Providence, and they've still never had their identities revealed.

Police don't know who they are.

So there are actually rules to urban exploration that every urban explorer should follow, and probably the biggest one, especially with social media, right now, is don't share locations online, because that attracts, oftentimes, the wrong type of crowd, vandals, arsonists, and it's happened time and time again.

There was a drive-in theater on Route 146 in Sutton, Mass.

It was actually the biggest drive-in movie screen in New England.

I'd gone there several times to shoot video and just, you know, take in the sights, because it's just, you know, it was left the way it was in 1994, but in 2022, someone went there and lit the screen on fire, and it just burned to the ground, and now it's just gone, so that's why, you know, we keep locations close to us, because we're afraid that something like that will happen again.

A lot of what I do, I document in my web series, "Abandoned from Above," which is on my YouTube channel, where I show the history of abandoned places throughout Rhode Island, and show people why they deserve our respect and attention.

(suspenseful music) Before I even step foot into a place, I'm looking at blueprints to figure out exactly where we wanna go, what we wanna shoot, how we wanna shoot it, and researching what the risks are associated with it.

For example, the abandoned train station in Central Falls, Pawtucket, it was built in 1916, abandoned in the 1950s, and it's just a beautiful example of architecture that's been left to decay.

(solemn music) My concern was, are the floors safe to walk on, because if you fall through a floor in there, you're falling 40 feet onto the tracks below, which are live.

Here comes a train.

There's still hints of the beauty that it once had, this bustling social center that's now just left to rot above the tracks.

I try to give people a new appreciation for the history around us.

I at least want to let people know why they were important and why they mattered, and give them a new appreciation for it.

(Jason claps) My name is Jason Allard, and this was my take on urban exploration.

- That's our broadcast this evening.