An urban explorer ventured into an abandoned funeral home that had begun to collapse – what they found inside was truly shocking, and definitely not for the faint-hearted
A funeral home owner who ‘vanished’ one day and never came back left his business totally abandoned – until now.
When urban explorer Ben James, 29, stumbled across the collapsing and crumbling building in Illinois, US, he hadn’t even realised it was there. Instead, he had been on the hunt for a completely different abandoned space.
“I found the funeral home while looking for an abandoned cemetery,” he explained, adding: “The place looks to [have been] abandoned for many years.
“I spoke to a local who said the owner vanished one day and never returned, so it closed and fell into disrepair.”
What Ben claims to have found inside would have sent chills up anyone’s spine. Amongst embalming fluids, death certificates, and ‘do not resuscitate’ labels, there beneath the dust and building rubble, he claims to have come across what appeared to be decomposing human remains.
The remains date all the way back to 2005, he claims, so they have been there undisturbed for twenty years. “It was amazing to see all that was left, death certificates, embalming fluid, and prep tools,” the urban explorer – who boasts 215,000 followers on Instagram, @places_forgotten, and a further 1.2 million on TikTok, said.
“But the most shocking discovery was human remains and Polaroids of corpses being embalmed. It was a very creepy place. Locals all say it is haunted and they wish it would get demolished, but then the spirits will have nowhere to go.”
Urban explorers who bravely venture into abandoned and forgotten spaces captivate a lot of attention, particularly on social media. Some of Ben’s followers were eager to see the inside of the ghostly funeral parlor, that had so long sat totally abandoned, with bodies allegedly inside that had never been laid to rest.
“For us, who live in a country, where events like this could never happen, this is incredibly fascinating!” Wrote one commenter. “That’s so sad,” wrote one user, “Are those people’s ashes just left on the counter?” Another said: “The Polaroids!”.
A crumbling cinema that was also discovered by urban explorers also recently generated a lot of interest, with the inside of the place seemingly frozen in time.
Ben’s fascination with forgotten spaces has seen him travel all over the world, and he has ventured into disused airports, schools, hospitals, and even a city that had been totally abandoned.
“Something a little different from my usual,” he captioned the post about the city, “This abandoned city has been left since 1950. It is off limits to people and is patrolled by armed guards, but sometimes, you have to just ignore that and climb the fence that’s covered in razor wire”.
