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Comment by kilroy123 | Hacker News Reader

One interesting rabbit hole to go down is finding YouTube videos of urban explorers finding their way into such tunnels and exploring.

There's some really cool videos of people in London in all sorts of tunnels and places they shouldn't be in.

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One of my favorite activities in college was exploring the campus - there were parts that weren't closed off to students, but I felt like we were probably not supposed to be in. It was fascinating walking around, looking at the weird architecture - in some places, the ceilings were barely six feet tall, and at one point to move between two adjacent buildings you had to use a door that was half the height of a regular one. Just a bizarre space that, nowadays, would be likened to "the backrooms".

A few years ago I had the pleasure of spending 10 weeks in hospital, which as well as having bits dating back to 1860 and being extended every couple of decades, is also attached to the local uni. The only way I stayed sane was spending my nights exploring as much as I could, made all the more exciting by having to crawl up stairs and drag my wheelchair behind me. I decided very quickly that "no public access" signs didn't apply as I wasn't a member of the public, I was an inpatient.

Elevators are particularly interesting. You might need a key-card to get onto the 4th floor, but it turns out that for efficiency half the elevators waited on that top floor. Get into elevator, read book for 5 minutes, wait for it to reset, go home and let you out in the restricted section. Or this entire floor is locked off from the stairway, but the floor above is open and the elevator lets me go down a floor and get out.

It's honestly amazing where you can end up, especially if you combine boredom, time and a bit of a can-do attitude. One of my favourite games was using the stick from an ice-lolly (sold from a machine in reception) to jimmy the lock on badly fitted doors. I also found an ebay pair of scrubs to be really useful once I'd worked out how to get into places - you'd go down a corridor, have people stick their heads out of doors and start with "Hey! You can't be down her---oh sorry doctor". I ended up reporting most of it to security just after I got released. They refused to engage, but had swapped out all the locks when I had a check-up a year later.

I treated my college campus like this. I had tons of secret nooks and crannies, rarely used single-occupant bathrooms, good reading chairs or study areas, even found a working shower in an old CS building that used to be dorms. In winter I would know the route through the complex of buildings and rarely used passages and connections to reduce my time spent outdoors.

Oh dude I found my sousaphone, plus a like-new Rhodes piano, and a whole-ass pipe organ my college had forgotten.

Plus the ID card laminator, that was clutch ;)

I grew up near Wesleyan U in connecticut; they have an extensive underground tunnel system partly for steam delivery and partly just to get around in weather. We used to do medieval recreation and other stuff down there, and I still occasionally dream I'm wandering the tunnels, 35 years later.

Are you the inspiration for Stephenson's "The Big U"?

Lol, no! That's based on BU, and was published right around the time I started LARPing. I can't remember if there were tunnels or LARPing in that book, but steam tunnels/walking tunnels are common in the northeast, as is LARPing.

There was definitely both! Man, I should re-read that book. I read it in college, and definitely felt like I was missing out on what I felt should have been a quintessential college experience, like losing a radiation source, fighting off mutant rats, and building my own tank.

Same, we had steam tunnels that you could get into if you were careful -- both not to get caught and not to get burned. Mechanical rooms that were often unlocked. Weird spots between buildings where additions were made.

UCSD has an amazing labyrinth of tunnels, some easily accessible, some locked away and purposefully obscured, but discoverable.

University of Michigan famously has a bunch of that sort of thing, though they were closed off to students by the time I got there. [0]

[0] https://localwiki.org/ann-arbor/Steam_Tunnels

I recently got to see the backrooms of an MIT building in sub basement 2. You had to go through some tight spaces (think ~20") and there was some rotating machinery to stay away from. I was surprised at how big it was. When I first went in I thought it was just the narrow corridor with the large air handler units, but it snaked around a corner to reveal itself to be 4-5 times that size.

The entire MIT campus is connected through underground hallways, most in use as labs. It's not all in ship shape, but tunnels and underground labs and industrial machinery do entertain my inner child.

I've heard UWisc's steam pipe service tunnels are cool to see, but I never got a chance to explore them while I was there.

> You had to go through some tight spaces (think ~20") and there was some rotating machinery to stay away from.

This description makes me want to play Half-Life again.

I’ve seen a few of those. It’s really surreal. It makes me feel like our history has been fudged and the singularity already happened. It’s surreal especially with all the graffiti mentioning similar scenarios, or the bullet casings. But even outside of that just the crazy amount of buildings that suddenly appear. It’s pretty wild.

> all the graffiti mentioning similar scenarios

> the bullet casings

> the crazy amount of buildings that suddenly appear

???

Here's an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rt0zuWUWcqA

This may not be the specific one I am thinking of; as I have seen quite a few across various channels. I do recall this one evoking a sense of "surreal uncanny valley."

I watch them at 2x speed sometimes just to get past some of the slow parts, but then you may miss interesting things written on the walls.

Is this a Control reference?

Ha, is it? I am not so sure. What's Control? Are you part of the Bureau?

All anti-reality aside, see my other reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39417588

A "rabbit hole to go down", indeed.

The most interesting are the places that look like a time capsule or museum --- where everything hasn't been touched for decades, and the urban explorers who come along also respect that.

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