Original
“Down in the Underground with Southern Urban Explorer Bentley Little”
“I just thought I was a weirdo that liked to look at abandoned buildings.” -Bentley Little
When I first heard the term “Urban Exploring,” I agreed with Bentley in part, and thought it was all about those strange birds that go into the sewer system and dig around for trouble. And yes, some urban explorers investigate the sewers, but the majority are looking for better locations. Theme parks, military bases, factories, and hospitals are a few of the hot spots explorers love to get into. According to Wikipedia, Urban exploring (also called draining, urban spelunking, urban rock climbing, urban caving, or building hacking) is the exploration of man-made structures, usually abandoned ruins, sometimes done for thrills, sometimes for history buffs, and sometimes for boredom.
Bentley Little was three years old when he was initiated into urban exploring via glimpses at the abandoned New York subway system in his favorite movie: Ghostbusters II. From this moment on, exploring was the wallpaper in the background of his life's room. Bentley's father worked in the local history department at the library and started telling his son about underground Chattanooga, encouraging him to explore the forgotten places. He soon took him on his first urban exploration: an abandoned hotel on a hill behind a “Welcome To Lookout Valley” sign, a community where Bentley has lived most of his life.
It's unbelievable that a hobby like this would start at such a tender age. It's unbelievable that Bentley's father encouraged him in this not-so-squeaky-clean adventuring. But then again, Bentley Little says he’s a pretty unbelievable guy.
“I make no sense,” he says, crossing his legs so that his custom designed Chuck Taylor’s show the side where black and white skulls grin amongst a pattern of stars.
The red on the other side of the shoe is hidden now as Bentley angles his foot away from my vision. The blue tongue of the shoe is barely visible, and the faded graffiti flags inside, pink-stitching, and black racing stripe only stand out if you are able to peel away the outer layer.
Bentley and I have known each other for eight years and have had plenty of time to peel away that superficial outer layer we all put over ourselves, and so I know what he means when he says he makes no sense.
Bentley elaborates for this audience: “I am an outspoken atheist, but I believe in ghosts and monsters and UFO's,” he says. “A lot of people think that because you don't believe in god, why would you believe in ghosts?”
Yet, he insists that when he makes no sense to the rest of the world, he's not doing it on purpose. There's no calculated effort to go against the expectations.
“I used to care what people thought and try to do what other people wanted and fit in. As I got older and I experienced a number of heartbreak and tragedies in life, I was like: screw it. I'm just going to be me,” Little says.
Bentley's distance from the mainstream mentality of “what everyone else is doing” is another possible factor that drew him into UE.
“Most people, when they see an abandoned building, they say: ‘that's neat’ and then move on with their life. People aren't compelled, to be perfectly honest, to break the law and trespass inside of a place and put themselves in danger,” Bentley says.
Getting into the buildings and rooting around is what it's all about obviously, but the motivating force that makes him risk the dangers has always been about the look back into the past that these explorations provide, he says. While urban legends can be a good starting point, the research and learning has kept Bentley at it all these years.
After his first exploration of the mostly collapsed motel in Lookout Valley, this has been in his life. He's always thinking: “What's behind here?”; “What is this building?”; “Why can't I go there?” Strangely enough though, Bentley didn't know this hobby had an actual name until about eight years ago.
“I just thought I was a weirdo that liked to look at abandoned buildings,” he says.
Like most people whose interest is piqued by UE, Bentley would watch the variety of different ghost shows, and notice that abandoned buildings like asylums and hospitals were the main locales where the crews went. Bentley insists that although a lot of UE'ers will tell you that they don't believe in ghosts or are not doing this because of ghosts, he's willing to bet that a large chunk of them got interested in the hobby because it is just so darn spooky. Indeed, part of Bentley's journey in the UE community involved joining up with a paranormal investigation group at one point to further his exploration opportunities.
Little used the paranormal group's influence as an in, and an explanation to building owners in order to access more locations. During this time, he was able to convince the group to explore an abandoned hospital, a forgotten power plant/dam, and a desolate space that was once part of a college.
The paranormal group soon broke up, and that could have been the end of the exploring for Bentley as well if not for a Web site called “Forgotten New York.” This was the catalyst that cemented the hobby of UE for Bentley. Finding out through this site that there were groups of people that had this similar interest helped immensely, Bentley says, because he no longer felt alone in figuring out this complex world that was hidden in plain sight.
Stumbling across Forgotten New York in the dial-up days of Internet, Little would spend all day reading page after page of the site, consuming as much information as possible, and waiting unthinkable amounts of time by today's standards for large picture files to load. As each section of picture materialized, offering another piece of the puzzle to a ways of the past, Bentley became engrossed in the history of old New York and the connecting threads around it.
During this time, the fall of 2005, Bentley was working for the government in Winnemucca, Nevada through AmeriCorps NCCC. In part of his work there, Bentley assisted in the cleanup and recovery efforts for Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita on the gulf coast. Having access to all these different areas was another opportunity Bentley took for exploring; using any spare moment to enter abandoned buildings and look around. It was on the way into New Orleans to assist disaster relief, Bentley found an exploration site that would grow to be one of his favorites: the Six Flags, New Orleans location.
The abandoned theme park presses upon the explorer a dissociative reality as you walk beneath a roller coaster that hasn't run in years with ticket stubs and empty carnival food wrappers crunching loudly beneath your feet in the quiet din of this once vibrant place. No lines on any ride here. Visitors are turned into anthropologists, turning over the refuse left, laying hands on the unmoving rides, and seeking to construct a story as to how the mighty structures fell.
Incidentally, this site and Bentley's other favorite (a creepy hospital in North Carolina built in the 1920's that he calls “Odd Hospital”) are both sites that draw explorers in with their surreal and imposing air. Yet, for hospital explorations, the surrealness of the exploration experience is also one of fear, Bentley says.
“I think everyone is kind of afraid of hospitals, and in hospitals and asylums the spooky factor always comes up for people. Horrible things have happened here, good things have happened, people have died here, and it's an emotionally charged atmosphere,” he says.
The majority of the community attracted to UE doesn't believe in paranormal at all, Bentley says. That said, Bentley does believe, and says he has “experienced things.” Both notable times were at this abandoned hospital.
Every window is broken. Spray paint and graffiti are everywhere. Wires spill in a bouquet of ends. Drawers' contents are dumped on the floor and destroyed underfoot in a collection of smashed pieces. A car is even parked in one part of Odd Hospital. Then, in the most normal looking of the hallways, the last room stands frozen in time; like the former resident “just walked out one day” with clothes still in the closet, suitcase still on the floor, bed slightly disheveled, and what used to be flowers on the nightstand.
On one exploration of this structure, Bentley and his group started hearing doors slam. His group radioed the other half of the exploration team to ask them if they were the source of the stomping and slamming noises. As the group denied they were making the noises, a door nearby Bentley's group closed.
“We started tracking it down. As a rule of thumb, the last thing it could possibly be is a ghost. There are 1,000 different things I try to make it before it's a ghost,” he says. “There is wind, your eyes playing tricks on you, drafts, homeless people, kids, and any number of things to explain why things are the way they are.
“We get to where the doors are slamming and a door closes next to us and on the other side. We split up to circle around in this square to meet each other and doors are randomly closing around us. BAM. BAM. BAM. BAM...almost like clockwork. A door would slam and we would go and open it and nothing would be there,” he says. “We finally get to the last door and see it close right in front of us and inside we find that it's the surgery center. It's completely tiled off. No air vents. No windows, just a little chamber. I can't explain what happened.”
Besides the Odd Hospital incidents, there have been others. A shadowy figure watching him at an abandoned dam, and later, in the tunnels underneath the dam, he felt the sensation of being chased. While one of these type of incidents would be enough for the average person to connect the paranormal and the exploration, Bentley reaffirms the two are not connected.
“For me, ghosts are something I don't think I can ever get an answer to 100%, but it's a fun thing to try,” he says. “When it comes to religion I take everything at face value and just hope it works out. The only way to figure it out is when I die. You can't test for God. You can't even design a scientific formula that shows there is a God. Ghosts...that is something you can document, test for, apply scientific principle to, and make it at least a question mark to.”
While the jury remains out on ghosts in UE, the dangers of exploring places that haven't been habitable for years are extremely real. There are explorers who wear vests, respirator masks, safety goggles, and steel toe boots to avoid the pitfalls of unstable floors, asbestos, and whatever else comes up. Bentley has friends who have been arrested, and known people who broke bones falling through rotten floors. There have been casualties in the explorer ranks as well. Bentley recognizes that he's been very fortunate, especially for someone who does nothing to prevent bad things from happening on explorations.
“I wear my Converse, which a lot of people think are dumb, but they are comfy and I'm not going to dress up like I'm on a special ops mission.”
Bentley's worst “boo-boo” while exploring is a cut on his foot from a barbed wire fence that actually happened off the property near where his group parked. He put peroxide on it, and it was fine.
Bentley has had a few run-ins with the law as well. Although, these too he laughs off in his signature way.
In Charlotte, North Carolina, Bentley was living with a couple of urban explorers he had met on a UE site, and they invited him to check out the former East Coast Bible College location. Driving down this area, a flight path for the airport, no houses were in the area, but driveway after driveway that led to nothing remained. His group was driving back and forth, trying to find a way into the college, before finally discovering a back way. Once up in the building though, the group looked out and saw an officer parked at the gate, shining his spotlight from the patrol car on the building. The group watched him behind the door until he left. Bentley says this was “the closest call he's ever had.”
Bentley works diligently to exhaust all resources to get permission into the locations he explores; talking to the people on the property that work there or guard the place, to the owners, and to the shell companies that own the properties.
“I have full custody of my son and I prefer to do things as legally as possible. I will try to do whatever I can to get permission, because a lot of people do it for the thrill of doing something illegal, but I like trying to figure it out. What happened here? What are these things for? Still, I'm very fortunate where I haven't gotten into trouble, haven't had any health problems, and haven't got hurt,” Bentley says.
Treading lightly is a good idea according to attorney Lee Davis from local law firm Davis & Hoss, PC. He says vandalism and criminal trespass are Class A misdemeanors and carry up to 11 months and 29 days jail time, plus court costs. A conviction also stays on your record permanently.
“While seemingly innocent, this activity could lead to civil (read monetary) damages as well,” Davis says. “For example, a historic, vacant building that is opened by these folks could expose the building to water damage. This could be quite costly.”
Davis says obviously there are other perils present, from exposed electric wires, open floors, weak walls and ceilings. “This kind of activity comes at a pretty high potential downside, criminal and civil,” Davis says.
It's certainly no Scooby-Doo Mystery Squad episode for those who make UE a regular hobby. Having a group of fellow, inquisitive humans with you to drive around to scout out places (still the best way to find exploration sites) and in all exploring though is a must according to every explorer. Finding fellow explorers through social media, and other Internet resources such as Reddit threads like “Chattanooga UE” has been Bentley's primary source.
While the UE community is mostly the middle class, white kids, under a banner of “white crime” activities, there is also a number of explorers on the older end of the spectrum who are involved for the art and photography as well as some surprisingly young followers. There's a high likelihood that a new member of the community will be able to connect quickly with the community's medley of people.
Bentley explains: “We do come from different walks of life. You will find people you have genuine connection with. There are a lot of women involved, all races, all socio-political ideas: they are there.”
The reason that members of poorer communities are not involved in UE, is as simply explained as it is unfortunate. Those who remember the 1990's television show called Eerie Indiana about a small town that hosted a variety of weird and mythological entities such as Bigfoot, Elvis, and others, should know that the real Eerie, Indiana is far less charming. An abandoned school, a desolate church, a rickety house or two is all that's left of this town.
“If you are in the inner city or a depressed area like Eerie, Indiana you are not going to want to go through the Scooby Doo ghost town that is your home town and explore it,” Little says. “You want to get away from that. You have to come from a certain level of an ‘easy life’ for this to be attractive.”
Bentley is currently in the process of reconnecting with the UE community. One of the outlets most likely to make this possible is a Web site Bentley and a group of urban explorers established called “Church of Atom.”
Church of Atom was established in 2010 “before the flood of life happened” to Bentley. The name “Church of Atom” references the video game Fallout 3, and the wasteland atmosphere in the game that exists after the bombs have fallen, leaving an abandoned and destroyed world where only small pockets of humanity are found. Bentley identifies with the concept of a world after the world and what structures will be left behind when humankind moves on.
Church of Atom is a resource his group uses to release information and share items that others in the larger community may be at work on, while keeping their identities safe at the same time. For example, a number of members of the Church of Atom group have gone to a highly illegal abandoned nuclear power plant. Church of Atom was a resource to upload videos of this site without having names attached to it.
If Bentley has his way, his dream explorations will be up on the site one day too. He dreams of one day seeing Chernobyl and the abandoned subways of New York that first started his spirit of seeking.
If reading of his plans to visit these highly off-limits sites makes anyone out there nervous, Bentley's attitude is the same as it ever was: get over it. It irritates him that one of the persistent misconceptions from the outside world looking in on his hobby is that urban explorers are destroying everything.
“I know of people who take a crowbar to break into places, but I think the majority of us apply the ‘leave no trace’ philosophy. Leave nothing but footprints, take nothing but memories and pictures,” he says. “We're not advertising the illegality of what we are doing,” Little says. “We are advertising the art that comes out of it. We are showcasing pictures and scenes and experiences that most people won't ever see or have the opportunity to and some people should rightfully not try to do. The freedom lovers and danger lovers...don't do it.”
While most urban explorers might say the hobby's number one rule is that there are no rules, Bentley disagrees. One of the unspoken rules his group has for membership is that they are not going to break into places or break more laws, in a hobby that already toes the line on legality.
“We are already breaking the law to do this and that adds a whole new layer of criminality to it that's not worth it to me,” Little says. “If you have raised yourself from a person who just has interest in it to an active member in our community, you do have rules you follow. It's the same with every community. You don't join a photographer's club with a disposable camera. You don't join a band with a kid piano. You don't join a UE group to destroy stuff.”
Unfortunately, urban explorers get lumped in with taggers who spray paint on abandoned structures and with scrappers who break apart items within abandoned structures to get copper out of them. But that's not what urban exploring is. Someone who was involved with these spaces for scrap metal or to deface their structure simply wouldn't wax poetic about the crumbling ruins like Bentley does.
He says: “Some of these places are more culturally and historically important to the community than you could ever realize. I've been in buildings that were the place whole towns were built around. Because of this one building, the city exists, and is why it has the opportunity to flourish and is how other opportunities came to the city. You just learn to appreciate the history. That's the big key to UE in general in understanding and recognizing the significance of where you are but also to work with people to show them that you are coming at it with reverence and interest.
“We are destroying so much history nowadays, tearing it down. When I was in Charlotte, they would hardly let anything stand, which is such a weird thing coming from Chattanooga where we have buildings that are hundreds of years old, and then going to a city where nothing is older than my grandparents. I feel like part of your identity as a city and as a group has been lost and replaced with the commercialized version of things. It takes away the personality; it's manufactured.”
That's why Bentley's big request to the outside world is that if an urban explorer comes asking for permission to go into your building, please give it to them.
“We are upfront with you. It's not like we are sneaking around or are going to do drugs in your abandoned building or steal your things,” Bentley says, gesturing to the imaginary property owner in question. “People who will take the time to see the story behind these places are what is really interesting, and I think you should let them go.”
As he states his case to to the owner of the building, vying for his next exploration opportunity, Bentley extends his hand: “Come with us, you might have fun.”
Revised
*Writer’s Note: There’s so much I want to do with this piece that I simply don’t have the time for. As per the workshop discussion, I want to do more interviews with others in the community and go on another exploration with Bentley for more material. My focus and organization around that are still off, but I’m working towards pinning down who Bentley is and what he has to say. Certainly, this is a work in progress, but I appreciate the feedback so far. (Current word count: 2,800)
“I just thought I was a weirdo that liked to look at abandoned buildings.” -Bentley Little
Some may agree with Bentley when they first hear of urban exploring. Why would anyone break the law and all concerns for welfare to go into trashy buildings and dig around for trouble? Maybe it’s because the sewers and other ugly places are just stepping stones to better locations. These hot spots that explorers love to get access to include: theme parks, military bases, factories, and supposedly haunted hospitals.
UE involves going into abandoned buildings and locations that are off limits. It also includes everything from climbing construction cranes, going through water or sewer drains, or getting on the roofs of buildings. Bentley says everyone has their own preferences of how they UE according to what they are comfortable with, but he only does abandoned building exploring.
Bentley Little was three years old when he was initiated into urban exploring via glimpses at the abandoned New York subway system in his favorite movie: Ghostbusters II. Bentley's father worked in the local history department at the library and started telling his son about underground Chattanooga, encouraging him to explore the forgotten places. He soon took him on his first urban exploration: an abandoned hotel on a hill behind a “Welcome To Lookout Valley” sign, a community where Bentley has lived most of his life.
It might seem unbelievable that a hobby like this started at such a tender age, and even more shocking that Bentley's father encouraged him in this not-so-squeaky-clean adventuring. But then again, Bentley Little says he’s a pretty unbelievable guy.
“I make no sense,” he says, crossing his legs so that his custom designed Chuck Taylor’s show the side where black and white skulls grin amongst a pattern of stars. As Bentley angles his foot away from view, the blue tongue of the shoe is barely visible, and the faded graffiti flags inside, pink-stitching, and black racing stripe only stand out if you are able to peel away the outer layer.
Bentley tries to explain himself: “I am an outspoken atheist, but I believe in ghosts and monsters and UFO's,” he says. “...and I’m not trying to go against what people expect. Like, I used to care what people thought and try to do what other people wanted and fit in. As I got older and I experienced a number of heartbreak and tragedies in life, I was like: screw it. I'm just going to be me.”
Bentley's disregard for the mainstream mentality is another factor that drew him into UE.
“Most people, when they see an abandoned building, they say: ‘that's neat’ and then move on with their life. People aren't compelled, to be perfectly honest, to break the law and trespass inside of a place and put themselves in danger,” Bentley says.
Strangely enough though, Bentley didn't know this hobby had an actual name until about eight years ago.
“I just thought I was a weirdo that liked to look at abandoned buildings,” he says.
Like most people whose interest is piqued by UE, Bentley would watch television ghost shows, and notice that abandoned buildings like asylums and hospitals were the main locales where the crews went. Bentley insists that although a lot of UE'ers will tell you that they don't believe in ghosts or are not doing this because of ghosts, he's willing to bet that a large chunk of them got interested in the hobby because it is just so darn spooky. Indeed, the next part of Bentley's journey in the UE community involved joining up with a paranormal investigation group to further his entrance into exploration sites. During this time, he was able to convince the group to explore an abandoned hospital, a forgotten power plant/dam, and a desolate space that was once part of a college.
The paranormal group soon broke up, and that would have been the end of the exploring for Bentley as well if not for a Web site called “Forgotten New York.” Finding out through this site that there were groups of people that had this similar interest helped immensely, Bentley says, because he no longer felt alone in figuring out this complex world that was hidden in plain sight.
Stumbling across Forgotten New York in the dial-up days of Internet, he would spend all day reading page after page of the site and waiting unthinkable amounts of time by today's wifi standards for large picture files to load. As each section of picture materialized, offering another piece of the puzzle to a ways of the past, Bentley became engrossed in the history of old New York and the connecting threads around it.
During this time, the fall of 2005, Bentley was working in Winnemucca, Nevada through AmeriCorps NCCC. In this position, Bentley assisted the cleanup and recovery efforts for Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita on the gulf coast, and also had almost unlimited exploration access to more and more abandoned buildings. It was on the way into New Orleans to assist disaster relief that Bentley found an exploration site that would grow to be one of his favorites: the eerily abandoned Six Flags, New Orleans location. Here, visitors are turned into anthropologists, turning over the refuse left, laying hands on the unmoving rides, and seeking to construct a story as to how the mighty structures fell.
Incidentally, this site and Bentley's other favorite both draw explorers in with their surreal and imposing air. Yet, for hospital explorations, the surrealness of the exploration experience is also one of fear, Bentley says.
“Horrible things have happened here, good things have happened, people have died here, and it's an emotionally charged atmosphere,” he says.
While the majority of the community attracted to UE doesn't believe in paranormal at all, Bentley is an exception. He says he has “experienced things,” and both notable times were at a creepy hospital in North Carolina, built in the 1920's, that he calls “Odd Hospital.”
Every window is broken. Spray paint and graffiti are everywhere. Wires spill in a bouquet of ends. Drawers' contents are dumped on the floor and destroyed underfoot in a collection of smashed pieces. A car is even parked in one part of Odd Hospital. Then, in the most normal looking of the hallways, the last room stands frozen in time; like the former resident “just walked out one day” with clothes still in the closet, suitcase still on the floor, bed slightly disheveled, and what used to be flowers on the nightstand.
On one exploration of this structure, Bentley and his group started hearing doors slam and decided to track down the source.
“As a rule of thumb, the last thing it could possibly be is a ghost. There are 1,000 different things I try to make it before it's a ghost,” he says. “There is wind, your eyes playing tricks on you, drafts, homeless people, kids, and any number of things to explain why things are the way they are.
“We get to where the doors are slamming and a door closes next to us and on the other side. We split up to circle around in this square to meet each other and doors are randomly closing around us. BAM. BAM. BAM. BAM...almost like clockwork. A door would slam and we would go and open it and nothing would be there,” he says. “We finally get to the last door and see it close right in front of us and inside we find that it's the surgery center. It's completely tiled off. No air vents. No windows, just a little chamber. I can't explain what happened.”
While the jury remains out on ghosts in UE, the dangers of exploring places that haven't been habitable for years are extremely real. There are explorers who wear vests, respirator masks, safety goggles, and steel toe boots to avoid the pitfalls of unstable floors, asbestos, and whatever else comes up. Bentley has friends who have been arrested, and known people who broke bones falling through rotten floors. There have been casualties in the explorer ranks as well. Bentley recognizes that he's been very fortunate, especially for someone who does nothing to prevent bad things from happening on explorations.
“I wear my Converse, which a lot of people think are dumb, but they are comfy and I'm not going to dress up like I'm on a special ops mission.”
And even though Bentley has had a few run-ins with the law, he laughs off these in his signature way.
In Charlotte, North Carolina, Bentley was living with a couple of urban explorers he had met on a UE site, and they invited him to check out the former East Coast Bible College location. Driving down this area, a flight path for the airport, no houses were around, but driveway after driveway that led to nothing remained. Once up in the building, the group looked out and saw an officer parked at the gate, shining his spotlight from the patrol car on the building. The group watched him behind the door until he left. Bentley says this was “the closest call he's ever had.”
Bentley says he works diligently to exhaust all resources to get permission into the locations he explores; talking to the people on the property that work there or guard the place, to the owners, and to the shell companies that own the properties.
“I have full custody of my son and I prefer to do things as legally as possible. I will try to do whatever I can to get permission, because a lot of people do it for the thrill of doing something illegal, but I like trying to figure it out. Still, I'm very fortunate where I haven't gotten into trouble, haven't had any health problems, and haven't got hurt,” Bentley says.
Treading lightly is a good idea according to attorney Lee Davis from local law firm Davis & Hoss, PC. He says vandalism and criminal trespass are Class A misdemeanors and carry up to 11 months and 29 days jail time, plus court costs. A conviction also stays on your record permanently.
“While seemingly innocent, this activity could lead to civil (read monetary) damages as well,” Davis says. “For example, a historic, vacant building that is opened by these folks could expose the building to water damage. This could be quite costly.”
Davis says obviously there are other perils present, from exposed electric wires, open floors, weak walls and ceilings. “This kind of activity comes at a pretty high potential downside, criminal and civil,” Davis says.
It's certainly no Scooby-Doo Mystery Squad episode for those who make UE a regular hobby. Having a group of fellow, inquisitive humans with you to drive around to scout out places and in all exploring though is a must according to every explorer. Finding fellow explorers through social media, and other Internet resources such as Reddit threads like “Chattanooga UE” has been Bentley's primary source. While the UE community is mostly the middle class, white kids, under a banner of “white crime” activities, there is also a number of explorers on the older end of the spectrum who are involved for the art and photography as well as some surprisingly young followers. There's a high likelihood that a new member of the community will be able to connect quickly with the community's medley of people.
Bentley explains: “We do come from different walks of life. You will find people you have genuine connection with. There are a lot of women involved, all races, all socio-political ideas: they are there.”
The reason that members of poorer communities are not involved in UE, is as simply explained as it is unfortunate. Those who remember the 1990's television show called Eerie Indiana about a small town that hosted a variety of weird and mythological entities such as Bigfoot, Elvis, and others, should know that the real Eerie, Indiana is far less charming. An abandoned school, a desolate church, a rickety house or two is all that's left of this town.
“If you are in the inner city or a depressed area like Eerie, Indiana you are not going to want to go through the Scooby Doo ghost town that is your home town and explore it,” Bentley says. “You want to get away from that. You have to come from a certain level of an ‘easy life’ for this to be attractive.”
Bentley is currently in the process of reconnecting the UE community here in Chattanooga. One of the outlets most likely to make this possible is a Web site Bentley and a group of urban explorers established called “Church of Atom.”
Church of Atom is an Internet resource his group uses to release information and share items that others in the larger community may be at work on, while keeping their identities safe at the same time. For example, a number of members of the Church of Atom group have gone to a highly illegal abandoned nuclear power plant. The site was a resource to upload videos without having names attached to it.
If Bentley has his way, his dream explorations will be up on the site one day too. He dreams of one day seeing Chernobyl and the abandoned subways of New York that first started his spirit of seeking. And like Bentley’s father did for him, Bentley will be taking his son alongside for some of these explorations.
If reading of his plans to visit these highly off-limits sites makes you nervous, Bentley's attitude is the same as it ever was: get over it. It irritates him that one of the persistent misconceptions from the outside world looking in on his hobby is that urban explorers are destroying everything.
“I know of people who take a crowbar to break into places, but I think the majority of us apply the ‘leave no trace’ philosophy. Leave nothing but footprints, take nothing but memories and pictures,” he says. “We're not advertising the illegality of what we are doing,” he says. “We are advertising the art that comes out of it. We are showcasing pictures and scenes and experiences that most people won't ever see or have the opportunity to and some people should rightfully not try to do. The freedom lovers and danger lovers...don't do it.”
While most urban explorers might say the hobby's number one rule is that there are no rules, Bentley disagrees. One of the unspoken rules his group has for membership is that they are not going to break into places or break more laws, in a hobby that already toes the line on legality.
“If you have raised yourself from a person who just has interest in it to an active member in our community, you do have rules you follow. It's the same with every community. You don't join a photographer's club with a disposable camera. You don't join a band with a kid piano. You don't join a UE group to destroy stuff.”
Unfortunately, urban explorers get lumped in with taggers who spray paint on abandoned structures and with scrappers who break apart items within abandoned structures to get copper out of them. But that's not what urban exploring is. Someone who is involved with these spaces for scrap metal or to deface their structure simply wouldn't wax poetic about the crumbling ruins like Bentley does.
He says: “Some of these places are more culturally and historically important to the community than you could ever realize. I've been in buildings that were the place whole towns were built around. Because of this one building, the city exists, and is why it has the opportunity to flourish and is how other opportunities came to the city.”
To Bentley, urban exploring is about learning to appreciate history and applying it to the significance of daily life.
“We are destroying so much history nowadays, tearing it down. When I was in Charlotte, they would hardly let anything stand, which is such a weird thing coming from Chattanooga where we have buildings that are hundreds of years old, and then going to a city where nothing is older than my grandparents. I feel like part of your identity as a city and as a group has been lost and replaced with the commercialized version of things. It takes away the personality; it's manufactured.”
That's why Bentley's big request to the outside world is that if an urban explorer comes asking for permission to go into your building, please give it to them.
“It's not like we are sneaking around or are going to do drugs in your abandoned building or steal your things,” Bentley says, gesturing to the imaginary property owner in question. “People who will take the time to see the story behind these places are what is really interesting, and I think you should let them go.”
As he states his case to to the owner of the building, vying for his next exploration opportunity, Bentley extends his hand: “Come with us, you might have fun.”
Feature Article (Original vs Revised)
This piece
started as an attempt to do justice to a story I wrote years ago for the
newspaper, and didn’t get to what I wanted that time. (See:
http://www.hamiltoncountyherald.com/Story.aspx?id=2358&date=6%2F24%2F2011)
I interviewed Bentley again about a year ago and hoped this would be
the first piece in a novel length type of work. Therefore, I knew going
into the writing of the feature article that it was going to be too long
to maintain audience interest. It was a constant battle from the
forming of the article to the revision to “kill my darlings” and let go
of the urge to write philosophically about a topic that held a strange
kind of romance in urban decay for me. (see, there I go again)
On revision, I cut the multiple examples I had to illustrate single
ideas. I also tried to take myself out of the article as completely as
possible. My future hopes are to go on another exploration with Bentley
and bring myself back into the story, but for now, it’s not there. I’d
like to also add more interviews from others in the UE community, but I
did not have time to compile these for this deadline. For this revision,
I also worked on strengthening my organization and tightening focus.
There are still some areas that falter, and I wasn’t sure whether to
revise or cut these completely. They will have to be revisited with
possible editorial assistance. I chose not to add too much about
Bentley’s son and how much or little he accompanies Bentley on these
explorations. One reason is that Bentley asked me to include his son as
little as possible, and I certainly don’t want to get Bentley in any
trouble if readers got the wrong idea about the care he gives to his
son.
Overall, I like the direction my feature is heading. I
want to try more to portray Bentley in a way that truly expresses his
personality and what drives him on these explorations. Right now, the
description is only surface level because I did not think I had the
authority to push the boundaries of the explanation of who he is. I am
going to work on this though and flush out his character more. I enjoy
the topic of Urban Exploration and I think I can stick with it through
multiple revisions to turn out something of publishable quality.
