Peek inside these abandoned places

Once the largest domestic brewer of beer by volume, the Schlitz Brewery in Milwaukee ceased operations in 1982. "This is one of my favorite locations of all time," said Ken Fager, who visited in 2012. The building was demolished last year.

These bowling pins and ball were set for a match in the gymnasium of an abandoned Cleveland area school.

Fager spotted this Wisconsin factory five years ago, when it was still operating. After it closed, many tools and pages of inventory were left behind, including meeting minutes and other employee documents. "Even before closing, it looked old and abandoned," said Fager.

A ledger left behind at an asylum in Green Bay, Wisconsin, documents business transactions from the 1950s and '60s. Fager visited during the building's demolition last year. "The building was relatively barren and did not have much to photograph throughout. This is one of those discoveries that makes you question, 'How and why is this important record still here?' "

Aaron Openshaw had driven by this derelict complex along the Patea River in New Zealand many times without knowing it was a cheese storage building. It was only after he purchased a new Nikon camera that he decided to learn more about it.

"It was an eerie experience for me exploring the building on my own, which added to the creative experience," Openshaw said.

Inside the building was a large, rusty steel wheel and walls painted in a red and white horizon line paint scheme.

"I loved the interior industrial space with the large steel wheel, which I wasn't expecting," said Openshaw. He found the building's interior in particular to be a source of inspiration.

A closeup of a part of the large wheel inside the abandoned shop proved intriguing.

Located inside an abandoned apartment building in Baltimore that was later turned into a school, this auditorium was practically in shambles. Carolyn Kina visited in November.

After decades of population loss, Baltimore has thousands of vacant and blighted homes. The city plans to demolish some 1,500 row houses over the next few years to make way for redevelopment.

Forest Haven in Laurel, Maryland, was founded in 1925 as a home for mentally disabled children and adults. It was ordered shut down in 1991. Medical records, children's assignments, books and X-ray equipment can still be found inside the abandoned hospital.

Carolyn Kina said she loves to "explore the world of the unseen" in her photographs. Her black-and-white shots make the surroundings look especially eerie. She used an infrared effect.

Several buildings make up the abandoned hospital for the mentally disabled. Kina said it "sits as a monument to a failed policy of institutionalization."

"The dust on the TV and wheelchair shows how untouched parts of the hospital are and will remain," Kina said.

The Penn Hills Resort in Analomink, Pennsylvania, was once one of the most popular honeymoon destinations in the Poconos, recalling an era when carpeted walls and heart-shaped bathtubs were the rage. It closed in 2009 after the owners fell on hard times. "When the resort shut down, the owners just walked away, leaving the entire property wide open," Chris Dolan said.

A pianist himself, Dolan couldn't resist photographing and playing an old piano sitting in the hotel bar. "I attempted to play the intro to 'Backstreets' by Bruce Springsteen," Dolan said, "but the keys went down and never came back up."

Dolan photographed Hotel Sterling in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, three weeks before the 2013 demolition. Not much was left. This small corner of the hotel's once grand lobby holds a fireplace that might have warmed guests in its hey day but was now covered with graffiti. "I was very disappointed when I walked in and found that it was nothing more than a wide open shell," Chris Dolan said.

The Scranton Lace Factory in Scranton, Pennsylvania, closed in 2002 and is being cleared out to be developed into upscale apartments, shops and restaurants. "I love this location," Chris Dolan said. "I always find something new to photograph."

Taken outside the factory's famous bowling alley, this photo features a rather out-of-place leather chair facing the many large windows. Click the double arrow to see more photos.

Vandals and the elements have destroyed the three remaining buildings of the Lackawanna County Tuberculosis Hospital, which is known to locals as the West Mountain Sanitarium.

A once-grand Pocono's resort, Buck Hill Inn has stood vacant since it closed in 1990. MTV featured the hotel in 2001 in its reality-based show "Fear," claiming that it was the site of a number of suspicious deaths and was haunted. Since then, Dolan says, owners have kept visitors away. He was unable to photograph the interior or even get a closeup shot. "Asking to go inside would be a lost cause," he said. "If I could photograph only one more abandoned location in my life, this would be it."

Pennhurst State School and Hospital was an institution for mentally and physically disabled people that opened in 1908. It shut down in 1987 after decades of patient neglect and abuse allegations. The complex is owned by a developer and is well-guarded, but once in a while they offer photography tours, Dolan said. "Being in the buildings here gave me a weird feeling, as if I'd round a corner and someone would jump out at me," he said. The former administration building opens as a haunted house attraction each fall.

Quaker Hall was one of the first two residential halls in the institution. "The owners will tell you that this is the most haunted building in the complex," Dolan said. The elements haven't been kind to this particular section, leaving many holes in the ceiling and floor.

The Portuguese city of Porto has faced financial troubles over the past few years, which has led to many buildings being left in disrepair or abandoned.

"Even though there is a sadness in seeing these beautiful buildings crumble, they are very photogenic and make a visit to Portugal very worthwhile for photographers," said Lynda Hanwella, who shot these photos.

"The atmosphere was of your typical quiet neighborhood," Hanwella said. "As you're walking along, you'll see some buildings that are obviously inhabited right by a building that looks abandoned. A lot of the buildings were very ornate, so it was easy to see that they were built in more prosperous times."

"I did sometimes feel a bit uncomfortable taking the photos because the Portuguese seem to be a very proud people," Hanwella said, "and I didn't want them to feel that I was focusing on the negative aspects of their cities. But Porto ... is a photographer's dream, and I couldn't help turning my camera toward the buildings that have seen much better days."

Deserted since 1938, much of the Kennecott copper mining town in Alaska looks as it did when it was still inhabited. "I took pictures of the grocery store and a hospital where I peeked in windows and could see hospital beds still there. It was incredible, like being in another world," Paul Tamasi said.

The town provoked an eerie feeling in Tamasi, as he said that he couldn't shake the feeling that those who had lived in the town all those years ago were somehow still there.

Once the precious ore ran out and the Kennecott Copper Corporation closed, "Kennecott became a ghost town overnight," Tamasi said.

Kennecott was recognized by Congress as a National Historic Landmark in 1986. In 1998, the National Park Service purchased the town and began an extensive restoration process.

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• People's fascination with abandoned buildings seems to have grown


• Urban exploration communities are flourishing online and becoming a resource


• Three iReporters share their tips and tricks to exploring abandoned buildings

Do you have a photo of an abandoned building in your area? Share it with CNN iReport and tell us its story.

(CNN) -- Ken Fager now calls himself an "urban explorer," but years ago he was just a study-abroad student who missed his train in Butzbach, Germany, and decided to spend the next few hours walking through an abandoned factory by the station.

First, he walked around the edges of the partially demolished complex full of old farm equipment. Seeing no one around, he got the courage to run inside. That afternoon, he photographed everything he saw. It changed him.

"The thrill of adventure and rush of adrenaline flipped a creative switch in me," said Fager, 30, who now lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, and operates the blog American Urbex: Exploring America's Gritty History, a site devoted to the history of abandoned locations.

Ken Fager poses on the top tier of a prison block.

There's a growing cultural fascination with abandoned buildings.

Online communities such as Reddit's AbandonedPorn and Urbanexploration forums draw tens of thousands of contributors to share photos, maps and secrets about underground and abandoned locations from defunct factories to neglected homes. Tim Edensor, a professor at Manchester Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom, wrote in a recent scholarly paper that researchers' interest in ruins has intensified over the past decade.

"We seem to be in the midst of a contemporary 'Ruinenlust,' which carries strange echoes of earlier obsessions with ruination and decay," Edensor wrote.

Whether through societal disruption, financial crises or just neglect, the world is full of buildings lost to time and the elements. But what fuels the fascination with walking through desolate hallways of peeling paint and photographing the discarded personal effects of strangers? For Fager, it is about fulfilling a sense of adventure.

"Urban exploration is physically challenging, intellectually stimulating and pushes my creativity," the IT freelancer said.

Photographers find beauty in 'states of decay'

Fager is fully aware that the exploration of abandoned buildings comes with risks, from unstable structural problems to trespassing concerns. He has called off explorations that he thought would compromise his personal safety. Reddit's urban exploration subcommunity advises explorers to "look but don't touch," "leave places as you found them" and "be safe," among other responsible behaviors.

Even those who break in to derelict buildings "for generally benign purposes" can hurt efforts to preserve the properties if communities fear vandalism and dropping property values, said Timothy James Scarlett, associate professor and director of graduate studies in Industrial Heritage and Archaeology at Michigan Technological University.

"The local cops don't know if the people breaking into a building are planning to 'discover' it or undertake illicit or dangerous activities there," Scarlett said. "That practice of breaking in and visiting places exacerbates the fear in local communities."

Urban explorers can also cause conflicts when documenting derelict properties in communities where people still live.

"In Detroit, this stuff drives people crazy because some people want to come from outside and take pictures that show Detroit as a vacuous empty wasteland when there are hundreds of thousands of people living in Detroit who are building their world. They find the photos reinforce stereotypes instead of being useful."

Done ethically, however, urban exploration can be quite valuable to modern archaeologists and historians, Scarlett said.

The long time explorer

For the past few years, Fager has been exploring buildings that have been pushed to the fringes of society. To the novice eye these buildings look lost, abandoned and neglected. But to him, these places are like museums in a way, just not curated or encased in glass.

"My favorite abandoned locations have a rich and documented history behind them, but these are few and far between. The majority of places I explore are more mundane, but that makes the pursuit of a prime abandoned location all the more enticing," he said.

His explorations have taken him to cities such as Chicago, Cleveland and Milwaukee. For him, each location is unique, but how he finds these buildings in the first place is surprisingly banal. He combs through public records, reads news articles and scours Google Maps to find locations that pique his interest.

One of his favorites was the historic Schlitz Brewery in Milwaukee, built along the Milwaukee River in 1870 to house what would at one time become the largest producer of beer in the world. The brewery closed in 1982, and the seven-story building was demolished last fall to make way for a public square in a 46-acre business park. When Fager visited the building in October, half the structure was already torn down.

"It felt like part of Milwaukee's soul had been ripped out," he said. "The Schlitz Brewery was one of those exceptionally rare jewels of urban exploration due to its size, history and architectural beauty. You don't get many opportunities to see a building like that up close."

There is a satisfaction in seeing something that most will not dare to venture to.

Ken Fager

When he steps into an abandoned building, he looks at it critically. "I try to approach each location from an analytical perspective," he said. He does this by asking himself a series of questions while walking through a new space.

"Why is this location abandoned? What did people do here? What do the items left behind tell me? How can I document this in an aesthetically pleasing way through photography?" Those questions taught him how to become a better explorer and student.

The nostalgic novice

New Zealand-based designer Aaron Openshaw traveled past a rundown building in the town of Patea since he was a child and wondered about its fate.

Last year, an artistic impulse and a new camera inspired him to venture inside the derelict facility. When he stepped in, he noticed the building's crimson and white paint was feathering on the walls inside, and there was abandoned industrial equipment scattered throughout the space.

An artistic rendering of the New Zeland cheese factory.

"It was also an eerie experience for me exploring the building on my own, which added to the creative experience," he said.

The 38-year-old architectural sales representative roamed the corridors of the factory for more than an hour, filling his camera with photos before he left. But on his ride home, he was brimming with questions. "I wanted to know the history. What happened and why was it abandoned?"

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He went online and researched the space afterward, discovering that is was a facility that made and stored cheese, not a meat packing plant as he initially thought. He advises that those interested in photographing abandoned buildings should hold off on researching the history of a place until after the exploration because it adds to the mystery of the whole process.

"After exploring the building and then knowing its history, it creates a feeling of being connected to the place," he said.

With New Zealand being a relatively new country, Openshaw hasn't had the opportunity to find another building to explore just yet. Thinking back to the abandoned cheese storage factory, he says for him exploring abandoned buildings is evocative.

"At one point, these spaces were occupied by people, but in a different time," he said. "I think that is the mystery of these places. They are like questions waiting for you to find answers."

The curious artist

Maryland urban-exploration enthusiast Carolyn Kina started canvasing abandoned buildings with her camera a few years ago.

One of her memorable trips was to the Forest Haven hospital complex in Laurel, Maryland, founded in 1925 as a home for mentally disabled children and adults, and ordered shut down in 1991. Although it may seem like a cliche, derelict asylums are a common place to venture for urban explorers. Many of these facilities were abandoned in the U.S. after changes in psychiatric treatment and deregulation in the mental health industry started taking shape in the 1950s and '60s.

Carolyn Kina poses in an abandoned hospital in Maryland.

"You can find medical records, children's assignments, books and X-ray equipment inside as well as other things that were left," she said. "It gives this hospital an extra creepy mood while walking through it."

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She always goes with another person or a group to an abandoned building if she has the itch to explore but steers away from places that explicitly say no trespassing. Depending on the location, she and her friends sometimes spend hours in a building. "Especially if it is somewhere like Forest Haven hospital, because there is so much stuff left in the buildings, you can spend forever looking through the rooms inside."

Her approach to photographing abandoned buildings is to add a bit of whimsy, like wearing a pretty dress amongst the array of ruins, but she's cognizant to leave things untouched and unaltered.

"Many abandoned buildings have been vandalized and lost their beauty due to people tearing them apart for 'fun.' I wouldn't want to ruin the experience for another urban explorer, so I leave buildings the way I found them," she said. "Urban explorers use the motto, 'Take only pictures, leave only footprints.' "

CNN's Daphne Sashin and Margaret Blaha, special to CNN, contributed to this story.