An Abandoned Elementary School, a Basement Gym, and a Noise We Couldn't Place

The video opens with a noise, and me saying it wasn’t me. We hear it again around the six minute mark, and it’s the reason this explore ended up in the basement.

This is an abandoned elementary school in Illinois, and I explored it with laststvnd. I don’t have any history on the building, and the exact location stays off this page. What I do have is a roof with holes in it, a gym in the basement and a noise that came from somewhere.

What we found

We couldn’t explore most of it. The floor is missing on the upper level and on the level below it because the roof has holes, so I showed what I could. It’s structurally not safe to walk across. There are holes in the ceiling, and a couple of pigeons were up there. Some of the lockers had been bolted shut, like somebody didn’t want anyone getting into them. We found room 207 and a spot where kids would hang up their coats, which is why I said I was pretty sure this was an elementary school.

The library has no books left. It’s filled with mold, the green carpet has turned brown, and the floor is covered in insulation and ceiling tiles. Past it is the faculty room and a spot marked for roof access, which would have been a way onto the roof if the roof weren’t caved in. Room 206 was locked, and I said it’s crazy that anything is still locked. I also said this place is getting demolished, no doubt, given the shape it’s in.

The girls bathroom had a dispenser with napkins and tampons at 25 cents each, and some were still in it. That started an argument. A quarter makes no sense for an elementary kid, so maybe it was a middle school. Then we spotted name tags with first names on them, which pointed back to elementary, and we ended up deciding it could have been both, with one splitting off from the other. The dispenser could also have been for adults. We never settled it.

Room 106 looked like an absolute disaster. All of it is water damage, the lockers are rusting and the paint has completely peeled off. Then you get a room like 107, which looked pretty nice by comparison. The whole place is just naturally decayed.

Then the noise came back, and I said again that it wasn’t me. I wanted to check the basement because I thought that’s where it was coming from. One of us pointed out that if anything, the noise came from down there anyway.

The basement is the best part of the school. It’s a gym, with a punching bag, a bunch of weights and a lot of other equipment. Then I found a hat that looked fairly clean, like it had been left recently. I said out loud that somebody was down here, that we weren’t there to harm anyone and weren’t trying to scare anyone, just taking pictures. We heard it again. I thought maybe it was a homeless person. A little later I decided the building was just making noises.

There were old computers down here, and a few more in the kitchen. The size of everything had made me think elementary school, but by then I wasn’t sure anymore.

Why places like this end up empty

I can’t tell you why this school closed, because I don’t know. I can tell you how long a school can sit once it does. In Chicago, 21 of the 50 public schools closed in 2013 were still empty and unused in May 2025, according to NBC 5 Investigates. The city’s Board of Education aimed to sell or demolish them by 2017 and missed that goal. Records showed $7,282,456.20 spent over about 12 years on heat, light, landscaping and repairs for the empty buildings. That isn’t the school in this video, but it shows the pattern. An empty school costs money to hold, and buyers are hard to find.

The roof is the other half of it. The EPA says wet buildings and furnishings need to be dried within 24 to 48 hours to avoid mold, and that mold can grow on wood, paper, carpet and insulation as long as moisture is present. A roof with holes in it lets water reach most of that, which fits what we saw in the library with the carpet and the insulation.

Our way out was a door that happened to be open.