Abandoned Illinois Radio Station Wrecked by Vandals, with 1960s Paperwork Left Inside

The video starts with the verdict. The station is pretty destroyed, kind of sad, but still cool to see.

This radio station operated in Winnebago County, Illinois. The exact location stays off this page, for the reason I give on camera. The description says I believe it was abandoned in the early 2000s. In the video I say that based on what I found inside, it closed sometime in the late 60s.

What we found

The satellite dishes come first, and they are really cool. They are huge, almost three times as tall as me, and absolutely massive. There is another one past that.

The door was wide open, and the inside is destroyed. This is a perfect example of why we don’t give out locations. People punch holes in the walls, steal copper and steel items, and spray paint everything. It’s just disgusting how people treat some of these places. Sometimes it’s done by locals, and other times it’s not.

I can’t even tell what any of these rooms were. That’s how bad it’s been destroyed. Somebody even kicked a door right there, trying to break it. There is a broken telephone, computer parts and a lot of insulation. The place was probably a really cool place at one point.

Some of it still looks good. The lights look pretty cool, and one trim piece looks like wood and I think it’s metal, painted to look like wood. There was a bathroom, a little bit of mold growing up in one corner, paint peeling, some nice thick cobwebs and a mosquito.

Then there was a room that was pretty cool. It must have been where they held most of their stuff, where they answered the phones and so on. There is old paperwork on the floor. One page is from 1966. Another is a bill of material. One is from 1967 and mentions a water cooled engine. Another is 1966 again. It is crazy to believe this paper is from the 1960s and it is still in perfect shape.

Past that is what looks like a power room and a control room. They put things in those little slots, and the wall of slots is still there. The wall in the control room is carpet. It’s carpeted, on the wall, which is crazy. Does that scream 60s? I don’t know.

Upstairs is even worse, and I didn’t know it was going to get worse. There is an old coat hanger and a U.S. Air Force sticker on a wall. They just punched holes everywhere and completely destroyed the drywall.

From the roof edge I could see over to where the satellite dishes are. The shingles are starting to go bad. There is really not much to see here, it’s just so destroyed. You can see from one side of the building through one, two, three, four walls to the outside. The front door is busted open, and I don’t see any signs besides the parking signs.

Why places like this end up empty

Radio sites are easy to strip. A 2026 Columbia Journalism Review report on copper theft says thieves steal the copper wiring under and around broadcast towers and sell it for scrap. AM towers are especially exposed. Each one typically has about 120 buried wires laid out in a star pattern, and an engineer quoted in the report said there were 180 pieces of copper for every tower.

The report says the towers are often in remote, dark areas where cameras rarely catch the thefts. It cites a USTelecom count of more than 5,700 copper theft incidents affecting communications infrastructure, including radio, between June and December 2024. The FCC commissioner quoted there said the agency has no jurisdiction over criminal law, and that its main tool is raising awareness.

That report is about stations still on the air. A building like this one has nobody checking the doors. The only signs left are the parking signs.