All Saints Drain--Interiors

(For exteriors of this location, see this post.)

First of all, a big thank you to Ryan Ademan AKA PunkUE. He's been the main explorer on the RI/MA scene since 2006, and a great inspiration to me personally. His photography is always stunning and he seems to have a real sense of what he's doing. You can see one of his latest blogs here and his (still active) facebook page here. He's also contributed greatly to the databases at uer.ca, a major international hub for urban explorers.

I found out about All Saints Drain from Ryan's blog, and after searching all around and following what leads I could get, I still couldn't find it. But after emailing Ryan a bit, I asked him if he would be willing to share the location of the drain with me. He told me where to find it and was even kind enough to provide an aerial map to help me.

Thanks to Ryan Ademan, I was able to access this drain and get some good shots of it over the past couple weeks that I feel pretty happy with. Here they are:

Establishing shot from outside just as a reminder.

The first tunnel I went down. It is relatively large in size but fairly long.

The first juncture.

The aged graffiti on top says "your life ends here" and points down to this tunnel. The redness in the tunnel below was enhanced on Photoshop by a new name to this blog, Vealius. Vealius hasn't been with us on any adventures but is very knowledgeable in photography.

That little dot of light at the end is the entrance.

I lit a few dozen real candles for some of these shots. Be careful of doing this in drains, as methane gas could possibly be in the air, and that would really ruin you day if you had an explosion on your hands.

Candles: lights on.

Candles: lights off.

You can see some plant spores down here. It is damp and there is sand, but this area receives very little to no sunlight, so I was quite surprised.

Ryan visited the drain a day before I got to fully explore any part of it, and told me he left a headlamp in there. I found it, still working, as you can see in this shot.

Ryan's headlamp. He was kind enough to let me keep it. You can see one of the shots above as well as some shots in other posts are lit with the red or white lights on this headlamp.

Candle set-up from a different day.

This shot was taken after I bumped my camera on long exposure, then stylized it with a program that "paints" the image.

Shot of the inside of the clay bricks.

A warning to those who dare venture down the clay sections: it's small enough so that you have to squat-walk for great distances, and on my first visit I spent over an hour down there with few opportunities to stand up. When I got out my legs were sore for the next couple days.


I explored just about as deep in as I could get over several visits, and almost completely alone. Some parts of the drain (deep down the clay sections) require crawling on hands and knees, and it can be pretty frightening down there when you're wedged in deep down a part of the drain, underground with no service, and you think you hear a human voice or footstep behind you. I took a couple different friends down there and their tolerance level for that kind of thing was much lower than mine.

This was taken in very dark lighting but using my camera's flash, which is something I rarely use, though I believe the shot came out nicely.

Vealius also worked some slight edits on this image in Photoshop.

A map I made of the drain. Excuse the poor quality. Lengths of tunnels not to scale.

Key for the map.

Once again, I couldn't have realized this aspiration without Ryan's help, so I have to thank him greatly for it.

All Saints Drain--Exteriors

Over the past week or so, I've done some exploring of the drain, inside and out. After today and yesterday, I finally got as far as I could with the exterior of the drain and now have some pictures to show of it. The drain flows out into an old and worn cobblestone path which runs through the woods, which I followed as far as I could to get these shots:

The drain's face from the cobblestone path it flows into.

This was covered in weeds when I first saw it on my first trip last Saturday. I would have never seen it had I not been looking for it.

The path during golden hours.

Eventually the cobblestone path fills with sand increasingly until it becomes a sandy, trash-filled path through the woods with many fallen trees and tree limbs.

Some finds along the path.

Notice how this shopping cart is partially submerged in the dirt.

This is the half-buried worn-out figure of an old bicycle.

Finally we reached something--a tiny isolated bridge through which shallow water flows.

The bridge is small, leads nowhere in particular, and is covered in graffiti. It pours out into some deeper water which becomes a river.

Under the bridge.

Other side.

Beaver damn up the river. I believe the river eventually leads to a very large drain, but I could not go any farther in just my rainboots.

Second Visit to Hope Mill

If you haven't seen my first post on the mill, check it out here.

Today Calypso and I went back, though didn't get very far because again, there was someone in the back of the property. However, I did get these shots further in the interior:

The ceiling had made its way comfortably to the floor.