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.