With my brother Tom back in town for a little bit, we decided to do some abandoned exploration. Through some internet searching, we found out about an abandoned toy factory in Algonquin. The sites we found did not disclose an exact location, however.

Using the description of the area around the factory and an outside photo, we were able to pinpoint the exact location using satellite imagery from Google and Microsoft. With the satellite images, we were also able to scope out the scene, looking for a place to park and enter the grounds with maximum cover so that people at neighboring businesses and houses would not give us any trouble. Isn’t technology great?

We headed down to Algonquin in the early afternoon and found the location very easily. After parking the car, it was time to explore.

For a pictorial tour of the old factory, go here.

When we got back outside the factory, I noticed a cop pull into the parking lot on the other side of the barbed wire fence. It was time to get the hell out of there. Luckily we were just feet from our entry point and high tailed it away the other way into the woods. The cop would have had to pursue us on foot at this point, but we continued at a very brisk pace just in case.

We got to a bike path that ran along the backside of the factory grounds and started walking down it. Looking behind us, we saw a man in black running towards us down the bike path. We were paranoid that it was a cop, but he was too far away to tell. We started power walking down the path. But the man in black got closer and closer. He was gaining on us. At this point the bike path was going over ravines and creeks and there wasn’t really anywhere for us to go off of the path unless we wanted to run down an extremely steep and muddy hill.

After looking over our shoulders every few seconds, the man in black was close enough for us to see that he was merely a jogger. He passed us without incident and we were overcome by relief. We figured that the cop was long gone by now and that we needed to get back to our car. We went down the bike path back towards the factory. We passed three teenagers who were standing on the path looking at the factory and talking about it. As we suspected, as soon as we got far enough away from them, they disappeared off the trail in the direction of the factory. This was good for us, because if that cop was still patrolling the area, we now had a diversion.

Me and Tom decided to take the long way back to the parking lot where the car was. We followed the bike trail until it came to a neighborhood side street. We walked through a park, which was on the other side of a creek that bordered the parking lot. But when we got closer, we noticed that there was a dark colored car parked close to mine, and there was a man sitting in it. This looked like the same car that I noticed through the window when we were in the factory. So we hung out in the park for a while to observe from afar.

The man eventually got out of his car and began walking around through the woods in the direction of the access point in the fence. He returned to his car a couple minutes later. During this time we noticed the kids from the bike path wandering around on the factory grounds. Was the mysterious parking lot man after these kids? Or maybe he was also there to explore but was paranoid that we were watching him? We weren’t sure, so we left the park to walk downtown for some grub.

We got some food from a small coffee shop and after a little time passed, we returned to the parking lot. The man was STILL there. At this point, I didn’t give a shit and we walked right passed his car and got into mine. The man just sat there in his car, reading something, and didn’t even glance over. He was probably as suspicious of us as we were of him. With that, we were home free with some kick ass pictures to show for it.