abandoned: The All-American Ruins Podcast
abandoned: The All-American Ruins Podcast guides listeners through immersive audio fantasies, recreating host Blake Pfeil’s experiences exploring abandoned spaces across the United States and around the world. Along the way, the show asks critical questions about American history and culture, community, economics, the environment, and mental health while encouraging folks to activate their imaginations as a tool for healing. Winner: Ambie Award (2025 - Best DIY Podcast), Signal Awards (2024 & 2025 - Best Experimental Podcast; 2026 - Best Live Recording), Oscar-Qualifying HollyShorts Film Festival (Best Podcast), Bushwick Film Festival (Best Podcast), CineHealth Media Festival (Best Podcast), Sydney Web Fest Michael Ajakwe Award for Innovation (2025) Nominee: UK Press Gazette Future of Media Awards (2024, 2025, 2026 - Regional Podcast of the Year), Ambie Awards (2024 - Best Indie Podcast, 2026 - Best DIY Podcast), Associations for International Broadcasters (2026 - Most Innovative Audio Production) To learn more, visit www.allamericanruins.com.
Episodes
October 15, 2026 • 40 mins
In 1933, Roland Lindemann opened America’s first privately-owned zoo: the Catskill Game Farm. By 2006, it was completely abandoned, along with its charmed memory, but in 2022, Emmy-nominated filmmaker Tim Travers Hawkins accidentally stumbled upon boxes of 16mm film archives and documents buried beneath layers of rubble on the property, which began to unearth a darker, far more complicated of the Catskill Game Farm than the w...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
October 1, 2026 • 66 mins
Podcast recommendation alert! This isn’t a new episode of “abandoned”—it’s a special preview from our urbex podcast pal Courtney Autumn, host of “Echoes of Elsewhere.” Join Courtney as she welcomes “abandoned” season 4 guest host, writer, and urban explorer Stev Hull-Allen for a conversation about the strange attraction to abandoned places—and what ruins can reveal about i...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
September 17, 2026 • 20 mins
To celebrate the award-winning “All-American Ruins” short film arriving on HUDSY’s YouTube channel on Sept. 24, we’re returning to the Season 1 story that inspired it. Revisit Blake’s surreal exploration of the legendary Nevele Grand Hotel—and a version of this Hudson Valley juggernaut that, after years of devastating fires, no longer exists quite as it did then.
🏆 The Ambies — Winner, ...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
September 3, 2026 • 35 mins
Who gets to wander freely—and who gets to decide where we belong? Blake sits down with activist, multidisciplinary artist, and social change worker callie mackenzie for a candid, exploratory conversation about race, ruins, trespassing, land ownership, and the privilege hiding inside the practice of urban exploration.
callie mackenzie (she/they) is a social change worker living at the intersections of art, music, and social j...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
August 20, 2026 • 34 mins
While exploring the ruins of the Green Mountain Race Track in Pownal, Vermont, Blake meets Dina (and her silent husband Mike), self-proclaimed conspiracy theorists who believe the world’s buildings weren’t built by us at all but inherited from a lost Tartarian Empire — what Bloomberg News once dubbed the “QAnon of Architecture.” As Blake tries to follow Dina's train-of-thought, he realizes that, really...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
August 6, 2026 • 37 mins
Guest host Stev Hull-Allen (Blake's brother in a past life) guides listeners through the abandoned Colonial Terrace, a crumbling catering hall where every room seems to hold onto a different version of the past. As his imagination weaves in and out of oral histories, textbook memories, and invented folklore, Stev explores what abandoned buildings can reveal about timing, healing, and the strange feeling that some friendships don't ...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
July 23, 2026 • 22 mins
Inside the abandoned Nopeming Sanatorium, Blake talks to his grandmother (Grammie), Lurana — whose dementia carried her away before she passed. Like an insistent phantom moving through its rooms and hallways, signals reverberating inside the walls of Nopeming’s medical past radiate against Blake’s cherished memories, turning the adventure into a ghostly conversation across time about forgiveness, sobriety, and the...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
July 9, 2026 • 22 mins
Blake finds sanctuary on the grounds of the abandoned Taney Motel in Branson, Missouri — a refuge tucked inside a world of risk. Wandering around the vacant property, Blake reflects on growing up queer, the quiet negotiations of safety, and the fragile, hallowed spaces that marginalized communities create when the outside world doesn't have room for them.
🏆 The Ambies — Winner, Best DIY Podcast (2025)
📡 The Signal A...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
June 25, 2026 • 27 mins
In the ruins of an upstate New York cement factory, Blake and New York Times best-selling author Dylan Thuras wander toward a mysterious “document storage house,” discovering they’re not just exploring a place but each other’s relationship to creativity and the myths we build to live inside it. Among empty boxes, industrial ghosts, and imagined histories, the duo considers what it means to construct somethin...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
Deep in the Mojave Desert, a defunct gas station has become a roadside altar of shoes, each pair carrying stories and secrets that transform a place for transients into a monument for return pilgrimages. Standing among the relics and artifacts of lives past, Blake considers eulogies, elegies, and effigies — and what it means to be remembered by strangers.
Note: Episodes 1–4 of Season 4 form “Fading Transmissions ...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
May 28, 2026 • 17 mins
On the border of Texas and New Mexico, a town divided by a state line faces an identity crisis — and demands to be remembered. Wandering the empty fields and crumbling pavement of what, at one time, was a glamorous rest-stop town, Blake imagines a conversation with Glenrio itself as it bears witness to what once was, and wonders whether a forgotten ghost town might outlast us all.
Note: Episodes 1–4 of Season 4 form ...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
May 14, 2026 • 22 mins
When Blake stumbles into a forgotten house in the Texas Panhandle, imagined legends and headlines begin unfolding in his mind — stories of addiction, homelessness, and loss, but above all, the power of family rising from the wreckage.
Note: Episodes 1–4 of Season 4 form “Fading Transmissions from a Republic of Ruins,” a four-part series embedded within the season.
🏆 The Ambies — Winner, Best DIY Pod...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
April 30, 2026 • 34 mins
An unexpected—and ironic—detour to an infamous abandoned school in Kansas sparks the kickoff of season 4. When Blake accidentally stumbles into the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education at the Sumner School in Topeka, he finds himself confronting the moment his childhood imagination collides with historical transmissions the country once tried to erase.
Note: Episodes 1–4 of Season 4 form “Fading Transmissi...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
April 16, 2026 • 5 mins
Welcome to season 4 of the Ambie-winning “abandoned: The All-American Ruins Podcast.” Through the immersive power of sonic storytelling, host Blake Pfeil guides you as he follows transmissions reverberating across forgotten spaces throughout the United States.
This season, the signal grows stronger: guest hosts step behind the microphone to lead listeners through their own encounters with ruins. Along the way, “...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
October 23, 2025 • 85 mins
On October 12, 2025, Blake was joined by All-American Ruins guest host and writer Isabel Wilder at the Ulster County Historical Society in Kingston, NY for a 90-minute program. Participants explored how ruins reflect America’s past, present, and future—while doubling as playgrounds for creativity, imagination, and healing.
To learn more, visit: http://www.allamericanruins.com
Please contact advertising@airwavem...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
September 4, 2025 • 16 mins
On the one-year anniversary of his best friend Julie’s death, Blake makes his way to the ruins of the Schrade Cutlery Factory in Ellenville, NY. The only remaining structure is a crumbling security gatehouse which Julie and Blake always talked about getting to but never did. Covered in vines, Blake reminisces on his friendship with Julie and asks her ghost if it’s time to let her go.
(Note: For the best immersive exper...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
June 12, 2025 • 30 mins
Wander through fantastical realm of a real giant beige house (at the end of a very long driveway), abandoned and hidden on the banks of a famous river in New York-- where you’ll meet the ghost of the old woman and connect the dots between this story and “The People Who Used to Live Here, Part 1” from Season 1.
This episode features:
Margarita Meyendorff
(Note: For the best immersive experience, we str...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
June 5, 2025 • 17 mins
In preparation for the season 3 finale, “The People Who Used to Live Here, Part II: The Giant Beige House at the End of a Very Long Driveway,” we’re diving back into the archives for this special re-release of “The People Who Used to Live Here, Part I.” You know; for context. This episode originally aired on December 29, 2022.
Original episode description: In the season one finale of abandoned: The Al...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
May 29, 2025 • 30 mins
Feeling trapped in their Covid bubble, Blake and his pandemic pod-mate Isabel explore an abandoned Hudson Valley farmhouse where Isabel discovers the Borden family’s influence on the country’s dairy industry and reconciles with childhood ghosts. In an All-American Ruins first, join Blake as he passes the storytelling reins to his sister-from-another mother who you may recognize from previous episodes in season 2, "Isabe...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
May 22, 2025 • 74 mins
What does it look like to revitalize an abandoned space - that’s situated inside an active and excessively large shopping mall - in 2005? On this special bonus episode of abandoned: The All-American Ruins Podcast, you’ll meet Michael Townsend, one of the eight artists who, from 2005-2008, did just that: built a secret apartment inside the Providence Place Mall. Michael is one of the subjects of the smash documentary Sec...
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
Popular Podcasts
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show. Clay Travis and Buck Sexton tackle the biggest stories in news, politics and current events with intelligence and humor. From the border crisis, to the madness of cancel culture and far-left missteps, Clay and Buck guide listeners through the latest headlines and hot topics with fun and entertaining conversations and opinions.