SOMERS, N.Y. -- Robert Carleton was getting the mail one day in April when he saw a group of teenage boys sprinting away from nearby woods. He cut them off at the road and raised his arms.
"I just said, 'Stop, it's over,'" the 62-year-old retired engineer recalled. Soon, he said, three pursuing New York State Police troopers emerged from the tree line and arrested seven juveniles.
The criminal charge: trespassing on the former IBM campus here.
The long-vacant site has become a magnet for so-called urban explorers, who prowl abandoned malls, hospitals, power plants, amusement parks, factories and any other disused structure they can breach.
The global "urbex" phenomenon isn't new, but it's been turbocharged by artsy videos on Instagram and TikTok that spur others to create their own posts, luring still more curiosity seekers.
Police in Livingston, N.J., recently warned people to stay out of the closed Livingston Mall property. Jacksonville Beach, Fla., police issued a similar caution in April about the shuttered Adventure Landing amusement park: "We are aware of a Tik-Tok challenge to explore the property."
In Somers, social-media images of the old IBM campus -- a sprawling, pyramid-studded 1980s complex designed by the late I.M. Pei's firm -- show dystopian scenes: busted windows, tossed rooms and graffitied walls. But they also give eerie glimpses of conference rooms and cubicles unchanged since IBM left a decade ago, as if employees had fled the daily grind one day and never returned.
The monthslong influx has rattled the Westchester County town of 21,500 that calls itself the "Cradle of the American Circus." Officials decry the trespassing as a risky gambit that is wrecking an iconic property they want revived.
"If somebody gets hurt and they're trapped in there, now it's additional resources for us, and I have to worry about officers getting hurt," said Chief Brian Linkletter, of the 17-officer Somers police department. "And why? Because somebody wants to walk through an empty building."
Sebastian Capital, the Manhattan company that manages the 723-acre site, said it has beefed up security and appreciates the help from police. "We have been the victims of vandalism," Roxana Girand-Spitzer, president and chief executive, said in a statement nodding to the urbex trend.
Since February, state police have arrested 48 people for trespassing on the property, many from nearby towns; 30 were teenagers. One man in his mid-20s faces felony charges; police allege he had a loaded 9mm gun and took a Sony camera and power strip among other souvenirs.
Andrew Proto, a defense lawyer, said "a 15-second clip" isn't worth a criminal record. "If you have already been arrested, you're not the first call we've taken this month," he blogged in May, "and you won't be the last."
Proto said he has represented or advised several minors arrested on the campus. The Somers town court clerk said some defendants received a 6-month "adjournment in contemplation of dismissal," meaning charges will be dropped and their arrest sealed if they avoid trouble.
Some explorers who have posted about the IBM site say they follow an observe-and-preserve ethos and reject vandalism. They say they're driven by curiosity, the thrill of roaming forbidden spaces and a zeal to document discoveries -- and that they're careful and know their limits.
"It actually gives me hope when I hear that kids are out there getting into trouble," says Bradley Garrett, a cultural geographer and author of the book "Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City," about his own urbex adventures. He sees urban exploration as "a gateway drug in a good way, sometimes, into intellectual curiosity about history and culture."
But Garrett said popular spots can be "loved to death" online -- and then shut down, looted or set ablaze.
The Somers IBM plant sits on a hilltop, ringed by woods, its pyramids visible from nearby Interstate 684. Three roads lead in; at least two have barriers. "No trespassing" signs plaster trees on the perimeter.
Pei's firm, now called Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, began planning the IBM campus in 1983. That year he was named architect for the Grand Louvre project in Paris, which also yielded a large glass pyramid.
After its completion in the late 1980s, about 2,300 employees worked at the complex, spanning more than a million square feet.
In 2016, IBM sold the property for $31.75 million, and it is owned by a limited liability company that shares a Fifth Avenue address with Sebastian Capital. A plan to convert it to a private school foundered during Covid and Sebastian said it is considering next steps.
While people sometimes ventured onto the campus over the years, trespassing escalated last winter as social media videos "spread like wildfire," said Supervisor Robert Scorrano, Somers' elected chief executive.
One, he said, showed someone sliding down a pyramid feature.
Leigh Jones, 55, whose home backs up to the campus, said she would like to see the complex renovated, not least for the boost to the tax base. But Jones doesn't mind the urban explorers if they don't trash the place.
A landscape architect, she once went inside the buildings to look around herself, she said. She saw vegetation pushing up through the parking lot, and a "ghost towny" interior with nice office furniture and photos on walls.
Other neighbors like Carleton want the interlopers to keep out. "If they're breaking in and vandalizing and starting fires, this place is going to be worthless," he said.
Herb Oringel spent about 10 of his 44 years with IBM doing strategic planning in Somers. The bold architecture and verdant grounds were an apt setting for high-level thinking, he said.
Oringel, who is 85 and lives in town, finds the long vacancy distressing. He also has a dim view of the trespassers. "Very disappointing," he said after watching urbex videos from his living room easy chair.
"It was at one time the Acropolis," he said. "So to think of it as a ruin is absurd."
Write to Scott Calvert at scott.calvert@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
July 07, 2026 05:30 ET (09:30 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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