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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 world ever could’ve known. Until now. American Zoo is the new documentary from Tim Travers Hawkins, which made its Catskillian debut at the Woodstock Film Festival in 2026. This episode features a truncated interview with Tim and Blake on a weekly radio program on Radio Kingston / WKNY called Cinema Kingston! (which happens to also be co-hosted by Blake). *** 🏆 The Ambies — Winner, Best DIY Podcast (2025) 📡 The Signal Awards — Best Experimental Podcast (2024 & 2025) 📰  Press Gazette Future of Media Awards — Nominee (2024, 2025, 2026) *** 🎧 Note: For the best immersive experience, find a quiet place and wear headphones when listening to “abandoned: The All-American Ruins Podcast.” 🎧 *** Further Exploration 📜 Transcripts: https://abandonedpod.com 🗺️ Continue exploring: http://www.allamericanruins.com ✉️ Advertising inquiries: [email protected] ℹ️ Learn more about your ad choices: megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Introducing COLLIN GOSSELIN: The Real Story Behind One of America’s Most-Watched Families from On Purpose with Jay Shetty. Follow the show: On Purpose with Jay Shetty Collin Gosselin opens up about what it was really like growing up in the spotlight of Jon & Kate Plus 8, sharing his personal account of life behind the camera. He recounts his experiences with family isolation, allegations of physical abuse, time spent in a basement room, and his twenty-month stay in an institution he says he never needed to be in. Collin also details how a smuggled note led to a reunion with his father, how he is working to rebuild his life today, and why he is finally choosing to speak publicly about his past. With Love and Gratitude, Jay Shetty Instagram Teen Accounts: Built-in protections for teens. Learn More. At https://chase.com/sapphirereserve JAY'S DAILY WISDOM DELIVERED STRAIGHT TO YOUR INBOX Join 900,000+ readers discovering how small daily shifts create big life change with my free newsletter. Subscribe here: https://news.jayshetty.me/subscribe Check out our Apple subscription to unlock bonus content of On Purpose! https://lnk.to/JayShettyPodcast What We Discuss: 00:00 Welcome To On Purpose And Disclaimer 01:43 Inside the Gosselin Household 03:50 Faking Reality On Camera 05:15 The Normalization Of Constant Filming 06:35 The Turning Point 09:06 Modern Child Exploitation 12:35 Pushing Back And Early On-Camera Resistance 17:02 Earliest Memories Of In-Home Abuse 20:37 Targeted Isolation And Homeschooling 25:21 Child Protective System Flaws 35:11 Advocacy In The Face Of Public Backlash 36:55 The Attempted Runaway 44:03 Institutionalization At Age 11 48:16 Twenty Months In Inpatient Confinement 53:53 The Official Admission Records 59:12 The Harsh Reality of Living in Isolation 01:04:45 The Smuggled Letter And Custody Battle 01:08:37 Reconnecting And Healing 01:11:26 Repairing The Father-Son Relationship 01:14:00 Turning Pain into Purpose 01:17:14 False Diagnoses & His Dream of Joining The Marines 01:24:41 Legal Defamation Threats 01:26:16 Where Does He Stand With His Siblings? 01:30:20 Who is Collin Today? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices DISCLAIMER: Please note, this is an independent podcast episode not affiliated with, endorsed by, or produced in conjunction with the host podcast feed or any of its media entities. The views and opinions expressed in this episode are solely those of the creators and guests. For any concerns, please reach out to [email protected].

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 identity, memory, mental health, and the elasticity of time. 🏆 The Ambies — Winner, Best DIY Podcast (2025) 📡 The Signal Awards — Best Experimental Podcast (2024 & 2025) 📰  Press Gazette Future of Media Awards — Nominee (2024, 2025, 2026) *** 🎧 Note: For the best immersive experience, find a quiet place and wear headphones when listening to “abandoned: The All-American Ruins Podcast.” 🎧 *** Further Exploration 📜 Transcripts: https://abandonedpod.com 🗺️ Continue exploring: http://www.allamericanruins.com ✉️ Advertising inquiries: [email protected] ℹ️ Learn more about your ad choices: megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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, Best DIY Podcast (2025) 📡 The Signal Awards — Best Experimental Podcast (2024 & 2025) 📰  Press Gazette Future of Media Awards — Nominee (2024, 2025, 2026) *** 🎧 Note: For the best immersive experience, find a quiet place and wear headphones when listening to “abandoned: The All-American Ruins Podcast.” 🎧 *** Further Exploration 📜 Transcripts: https://abandonedpod.com 🗺️ Continue exploring: http://www.allamericanruins.com ✉️ Advertising inquiries: [email protected] ℹ️ Learn more about your ad choices: megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 justice. For her complete bio, visit calliemackenzie.com. Songs by callie on today’s episode include: “roller coaster” from the album “what that heart do” (2025) “kerfuffle” from the album “what that heart do” (2025) “i can’t talk about freedom” from the album “the wreckoning” (2022) callie’s complete music library can be accessed at: https://calliemackenzie.bandcamp.com  bell hooks interview audio courtesy of Othering and Belonging Institute “Kwanzaa: A Celebration” courtesy of WXXI (Rochester, NY) “Theatre Acknowledgement” courtesy of CBC 🏆 The Ambies — Winner, Best DIY Podcast (2025) 📡 The Signal Awards — Best Experimental Podcast (2024 & 2025) 📰  Press Gazette Future of Media Awards — Nominee (2024, 2025, 2026) *** 🎧 Note: For the best immersive experience, find a quiet place and wear headphones when listening to “abandoned: The All-American Ruins Podcast.” 🎧 *** Further Exploration 📜 Transcripts: https://abandonedpod.com 🗺️ Continue exploring: http://www.allamericanruins.com ✉️ Advertising inquiries: [email protected] ℹ️ Learn more about your ad choices: megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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, there's a small conspiracy theorist living inside each and every one of us. Dina is recreated by Terri Weagant. 🏆 The Ambies — Winner, Best DIY Podcast (2025) 📡 The Signal Awards — Best Experimental Podcast (2024 & 2025) 📰  Press Gazette Future of Media Awards — Nominee (2024, 2025, 2026) *** 🎧 Note: For the best immersive experience, find a quiet place and wear headphones when listening to “abandoned: The All-American Ruins Podcast.” 🎧 *** Further Exploration 📜 Transcripts: https://abandonedpod.com 🗺️ Continue exploring: http://www.allamericanruins.com ✉️ Advertising inquiries: [email protected] ℹ️ Learn more about your ad choices: megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 begin so much as they find their way back to us. *** 🏆 The Ambies — Winner, Best DIY Podcast (2025) 📡 The Signal Awards — Best Experimental Podcast (2024, 2025) 📰  Press Gazette Future of Media Awards — Nominee (2024, 2025, 2026) *** 🎧 Note: For the best immersive experience, find a quiet place and wear headphones when listening to “abandoned: The All-American Ruins Podcast.” 🎧 *** Further Exploration 📜 Transcripts: https://abandonedpod.com 🗺️ Continue exploring: http://www.allamericanruins.com ✉️ Advertising inquiries: [email protected] ℹ️ Learn more about your ad choices: megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 confounding kinship between grief and love. 🏆 The Ambies — Winner, Best DIY Podcast (2025) 📡 The Signal Awards — Best Experimental Podcast (2024 & 2025) 📰  Press Gazette Future of Media Awards — Nominee (2024, 2025, & 2026) *** 🎧 Note: For the best immersive experience, find a quiet place and wear headphones when listening to “abandoned: The All-American Ruins Podcast.” 🎧 *** Further Exploration 📜 Transcripts: https://abandonedpod.com 🗺️ Continue exploring: http://www.allamericanruins.com ✉️ Advertising inquiries: [email protected] ℹ️ Learn more about your ad choices: megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Awards — Best Experimental Podcast (2024 & 2025) 📰  Press Gazette Future of Media Awards — Nominee (2024 & 2025) *** 🎧 Note: For the best immersive experience, find a quiet place and wear headphones when listening to “abandoned: The All-American Ruins Podcast.” 🎧 *** Further Exploration 📜 Transcripts: https://abandonedpod.com 🗺️ Continue exploring: http://www.allamericanruins.com ✉️ Advertising inquiries: [email protected] ℹ️ Learn more about your ad choices: megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 something out of nothing, outgrow it, and still carry its faded transmissions — like a friendship — once it becomes memory. 🏆 The Ambies — Winner, Best DIY Podcast (2025) 📡 The Signal Awards — Best Experimental Podcast (2024 & 2025) 📰  Press Gazette Future of Media Awards — Nominee (2024 & 2025) *** 🎧 Note: For the best immersive experience, find a quiet place and wear headphones when listening to “abandoned: The All-American Ruins Podcast.” 🎧 *** Further Exploration 📜 Transcripts: https://abandonedpod.com 🗺️ Continue exploring: http://www.allamericanruins.com ✉️ Advertising inquiries: [email protected] ℹ️ Learn more about your ad choices: megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 from a Republic of Ruins,” a four-part series embedded within the season. 🏆 The Ambies — Winner, Best DIY Podcast (2025) 📡 The Signal Awards — Best Experimental Podcast (2024 & 2025) 📰  Press Gazette Future of Media Awards — Nominee (2024 & 2025) *** 🎧 Note: For the best immersive experience, find a quiet place and wear headphones when listening to “abandoned: The All-American Ruins Podcast.” 🎧 *** Further Exploration 📜 Transcripts: https://abandonedpod.com 🗺️ Continue exploring: http://www.allamericanruins.com ✉️ Advertising inquiries: [email protected] ℹ️ Learn more about your ad choices: megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 “Fading Transmissions from a Republic of Ruins,” a four-part series embedded within the season.🏆 The Ambies — Winner, Best DIY Podcast (2025) 📡 The Signal Awards — Best Experimental Podcast (2024 & 2025) 📰  Press Gazette Future of Media Awards — Nominee (2024 & 2025) *** 🎧 Note: For the best immersive experience, find a quiet place and wear headphones when listening to “abandoned: The All-American Ruins Podcast.” 🎧 *** Further Exploration 📜 Transcripts: https://abandonedpod.com 🗺️ Continue exploring: http://www.allamericanruins.com ✉️ Advertising inquiries: [email protected] ℹ️ Learn more about your ad choices: megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Podcast (2025) 📡 The Signal Awards — Best Experimental Podcast (2024 & 2025) 📰  Press Gazette Future of Media Awards — Nominee (2024 & 2025) *** 🎧 Note: For the best immersive experience, find a quiet place and wear headphones when listening to “abandoned: The All-American Ruins Podcast.” 🎧 *** Further Exploration 📜 Transcripts: https://abandonedpod.com 🗺️ Continue exploring: http://www.allamericanruins.com ✉️ Advertising inquiries: [email protected] ℹ️ Learn more about your ad choices: megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Transmissions from a Republic of Ruins,” a four-part series embedded within the season. This Season 4 premiere was recorded in front of a live audience at Green Box Arts in Green Mountain Falls, Colorado. 🏆 The Ambies — Winner, Best DIY Podcast (2025) 📡 The Signal Awards — Best Experimental Podcast (2024 & 2025) 📰  Press Gazette Future of Media Awards — Nominee (2024 & 2025) *** 🎧 Note: For the best immersive experience, find a quiet place and wear headphones when listening to "abandoned: The All-American Ruins Podcast." 🎧 *** Further Exploration 📜 Transcripts: https://abandonedpod.com 🗺️ Continue exploring: http://www.allamericanruins.com ✉️ Advertising inquiries: [email protected] ℹ️ Learn more about your ad choices: megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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, “abandoned” asks critical questions about American history, culture, community, the environment, technology, and collective mental health, inviting listeners to use imagination as a tool for healing and connection. New episodes every other Thursday starting April 16, 2026. 🏆 The Ambies — Winner, Best DIY Podcast (2025) 📡 The Signal Awards — Best Experimental Podcast (2024 & 2025) 📰  Press Gazette Future of Media Awards — Nominee (2024 & 2025) *** 🎧 Note: For the best immersive experience, find a quiet place and wear headphones when listening to abandoned: The All-American Ruins Podcast. 🎧 *** Further Exploration 📜 Transcripts: https://abandonedpod.com 🗺️ Continue exploring: http://www.allamericanruins.com ✉️ Advertising inquiries: [email protected] ℹ️ Learn more about your ad choices: megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices