I didn't realize so many other people were also fascinated with abandoned homes and buildings. I've been exploring them since I was a kid, and have been in dozens of them.
In Paradise Valley, Arizona, there was an old "printing house" sitting in the middle of empty acreage, not even near a road, abandoned for years after it was fire-damaged. Lots of fascinating bits of printed stuff there, along with some of the old machinery, but I watched it gradually disappear to looters before it was finally razed to build something else on the property.
Here in Hong Kong during the 1980s, the pace of redevelopment was hectic. There were always old colonial-era buildings being torn down for re-development into high-rise developments. I went through every one I could, dozens of places, and picked up (rescued/salvaged) plenty of "souvenirs", including carved blackwood furniture with marble insets, old pressed glass, a solid copper-and-brass fire extinguisher from the 1920s, some nice colored-glass windows, etc...
There are also ruins going back a few hundred years, partly overgrown. Perhaps the most fascinating place is a large Banyan tree in the New Territories area, that grew right over a house that dated back a couple centuries. The brickwork of the house mostly either eroded away or perhaps was taken for recycling, but the roots and lower trunk of the tree, still grasping brick sections and single bricks in places, form an almost perfect square. You can literally walk "inside the tree" --well, inside the lattice-like web of its root/trunk structure-- as if you were walking into a room. It must have taken a couple of centuries to grow like that!
The most dangerous experiences I've had exploring the old buildings here were two staircases that collapsed while I was on them. I "rode them down" as if surfing, with only very minor injuries, but it isn't an experience I'd ever recommend. VERY dangerous! In one case, there was old chemical glassware (so it probably had traces of acids, etc...) on the ground floor below, where the stairway collapsed. One very elaborate and huge distillation flask I was keen to take as a souvenir, but unfortunately it was smashed by the collapse.
I've never seen another flask quite like it, and am still curious to know what it was used for!
One other time that was scary was a place where a major section of an upstairs floor had collapsed, leaving only a strip around the outer walls, about 4 to 6 feet wide. The whole floor had been coverd with decorative Victorian or Art-deco tile work, laid over a thin cement layer, atop a wooden beam-and-board floor. My guess is that the weight of the tiles and cement on top had become too much for the aging (and probably rain-weakened, since the roof was poor) wooden flooring, leading to the collapse.
The strips along the outer walls were the only way to get to some back rooms, so I walked along that slightly-spongy-feeling strip of floor, hugging the wall as the strongest part, just waiting for it all to collapse underneath me and send me plummeting down.
Fortunately, it held and I survived to tell the tale. STUPID thing to try, but I was into exploring these places then, and had the bravado (=stupidity!) of relative youth.
One place gave me a bad feeling, and a bad cough every time I went in there. There was a gorgeous carved wooden bureau there, which I managed to take home, but for weeks afterwards --as long as I had it in the apartment-- I continued to cough, until I decided it was carrying some disease germs. It sat in storage for a few years and eventually was shipped back to the States. Seems to have lost it's cough-causing power over the years, if there ever was any such connection.
That same place had a wonderful fancy old ceiling fan with ornate metal work and beautiful carved-wood blades, with ruby cut-crystal lamp globes suspended below. Probably the most elaborate yet beautiful ceiling fan I've ever seen. It looked like something one would have seen in a circa 190X high-class Parisian salon (or perhaps bordello...) I managed to get it down and bring it home safely, too. In that same building (a high-end place with several apartments in it), just a day or two before I was first there, someone (unfortunately not me) found a large cache of mostly silver coins. Wish I'd found that! (Although I did get a smaller cache of silver coins from another place, later. A friend who was working in the demolition company found that and passed it to me. He is since deceased, so I keep it in his memory. Not really worth much monetarily, but worth something nostalgically.)