In Mrs. Dalby and the Gravekeeper of Hatteras Island, Blake Pfeil takes the listener on a fantastical walk to the ruins of a seaside shanty, standing proudly on the edge of a graveyard overlooking the mighty Atlantic Ocean in the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

His sound walk is one of the shortlisted pieces for the Sound Walk September Awards 2024.
Below, Blake reflects on the origin of his podcast All American Ruins, for which Mrs. Dalby is one of the episodes.

As a kid, I spent hours at an abandoned dairy farm down the hill from my childhood home. The first time I figured out how to break in, it was 1993, and I was just 6 years old. I immediately had this funny feeling, right down in my gut, like I’d been there before. It was more than a feeling of familiarity, though—it was also a feeling of safety, security, and serenity.

Inside the barn or the grain silo or the adjoining house, still full of dishes, furniture, clothes, I ran my fingers along the walls, and somehow, it was recognizable to me. I began to frequent the ruins of a time gone by, nestled in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies, and it slowly transformed into my private sanctuary. The ghosts inside became my best friends, and they shielded me from the reality of the outside world. It was the genesis of my imagination becoming not only a place of wonderment and creativity—but also a place of great comfort and healing.

Eventually, the dairy farm burned down, the remains were bulldozed, and overpriced condos took its place. Though the physical space had been destroyed, the spiritual domain that I’d discovered there seemed to linger in me. I carried those memories with me in my subconscious until May of 2020 when I woke up from a dream that I was back inside the dairy farm once again, that funny feeling still right down in my gut. It was the first time in months that I’d felt a sense of safety, security, and serenity. At that point, the COVID-19 pandemic had been raging for over three months, and my germaphobe-centric anxiety had taken full control of my life. The isolation began to wreak serious havoc on my head and heart, and though I knew I wasn’t alone in the overwhelming fear that seemed to be driving the societal narrative, I still felt totally confused, scared, and hopeless.

I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking about the abandoned dairy farm, and I wondered if there were any abandoned buildings near my house in the Hudson Valley. I hopped out of bed, did a quick Google search for “abandoned spaces near me,” and—shit. They’re everywhere. As it turns out, I’d entered a world I’d never heard of: the Urban Exploration, or “Urbex” for short, an underground community devoted to mini odysseys all over the world in search of the drudge and decay of once-occupied dwellings.

In my opinion, however, it doesn’t necessarily apply to solely “urban” areas; for me, my adventures have taken me to suburban and rural areas too, almost more so than urban. It’s a global company of misfits intent on seeing the unseen, unafraid to bend a rule or two. It can be as scary as it is exhilarating to roll under a cheap chain link fence or scoot around faded barbed wire, but it’s always worth it.

Many of the ruins I began to read about seemed too manicured or too preserved. I was more compelled by sites like the dairy farm from my childhood, places that looked like they’d been raptured, locations where I could once again time travel and feel that sense of serenity that I felt when I was a kid. The intentional act of getting lost has always been an important component of managing my emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual wellbeing. Since I didn’t even feel safe on the trails in my neck of the woods (at that point, they were overrun with thoughtless city people coming up seeking refuge from the brutality of the pandemic epicenter), this idea seemed to be a much safer way to get that adventurous, rule-bending Sagittarius energy out of my system.

Extensive hours of research (and developing an echolocation for abandoned spaces) charted a map of several locations in the immediate area that stoked the fires of that funny feeling of familiarity right down in my gut. Every weekend, I ventured out to a new location, each one much different than the last: military bases, factories, churches, bowling alleys, resorts, motels, psychiatric facilities, movie theaters, and houses. What started as a way to safely pass the time evolved into a salve for my mental health and a realm for my creativity to explode. I began to write about my experiences in each location, not just about each space itself, its architectural narrative, or the sordid history behind it, but also about what was going on inside my head as I wandered through each one. The more I went, the more I began to realize that I was reconnecting with my childhood self and that powerful imagination of mine that had become a healing realm at the abandoned dairy farm.

Over the last four years, I’ve explored over fifty abandoned spaces in sixteen states and four different countries, and in each one, I’ve learned something new about myself. I’ve forgiven myself for big mistakes, reconnected with my sobriety, allowed my spiritual beliefs to grow, and reclaimed my identity as an artist. I’ve meditated on challenging truths and asked critical questions about American history, culture, community, economics, the environment, mental health, and politics, all through the lens of these strangely beautiful abandoned spaces that time seems to have forgotten. 

But most importantly, I’ve been able to bear witness to humanity and honor the all-too-soiled American past, the untold stories of regular, everyday folk just like me, forgotten histories that live inside the walls of each abandoned space where lives were once lived and pain was once felt and love was once expressed. It’s grounded me in a way that I can’t explain except through immense gratitude and creative expression and the sheer willingness to keep showing up for that magical, funny feeling, right down in my gut, the same one that brought me the safety, security, and serenity I felt, all those years ago at an abandoned dairy farm in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies.

These experiences transformed into my larger body of work, All-American Ruins, a multimedia travelog in which I recount my experiences exploring abandoned spaces, each expedition reimagined through ​multimodal storytelling. “Mrs. Dalby and the Gravekeeper of Hatteras Island” was originally developed as a written retelling of my time at an abandoned seaside shanty on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. (You can read that story here.) The piece that I submitted to WLC is the audio adaptation of that original blog post.

Discovering this abandoned seaside shanty was purely an accident, but I’d like to believe that Mrs. Dalby knew I was going to find her. Who is she? You’ll have to find out for yourself.

The winner and honourable mention of the SWS Awards 2024 will be announced around the start of 2025.