Abandoned buildings — mystical places on the map
Houses, hospitals, factories and whole towns that people left and never came back to. Some closed overnight on an order, some simply stopped being needed — and wherever the owners' belongings are still lying about, stories about the ones who supposedly stayed are never far behind.
25 places
The Adzhimushkay quarries
Limestone workings outside Kerch where, from May to October 1942, a garrison of soldiers and civilians held out after the city fell and they went underground. The Germans blew in the roofs and pumped gas into the galleries. Of some thirteen thousand people, a few hundred survived. The diaries found in the workings afterwards are among the hardest documents of that war. Part of the quarries is a museum today; the rest is closed, because remains are still being found there.
The Dead Road
Construction Projects 501 and 503: the Salekhard–Igarka railway, driven across the polar tundra by prison labour between 1947 and 1953. After Stalin's death the work was abandoned in a single day. Some seven hundred kilometres of track remain in the tundra, along with locomotives, bridges and camp compounds with their watchtowers and barracks — all still standing, because removing it would have cost more than leaving it. It is called the dead road not for its ghosts: it leads nowhere and never did.
Chufut-Kale
A cave town on a Crimean plateau, inhabited from the sixth century and abandoned in the nineteenth. The name means Jewish fortress — the Karaites were the last to live here. Houses, cisterns, a prison and the mausoleum of the khan's daughter Canike Hanım are cut into the rock. Beside it lies the Karaite cemetery of Balta Tiymez, "the axe shall not touch" — a protected oak grove where felling was absolutely forbidden, which is why it outlived every wood around it.
Gwangju and the Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital
A city south-east of Seoul where the abandoned Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital stands, closed in 1996. The official reason was sewage problems and a lapsed licence; urban legend insists on mass deaths among patients and a director who fled the country. CNN listed the building among the world's creepiest places. A film about it in 2018 led the owner to seal off access for good.
Teufelsberg
A hill in Berlin heaped from the rubble of the bombed city over an unfinished Nazi military-technical faculty that would not yield to explosives. The Americans built a listening station on top, white radomes that monitored the Eastern Bloc until 1992. The station is abandoned now, the domes tearing in the wind, and the acoustics inside carry a whisper the length of the hall.
The Moundsville Penitentiary
A Gothic prison in use from 1876 to 1995, once listed among the ten most violent correctional facilities in the United States. Ninety-four men were executed here and some thirty-six more died in prison violence, including a riot in 1986. The Sugar Shack basement and the dark isolation cells have their own reputation. The building stands across the road from an Adena burial mound, which added another layer to the story.
The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum
One of the largest hand-cut stone buildings in North America, built in West Virginia for two hundred and fifty patients. By the 1950s it held around two and a half thousand, in unheated wards, under a lobotomy programme applied here unusually widely. The hospital closed in 1994. Night tours run through it now, and most of the accounts concern the fourth floor, where the most severe cases were kept.
Kuldhara
A village in the Thar Desert near Jaisalmer that its inhabitants abandoned in a single night around 1825 and never returned to. The story goes that the state minister demanded the village headman's daughter, and rather than hand her over the whole community of eighty-four villages walked out in the dark — quietly enough that none of their neighbours noticed them going. On leaving, the brahmins cursed the place: anyone who tried to settle there would not survive the night. The houses have stood empty for almost two centuries since, in the middle of otherwise inhabited land. The stone walls, staircases and doorways are intact — not ruined, simply left, as though the owners had stepped out and never come back.
Eastern State Penitentiary
A Philadelphia prison that pioneered total solitary confinement in the 19th century. Closed in 1971 and left in ruins, its vaulted cellblocks are counted among the most reputedly haunted places in the United States.
Old Changi Hospital
An abandoned hospital in Singapore, used as a prison and interrogation site during the Japanese occupation. Its empty wards and corridors have long attracted stories of voices and shadows — one of Asia's best-known haunted sites.
Plymouth
The capital of the Caribbean island of Montserrat, buried under ash and mudflows by the Soufrière Hills eruption of 1995–97. It legally remains the capital — the only ghost town holding that status.
Wittenoom
An Australian town built around blue asbestos mining, judged so hazardous that it was struck from maps and cut off from the power grid. It is officially the largest contaminated site in the Southern Hemisphere.
Beelitz-Heilstätten
A vast hospital complex outside Berlin, built around 1900 for tuberculosis patients. A wounded Hitler was treated here in 1916; parts of the site have stood empty since the 1990s and are green inside.
Buzludzha Monument
A concrete "flying saucer" on a Bulgarian mountaintop — the Bulgarian Communist Party's monument house, opened in 1981 and abandoned after 1989. Inside, its mosaics are crumbling and sky shows through the dome.
Belchite
A Spanish town destroyed in heavy fighting during the Civil War in 1937. A new Belchite was built alongside, and the old ruins were deliberately left as they were — scorched churches and bullet-pocked walls.
Kadykchan
A miners' settlement in Russia's Magadan region, built by Dalstroy prisoners and abandoned after a mine explosion in 1996. Its apartment blocks stand in the Kolyma tundra with broken windows and furniture left behind.
Centralia
A Pennsylvania town with a coal seam burning beneath it since 1962. Residents were relocated, the roads cracked open, and smoke has risen from the fissures for decades — the fire could burn for centuries more.
Varosha
A resort quarter of Famagusta, Cyprus, hastily abandoned in 1974 and fenced off. For half a century its beachfront hotels have been crumbling behind barbed wire.
Oradour-sur-Glane
A French village where an SS company killed almost the entire population in June 1944. On de Gaulle's order the ruins were left untouched as a memorial — burnt walls, rusting cars and sewing machines still where they stood.
Kayaköy
A Greek village in south-western Turkey, emptied by the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey. Several hundred roofless houses and two churches have stood untouched on the hillside for a century.
Craco
A medieval town on a rocky ridge in Basilicata, abandoned in the 1960s–70s after landslides and an earthquake. Its empty stone houses and bell tower on a bare hill have repeatedly served as a film set.
Bodie
A California gold-rush town that peaked near 10,000 residents and emptied by the early 20th century. It is kept in a state of "arrested decay" — houses still hold the belongings their owners walked away from.
Hashima Island
A tiny island off Nagasaki, packed with concrete apartment blocks for coal miners and abandoned in 1974 when the mine closed. Its silhouette earned it the nickname Gunkanjima — "Battleship Island".
Pripyat
A ghost city near the Chernobyl nuclear plant, evacuated in 1986 after the disaster. Its panel-block apartments, ferris wheel, and overgrown streets are a symbol of Soviet life frozen mid-motion.