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Bodie

added28 August 2026

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.

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38.21222, -119.01222

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The Calaveras Skull

In February 1866 miners at Angels Camp in Calaveras County brought up a human skull from forty metres down, beneath a bed of lava. Josiah Whitney, State Geologist of California and a Harvard professor, announced it as proof that people had lived in North America in the Pliocene. Locals were telling reporters almost at once that the skull had been taken from an Indian burial in a nearby cave and put down the shaft as a joke on the professor; Bret Harte wrote a poem about it. Radiocarbon dating in 1992 gave an age of about a thousand years — an ordinary late Native burial, with no relation at all to the lava above it.

135 km away

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Racetrack Playa

A dry lakebed in Death Valley where stones move by themselves, leaving long trails behind them. The puzzle was only solved in 2014: thin sheets of ice push the rocks along under a light wind.

213 km away

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The Sailing Stones of Racetrack Playa

On the dry lake of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley, stones weighing up to three hundred kilograms leave furrows hundreds of metres long, sometimes parallel, sometimes turning at right angles. Since 1948 magnetic fields, hurricanes, algae and human interference had all been proposed; nobody had ever seen one move. In 2011–13 Richard and James Norris put GPS units on the stones and a weather station with time-lapse cameras beside them. On 20 December 2013 they watched it happen: after rain the playa freezes over a few millimetres thick, the ice breaks by day into floating panels, and a wind of four or five metres per second is enough for the floes to push the stones at walking pace.

213 km away

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The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant

The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (officially the V. I. Lenin Nuclear Power Station, or ChNPP) is a decommissioned nuclear energy facility located in the Vyshhorod Raion of Kyiv Oblast, Ukraine, along the Pripyat River and a man-made cooling reservoir, roughly 3 kilometers southeast of the abandoned city of Pripyat and 18 kilometers northwest of Chernobyl. On April 26, 1986, the site suffered the most catastrophic reactor breach in nuclear history (Level 7, the maximum on the INES scale), which destroyed Reactor Unit 4. Today, ChNPP is a specialized decommissioning site enclosed by the monumental New Safe Confinement arch structure.

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The Khovrino Hospital

The Khovrino Abandoned Hospital (colloquially known as "HZB" or "The Umbrella") was a notorious Soviet mega-scale unfinished complex, formerly situated at 2 Klinskaya Street in the Khovrino District of northern Moscow. Built in a monumental modernist and brutalist architectural style, the 1,300-bed facility famously formed a three-pointed star from the air that precisely mirrored the international biohazard symbol and the Umbrella Corporation insignia from Resident Evil. For over three decades, the derelict complex served as the ultimate urban exploration mecca in post-Soviet Russia, cultivating extensive dark urban mythology before its complete demolition in late 2018.

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The Adzhimushkay quarries

The Adzhimushkay Quarries constitute an extensive subterranean limestone quarry system (comprising the Great and Small Adzhimushkay labyrinths) located on the outskirts of Kerch near the settlement of Adzhimushkay on the Kerch Peninsula, Crimea. Having supplied coquina building stone since antiquity, these catacombs became the site of one of World War II's most harrowing subterranean sieges: from May to October 1942, surrounded Soviet rear-guard units and local civilians mounted an unrelenting 170-day defense trapped in absolute darkness, enduring lethal dehydration, structural demolitions, and continuous chemical asphyxiation assaults by the German Wehrmacht.