Kerry Ferguson · CC BY 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons

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Buzludzha Monument

added28 August 2026

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.

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42.73580, 25.39380

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Poenari Castle

Vlad the Impaler's actual fortress — as opposed to Bran Castle, which had almost nothing to do with him. Vlad rebuilt it with the hands of the boyars he blamed for his brother's murder: they were marched here after an Easter feast and worked until their clothes fell apart. Tradition has Vlad's wife throwing herself from it into the Argeș on hearing the Turks were coming. Fourteen hundred and eighty steps lead up to it.

297 km away

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Bran Castle

A fortress on a Carpathian mountain pass, known as "Dracula's Castle". Vlad the Impaler almost certainly never lived here — the link to Stoker's novel came later, though the silhouette on its crag fits it well.

309 km away

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The Piri Reis Map and the Antarctic Coast

In 1929 a surviving fragment of a map drawn by the Ottoman admiral Piri Reis in 1513 was found in the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul. Charles Hapgood, and Erich von Däniken after him, announced that the southern part of the map showed the coast of Antarctica beneath its ice, surveyed from the air by an unknown civilisation. Piri Reis wrote his sources on the margin himself: some twenty portolans, Arab charts and a map of Columbus. The southern line on his sheet is the east coast of South America, bent eastward because the parchment ran out — a device found on other portolans of the period. It bears no resemblance to the true sub-glacial topography of Antarctica established by seismic survey.

354 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.