All places
The full catalogue of approved places — abandoned buildings, anomalous zones, UFO sightings. Sort by rating, recency or discussion, and narrow it by category.
494 places
Socotra
A Yemeni island in the Indian Ocean, cut off from the mainland for millions of years. A third of its plants grow nowhere else — including the umbrella-crowned dragon's blood trees that make it look extraterrestrial.
Danakil Depression
One of the hottest and lowest places on Earth, in northern Ethiopia: acid pools, salt flats and sulphur fields in yellow and green. The landscape is otherworldly enough that Mars life-detection instruments are tested here.
Lake Natron
An alkaline lake in Tanzania with rust-coloured water reaching 60 °C. Its chemistry preserves the bodies of dead birds under a calcified crust — the source of those photographs of "petrified" animals.
Blood Falls
A vividly red flow seeping from Antarctica's Taylor Glacier. The colour comes from iron in an ancient brine lake, sealed under the ice for millions of years along with microbes living without light.
Darvaza Gas Crater
A burning gas crater some 70 metres across in Turkmenistan's Karakum desert. By the common account geologists set it alight expecting the gas to burn off in days — it has been burning since 1971.
Dyatlov Pass
Dyatlov Pass is a mountain saddle situated between unnamed Peak 905 and the eastern flank of Kholat Syakhl (Mansi for "Dead Mountain") in the northern Ural Mountains of Russia's Sverdlovsk Oblast. This remote subarctic wilderness became the focal point of one of the 20th century's most persistent mysteries following the tragic and perplexing deaths of nine Soviet ski hikers in the winter of 1959.
Mapimí Silent Zone
A patch of northern Mexican desert where, by local account, radios fall silent and compasses misbehave. The reputation dates from a US missile crashing here in 1970; tests have not confirmed any radio anomaly.
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.
Oregon Vortex
A hillside in Oregon with a tilted cabin where balls appear to roll uphill and a person's height seems to change from spot to spot. A classic "mystery house" — the effect comes from sloped planes and a missing true horizon.
Devil's Sea
A stretch of the Pacific south of Japan known as the "Dragon's Triangle", a Pacific counterpart to the Bermuda one. Its reputation came from fishing vessels lost in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Tunguska Event
In June 1908 an explosion over the Siberian taiga flattened some 80 million trees across more than 2,000 km². No crater was ever found, and the cause has been argued over for more than a century.
Area 51
A closed US Air Force range in the Nevada desert that officially did not exist for decades. Secret aircraft testing and total secrecy made it the centre of global UFO mythology.
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
Plymouth is an abandoned ghost city situated along the southwestern coast of the island of Montserrat, a British Overseas Territory in the Leeward Islands of the Caribbean Sea. Historically the island's capital, primary commercial center, and port, the municipality was systematically destroyed and buried beneath meters of volcanic ash, pumice, and catastrophic lahars during the 1995–1997 eruptions of the Soufrière Hills stratovolcano. Plymouth holds a unique global geopolitical status: it remains the world's only de jure official capital that is completely uninhabited de facto, earning the international designation of "the Pompeii of the Caribbean."
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
Kadykchan (derived from the Evenki Kadygchan, meaning "little canyon" or "chasm") is an entirely abandoned urban-type settlement situated within the Susumansky District of Magadan Oblast, Russia, along the 730th-kilometer mark of the R504 Kolyma Highway in the Ayan-Yuryakh river basin. Constructed during World War II by forced laborers of the Dalstroy Gulag system to extract high-grade coal from the Arkagalinskoye basin, Kadykchan grew by the 1980s into a bustling subarctic industrial town housing over 10,000 residents. Following a deadly subterranean coal-dust explosion in 1996 and the catastrophic freezing of its district heating grid, the municipality underwent rapid state-mandated abandonment, becoming Kolyma’s definitive ghost town and an open-air monument to post-Soviet deindustrialization in the Far North.
Centralia
Centralia is a near-total ghost town and borough in Columbia County, Pennsylvania, United States, situated at the core of the state's historic Anthracite Coal Region. Established in the mid-19th century atop rich deposits of high-grade anthracite coal, Centralia became the site of an uncontrollable subterranean mine fire in May 1962. Smoldering through interconnected underground shafts across hundreds of acres, the fire caused extensive surface fissures, toxic gas venting, and the federal condemnation and buyout of the municipality, transforming Centralia into America's most iconic modern ghost town and the direct real-world inspiration for the film adaptation of Silent Hill.
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
Oradour-sur-Glane is a preserved ghost village and national memorial located in the Haute-Vienne department of Nouvelle-Aquitaine, France, situated along the Glane River roughly 22 kilometers northwest of Limoges. On June 10, 1944, the tranquil rural community was systematically liquidated by the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich, who massacred 643 civilians (including 247 women and 205 children) before putting every structure to the torch. Following the liberation, French Provisional Government President Charles de Gaulle decreed that the skeletal ruins remain entirely untouched as an open-air national shrine and enduring monument to Nazi wartime atrocities against civilian populations.
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.