24 Tales of Ghost Towns and Abandoned Cities

Article by Urbanist, filed under Abandoned Places in the Architecture category.

What in the world could cause an entire city to be abandoned? Some become unlivable due to environmental disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamis to nuclear meltdowns (as with Pripyat, shown below). Others become the center of military activity and remain contested and uninhabited as a result – or are simply left as memorials to the terrible events that took place in them. Still others are simply deserted when they outlive their usefulness as trade outposts or mining towns.

This Halloween, forget the plastic cape and cheesy costume. Why not find and explore the real relics and strange structures of an actual ghost town or abandoned city instead? From Azerbaijan to Japan, Italy to Siberia and Cyprus to China, here are twenty-four haunting real-life ghost villages, towns and cities from around the world. Click below to learn more:

: Abandoned Medieval Town Oradour

: Abandoned City Commune France

: Abandoned Island City Hashima

: Abandoned Desert Ghost Town

: Abandoned Area Varosha

: Abandoned Gulag Concentration Camp

: Abandoned Town Centralia

: Abandoned Flooded City Quabbin

: Abandoned War Torn City Agdam

: Abandoned Resort Town Yashima

: Abandoned Disaster City Beichuan

: Deserted Village Italy

: Deserted Walled Town Craco

: Wild West Ghost Town Bodie

: Deserted Ghost City Humberstone

: Deserted Mining Town Pyramiden

: Deserted Mining Town Sewell

: Abandoned Mountain Town Sardinia

: Deserted Resort Village

: Deserted Kowloon Walled City

: Ancient Underwater City Alexandria

Interesting stuff. I lived in Illinois from 1997-2005 and my work took me near Cairo, Illinois, many times. It is beautiful and sad. I don’t know how much of the town will be saved as building supply companies were coming into Cairo and dismantling numerous buildings in downtown. They were after the bricks that make up most of the old business buildings. I wonder if anything will be left?

“gosts do not harm you as much as human”

^^^ Funniest line on this page by far. For one you couldn’t even spell “ghosts” properly, so something tells me you’re not an expert on the topic. Even if you were, you still wouldn’t be qualified to make any real statements about what ghosts do or not do for one simple reason; they don’t exist.

Sorry to break the bad news with you, but it’s the same as the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, the “Boogeyman,” all of that bullshit that you believed in when you were young? That includes ghosts.

Thank you for creating this list.
Do you have links to Google maps for these town and cities?

Here are some ‘lost city’ links to add to your collection:

http://www.hvk.org/articles/0102/137.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1768109.stm

you guys are all stupid. ghost are real bad asses because i get into fights with them all the time. they killed my cat man. i hunted it down and kept it in the bottle. i buried the bottle in this special liquid type cement. i invented this by a special substance called quantum Elepa. i named it after a little bit of my name. it has a special DNA screen mixed in with the quantum Elepa which only allows my DNA to enter the complex liquid cement. the quantum Elepa is extremely rare and can only be found in a special place in my back yard but you must add other materiel’s as well. in order for the DNA screen to mix you must add calorific acid and liquid nitrogen. only then can you mix the DNA screen. The DNA screen will only mix into the quantum Elepa, if you try to use anything els the fumes will blind you for several weeks. buy the end of this process stick your hand into the mix and the mix will turn a spectacular clear blue and only your hand can enter. if anyone els tries to put there hand in it will just feel like cement.

What is scary is the picture of Cairo you show looks like the town I live in now and the town I grew up in. Both are located in Southwestern Lower Michigan. This could happen anywhere. With many large factories closing the past few years this really could happen and soon!

It’s amazing how in this overpopulated planet there are places like this.

I remember visiting Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, in 1990. The center of the city was destroyed by an earthquake in the 1970′s, and although the city has grown in size enormously since then, nobody has done anything with the center. So to drive through from one side to the other you have to go along broken roads with ruins that are overgrown, or drive around the outside of the city.

This is a very interesting site, despite the coments made by the mentally challenged. If you have to insult someone else to make yourself feel like a man, then maybe you should not post at all. The only peson that appears intellectually challenged is the person making the out of place comment.

So go back to your beer, turn off your big sisters computer, This is a really good site, leave it as a good site.

Interesting post. Don’t forget about the cities or communities that appear to be dead but in fact have a life of their own, such as the hidden tunnels and passageways of the great New York City subway system. Ripe places for some psycho-geography experimentation.

I cannot believe that there are abandoned city’s… that’s truly unbelievable. It is a waste of space that could be transformed into beautiful places. I do feel that humans take valuable earth space for granted if they can build and abandon, it’s tragic. However I suppose they may come useful for film sets and things like that. I’d love to spend a day exploring the city of Hashima in Japan. Very interesting post thanks for sharing.

Alexandria, Egypt is not a lost city. It has been continuously occupied, and by a large number of people, for the past couple thousand years. Its current population is 4 million.

It is true that some of the oldest parts of the city sank into the sea. However, people still lived in the unsunken parts of Alexandria.

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