The eeriest abandoned places tend to feel as if their former inhabitants disappeared into thin air. In each room is evidence of lives interrupted: clothes spilling out of dresser drawers, dishes in the kitchen sink, toys scattered across the floor, photos of loved ones still hanging on the walls. Seemingly precious belongings remain in place decades after the house was last occupied, leaving the sense that something devastating happened to the people who once owned them. In most cases, these mysteries will never be solved.

These untold stories are what linger behind the images captured by Bryan Sansivero, an American photographer (on Instagram) known for his explorations of abandoned places as well as editorial, street style and film work. In a series called “American Decay,” Sansivero portrays scenes from 20th century houses that seem frozen in time, contrasting cheerful pastels and idealized mid-century American dreams against the inevitable decay that comes with neglect.

Says Sansivero of his photos, “The idea of the abandoned place or ruin is imbued with a sense of loss, nostalgia, of strangeness, an artful fluctuation between presence and absence, creating a poetry of lost words, experience and story.” This is certainly evident in each one of these photos. It’s not clear whether the contents of the houses have been rearranged to achieve such perfect compositions, but even if they have, the effect is remarkable.

While most of these homes are relatively modest, one is an old 57-room mansion outside of New York City filled with spiral staircases, chandeliers, a bowling alley, two bars, a library and an indoor tennis court; it was built in the late 1930s and abandoned in the 1970s. The fact that it hasn’t been looted is pretty amazing in itself.

Check out more of Sansivero’s work at his website.

There’s something about the contrast of opulent ornamentation and expensive materials with rot and deterioration that makes luxury resorts and mansions some of the most fascinating abandonments. Someone once cared about these places so much, they invested untold sums of money and hours of labor into them, perhaps having their walls hand-painted with frescoes or calling in master craftspeople to apply the finishing touches.

But nothing lasts forever, and neglect has the same effect on high end structures as it does on those more humble. Different viewers may look at them with sadness or schadenfreude, thinking about the larger context of human impermanence or just the potential wasted, but either way, we can’t help but look.

For many people, those feelings came into play this week as photos emerged of an eerie abandoned complex of castle-like mansions in Turkey. About halfway complete, the $200 million complex of fake chateaus modeled after historic European architecture is in limbo after economic uncertainty led large numbers of buyers and investors to pull out of the project. The developers don’t have enough funds to keep going, and though they say they’ll find a way to move the Burj al Babas development forward by the end of the year, it’s unclear whether that will actually happen.

Mocking commenters across the internet note not only the Disney-like quality of the $400,000 houses but how closely spaced they are. Row after row of identical Cinderella McMansions swirl through the valley, all sitting empty, many with gaping maws where their doors and windows should be. But while this is a particularly eye-catching example of stalled luxury development, it’s never been occupied, leaving it empty in another sense. The ghostly echoes of the lives that were lived in abandoned places, the hopes and dreams that their remains represent, are what lend them emotional weight.

Echoes of Past Promise

French photographer Thomas Jorion captures this particular quality of abandoned mansions and palaces throughout Italy in his series “Veduta,” which is on display at Esther Woerdehoff Galerie in Paris through April 6, 2019.

Each photograph depicts a real mansion – not a facsimile of one – still decked out in traditional Italian finery despite its considerably lowered circumstances. There are no background stories given for what happened to these beautiful villas, why they’ve fallen into disrepair; it could be that the cost of restoration is too high for most buyers, or the locations are inconvenient, or any number of other things. These places feel frozen in time, records of an era that has passed or perhaps an empire in the midst of falling.

Belgium seems to be brimming with abandoned castles, perhaps due to the simple fact that the country is full of historic architecture that’s difficult and expensive to maintain. Château Miranda, also known as Château de Noisy, stood as a stunning example of ornate abandonments before its demolition in 2017.

The 19th-century neo-Gothic castle in Celles was occupied by German forces during World War II and later became an orphanage and a “holiday camp for sickly children” before it was abandoned in 1991. Mesen Castle in Lede has a similar story. Purchased by a Catholic institution after the noble family that commissioned it died out, it became a boarding school for girls before its abandonment in 1970. It was destroyed in 2011.

North America has some abandoned castle-like structures of its own, including a once-beautiful mansion that now looks like the perfect setting for Netflix’s next gothic horror series. The villa on Carleton Island in Cape Vincent, New York has been unoccupied for over 70 years, and it has deteriorated to the point of serious safety concerns.

Businessman William O. Wyckoff commissioned the mansion in 1890 and promptly died of a heart attack on his first night there; his wife had passed away a month prior. Though the house was passed on to his sons, the family seems to have lost its fortune during the Great Depression, and the property was abandoned. The current owners live in a nearby cottage, putting it on the market every few years with no luck. One potential buyer estimated that it would cost up to $12 million to rebuild.

Remains of Wasted Wealth

Built in 1963, Japan’s Hachijo Royal Hotel quickly became a popular destination for wealthy Japanese natives looking for a quick and easy weekend getaway. At the time, passports were hard to acquire, keeping a lot of travel limited to domestic destinations. Set on a volcanic island just a short ferry ride from the mainland, the hotel offered luxe accommodations in a beautiful hillside setting the Japanese government promoted as “The Hawaii of Japan.”

But as soon as international travel became more accessible, Japanese tourists began leaving the country for new adventures, and the hotel languished. It was abruptly abandoned in 2006, and the ensuing years have been brutal. Nearly everything remains exactly as it was then: towels draped over the edges of the tubs, toys in the play rooms, offices full of outdated electronics. Many of the rooms have been invaded by ferns and moss.

Known for its constant frenzy of construction, innovation and over-the-top spending, Dubai has its fair share of arrested developments. But one of the weirder displays of seemingly casual extravagance is the country’s high number of abandoned luxury vehicles. Some of the world’s most expensive cars are little more than street litter here, collecting dust curbside or in parking garages.

But this particular millionaire habit isn’t quite as it appears. Though some might truly be cast aside by owners too rich to care, many are abandoned by owners who bought them during a boom but can no longer afford them. In Dubai, bouncing a check or failing to pay back debt is a criminal offense, so it’s likely that formerly wealthy expats dumped the cars and then high-tailed it back home.

Back in Belgium, urban explorers hit the motherlode when they entered the grounds of the Kasteel van Heers a 13th century castle near Brussels that fell into decay when the descendants of its original owners couldn’t afford to maintain it.

The castle and all its contents were seized by the Flemish government in 2007, but somehow they missed a collection of six 1060s Alfa Romeo sports cars held within a dusty basement – including a rare and extra-valuable prototype. They were all sold at auction in 2015. Kind of makes you wonder what else dusty castles around the world might be hiding, doesn’t it?

If all of this waste makes you wish you could save an abandoned mansion, the governments of several countries would like to assist you with that venture. Italy is giving away over 100 historic castles and villas for free as long as the new owners can produce concrete plans for renovating the sites to help boost tourism to their local villages, and rural Japanese towns are so desperate for residents they’re giving away abandoned houses. In France, you can “adopt a chateau” without becoming solely responsible for its upkeep through a collective effort to preserve neglected structures with historic value.

A series of abandoned houses in Iran’s capital city overflow with vegetation in varying states of vitality and decay, making them feel untamed, out of control and perhaps impossible to save. In some rooms, saplings spring up from cracks in concrete with a certain defiance, and flowers bloom in the dim light. In others, dead garlands drip down staircases, and shrubs that should be evergreen have begun to wither and turn brown. The variation speaks to the different ways in which people might respond to their homes suddenly no longer being safe – whether they find a way to go on, or succumb.

Born in 1980, Iranian artist Gohar Dashti grew up with the terror of war as part of her everyday life, and her work carries the pervading sense of violation that comes with loss of home and sanctuary. Each of the residences depicted in her series Home once belonged to a family that had to leave Iran for political or social reasons; the once-beautiful structures are in danger of collapse.

Though it’s certainly common for nature to take over abandoned spaces on its own, these photos have been staged to capture a certain mood.

“When I talk about war in my works, it refers to war in the world, and also refers to my memories about war when I was a child,” Dashti tells AnOther Magazine. “Usually my works start as personal perceptions. My recent work is not only a personal exploration about nature, but is also about how nature can be political. What happens to the environment when human populations are displaced or destroyed by war? People are transient while nature is a constant; it will be here long after we are all gone.”

For photographer Mark Redondo, the many abandoned developments littered throughout Spain aren’t just symbols of economic troubles, but a failure to learn from our mistakes. Even in the midst of a housing crisis, Spain has an incredible 3.4 million deserted houses, and many of them have stood empty since the collapse of the country’s real estate industry in 2007. Ten years ago, Redondo set out to photograph some of these crumbling structures from the ground; now, drone photography has now enabled him to capture their true scale, giving us a look at their hidden shapes, patterns and textures in a whole new way.

The series, entitled ‘Sand Castles (Part II),’ depicts these structures stark against the dry Spanish landscape, often only half-completed. The contrast between the abandoned developments and their natural surroundings is particularly striking. Redondo notes that while this colossal waste of resources was in the news for a while, the abandonments have since been largely forgotten. That doesn’t mean they’ve gone away.

“There is definitely an apocalyptic feeling to it, it is as if you are the last inhabitant in the world,” he says in an interview with the British Journal of Photography. “The sites are completely deserted and the locations are difficult to reach so, unless you are determined to go there, most people don’t ever see them. A lot of construction material, electric parts, sewage covers and copper has been stolen. There are rabbits everywhere.”

“It is important to understand that this is not an isolated problem; it is something that has happened systematically across Spain. We need to ask why this is still happening and how we are going to fix the problem.”

Redondo read news reports on abandonments and searched for updates to find the developments, and used Google Earth to identify the ones that look most dramatic by air. He used a DJI Phantom 4 Pro drone to take photos for the project, which won this year’s DJI Drone Photography award.

Never-updated interiors may be considered ‘dated’ within a decade or two of being in style, but give them some more time and they become vintage time capsules capturing the essence of their particular era, from swinging ’70s penthouses and pristine ’60s kitchens to luxurious Parisian apartments abandoned during World War II. Frozen in time, some of these interiors lay abandoned for decades before being rediscovered, while others have finally been sold after never being updated by their elderly original owners.

Chicago Condo Untouched Since the ‘70s

Untouched for decades, a swingin’ 70s penthouse in Chicago’s Winston Towers condo recently went up for sale for just $158,000, with the original furniture, decor and even bottles of perfume on the bathroom shelves still intact. The 1,877-square-foot three-bedroom condo would have been considered garishly dated in the ‘80s, but over forty years after it was furnished and decorated, it’s like a living snapshot of the tastes that were popular at the time and has big appeal for vintage enthusiasts.

Paris Apartment Untouched for 70 Years

Thanks to a wealthy estate that paid its bills without checking on anything too carefully, an apartment in Paris was left isolated for 70 years after its owner fled the city during World War II. The interiors are exactly as she left them, full of vintage Parisian treasures, including a 19th century painting by celebrated Italian artist Giovanni Boldini of the owner’s grandmother, actress Marthe de Florian. The time capsule was discovered after the woman’s heirs decided to take an inventory of her possessions.

Scott’s Hut & Shackleton’s Hut, Antarctica

100 years after explorers built their own wooden shacks on the freezing, windy, desolate continent of Antarctica, the structures are exactly as they left them. British adventurers Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott and their crews created the dwellings and stocked them with whiskey and brandy, which can still be seen on the shelves and tables today. It’s a wonder that the shacks – made to be temporary at the time – are still standing, but conservators have restored the landmarks to eliminate damage from decades of water seepage, age and abandonment. The extreme cold preserved artifacts like newspapers, scientific equipment and cans of food.

Garage Full of ‘Brand-New’ ‘60s Cars

Imagine opening an old, seemingly forgotten garage to discover a treasure trove of ‘50s and 60’s cars in near-perfect condition, some of them driven less than 10 miles. Long time owners of a dealership in Pierce, Nebraska, a couple who are now in their nineties had been storing the vehicles for decades, and finally decided to liquidate their inventory in 2013. The collection includes Impalas, Chevelles and a 1956 Chevrolet Cameo Pickup. All were ultimately auctioned off to the tune of $2.8 million.

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