Draped like the macabre souvenirs of a serial killer, ghostly skins of old buildings billow on clotheslines, bearing the grime of the surfaces from which they were cast. Amsterdam design studio KNOL Ontwerp preserves the memory of cobblestone streets, brick walls, fireplaces and doors by coating them in latex to create a tactile impression of their surfaces.

Installed at the Sandberg Institute of Amsterdam, ‘Skinned’ has these castings hanging like funeral shrouds from the gallery ceiling. The latex is fittingly translucent, almost immaterial, adding to the sense that each piece is just the faintest echo of the solid object from which it was taken. Most of the skins come from vacant buildings around Amsterdam.

Not only is the exact texture and shape of the original structure captured in great detail, but also some of the dirt. The designers made no effort to clean up any of the surfaces they cast, so when they peeled away the latex, a little bit of the structure’s history came off with it.

“Like skin transplantations they can be taken to other spaces where they get a new spatial meaning. They take us to a wold in which places are no longer fixed to specific locations, but become nomadic or ‘liquid.’ When the skins are drawn out of their original context and are brought to a new one, their character changes. The impact on for example an abandoned office building is remarkable.”

At the top of a mountain, a crumbling Yellow Brick Road winds around forests filled with creepy anthropomorphic trees, Dorothy’s dilapidated house and an Emerald Castle made of stone. The Land of Oz has been abandoned for thirty-three years, and it hasn’t seen much restoration during that time, but it opens to the public October 5th for an annual event called ‘Autumn at Oz,’ enabling visitors to see it in all its sad, derelict glory for a few of Halloween season.

(images via: rockinfree)

Located at Beech Mountain, a ski resort in Western North Carolina, the Land of Oz saw over 20,000 visitors on its opening day in 1970. A ski lift was modified to resemble a balloon ride, taking guests on an aerial tour of the park with views of the mountain scenery. The park design was based on the book rather than the film, and the visitor was intended to experience it from Dorothy’s point of view.

(images via: rockinfree)

Despite a 1975 fire that destroyed some artifacts, including the dress worn by Judy Garland in the movie, the Land of Oz was fully operational until 1980. Once it was closed, many items were stolen, vandalized or destroyed, and those that weren’t were given over to the elements. A few pieces remain in storage at Appalachian State University.

(images via: emerald mountain)

The park was partially restored in 1990, and Former employees started Autumn at Oz as a reunion three years later. Now it’s an annual event, opening the doors to the outside world just two days every year. Proceeds from the event go to the (apparently minimal) upkeep of the park.

At the end of the earth, in some of the most remote places known to man, the remains of ill-advised human exploration and activity can be found in the form of rusting equipment, buildings almost entirely buried in snow, and abandoned ships. Left behind due to inaccessibility, war, failing industries and harsh, inhospitable conditions, these whaling factories, military bases and research facilities make up some of the world’s eeriest ghost towns.

Whaler’s Bay Ghost Town, Deception Island

(images via: wili_hybrid, wikimedia commons)

Established as a ship base on C-shaped Deception Island by a Norwegian-Chilean whaling company in the early 20th century, Whaler’s Bay was abandoned when oil prices plummeted during the Great Depression. It sat empty until the British reclaimed it as a base in 1944, but a series of volcanic eruptions in the 1960s sent everyone packing again. A mudslide caused by the most recent eruption in 1969 buried many of the structures.

Decades later, it’s totally empty but for the remains of the buildings, equipment and ships. Deception Island is so named because the tiny entrance to its bay is difficult to find; some explorers thought the island was nothing but high, rocky cliffs that are impossible to access. Once inside, however, visitors are greeted by surprisingly warm waters courtesy of the dormant volcanoes, which boil in some spots but offer comfortable bathing in others.

Pole of Inaccessability with Bust of Lenin

(images via: wikimedia commons, npolar.no)

The southern point of inaccessibility – the point in Antarctica that’s furthest from any ocean – is the location of a now-defunct Soviet research station established in 1958. As difficult to reach as it was, the station was never very robust; it had a hut for four people, a radio shack, and an electrical hut, all of which were pre-fabricated and brought in on tractors. The base was in use for a whopping 12 days before it was suspended indefinitely due to its remote location. All that was left behind was a single building topped with a bust of Vladimir Lenin. Snow drifts have buried most of the building so that the bust is all that can be seen of it today.

Grytviken Harbour, South Georgia

(images via: wikimedia commons, tripmondo)

This rusted jumble of equipment was once a large Norwegian whaling base, with about 300 men working to process captured whales, rendering the blubber, meat, bones and viscera into oil. Established in 1904 in the most protected harbor of British-owned South Georgia Island, which offered plenty of flat land for building, it soon became home to an Argentine meteorological station as well. But over the following sixty years, the population of whales in the seas around the island declined dramatically, and by 1966, the station closed. The whaling station site is still littered with whale bones as well as carcasses of industry and architecture. The island of Grytviken is also the gravesite of the explorer Ernest Shackleton, who was buried alongside whalers who died there.

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Ranging from eerie, remote desert settlements in the hottest place on earth to perfectly pastel modern ghost towns, Africa’s standout abandonments are as diverse and fascinating as the continent itself. A Star Wars set is slowly swallowed by the sand in Tunisia, skeletons of ships serve as warnings to sailors on the coast of South Africa, and a vast Chinese-built housing development waits for half a million new residents in Angola.

Tattooine: Abandoned Star Wars Set, Tunisia

(images via: fastco)

Left to dry out in the blazing desert sun for over 35 years, the Lars Homestead set from Star Wars Episode IV was recently rediscovered by New York-based photographer Rä di Martino. An area of Tunisia near the oasis city of Tozeur has been used as a dramatic backdrop for many films, including Raiders of the Lost Ark and The English Patient. In addition to Luke Skywalker’s childhood home, di Martino found several other Star Wars sets, documented in a series she calls Every World’s a Stage.

Tunisia was used as a location for scenes in every Star Wars movie except Episode V, including Ben Kenobi’s hut, Grand Dune where R2-D2 and C-3PO crash in Episode IV, the Slave Quarters Row and the canyon where Luke meets Ben. Pictures taken by fans who make pilgrimages to the set have revealed that, in time, it will be swallowed up by the desert sands.

Abandoned Mining Town of Kolmanskop, Namibia

(images via: wikimedia commons, geoftheref, coda)

The sands have already claimed one abandoned village in Namibia. Kolmanskop was once a bustling mining village filled with German diamond miners who built mansions in the style of their home country. It had a hospital, ballroom, power station, school, theater, sport hall, casino, the first x-ray station in the Southern Hemisphere and the first tram in Africa. But after World War I, the diamonds were gone, and the miners began to leave. Kolmanskop was abandoned altogether by 1954, and since then, winds have swept knee-high drifts of sand into the open doors and windows of the architecture left behind. Some homes are almost entirely buried. The ghost town is now a popular tourist destination.

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Sometimes, the setting of a film is almost more important than the plot itself, and that’s particularly true with abandoned places. Crumbling ruins of hospitals, prisons, houses, schools and other facilities seem to host echoes of past residents and events, often radiating a sense of trauma and loss. Of course, the catch – at least, in fiction and fantasy – is that these places aren’t really abandoned after all. Here are 10 (more!) abandonments, real and invented, that feature prominently in scary movies and television shows.

Abandoned Sanitorium – Death Tunnel

Death Tunnel may not be the greatest horror film ever made, but it’s the setting that’s the real star of the show. This 2005 movie about five college women locked into a Kentucky hospital where 63,000 people died from a disease known as the ‘white plague’ was filmed at the real life Waverly Hills Sanitorium in Louisville. And that part about thousands of people dying there? It’s actually true. Treated with little more than fresh air and sunlight in an era before antibiotics, the tuberculosis patients admitted to the hospital invariably ended up in the 500-foot tunnel located beneath the hospital, called a ‘body chute.’ The dead were secretly lowered into the tunnel and loaded on a train so that the remaining patients wouldn’t give up hope that they’d get out alive.

Built in 1910, Waverly Hills closed in 1961 after the advent of advanced medical care drastically reduced the number of patients coming in. Plans are underway to turn it into a hotel that will play up its ‘haunted’ history.

Abandoned Town – Silent Hill

‘Silent Hill’ is based on a real place. This seemingly fictional setting of a series of video games and a movie is based on Centralia, a borough of Pennsylvania that has been abandoned as a result of a mine fire that has burned underground since 1962. Prior to the 1980s, it had about 1,000 residents; there are just a handful left today despite the town being condemned. The blaze beneath Centralia has opened steam pits, sink holes and carbon monoxide vents. The fictional Silent Hill is located in West Virginia, and the reasons for its abandonment are far more frightening.

Abandoned House: The Abandoned

In the 2006 film The Abandoned, an adopted American film producer returns to her hometown in Russia after receiving a phone call from a notary public that she had inherited her family’s abandoned farm. When Marie arrives at the house to learn more about the family she never knew, a man tells her he received the same phone call, and that they’re twins. But once inside, the pair find that the dead residents of the house don’t really want them to leave.

Hidden Subway Tunnel Under London – Raw Meat

Released overseas as ‘Death Line’, Raw Meat is a 1973 movie set in an abandoned subway tunnel under London. Inspired by the many real-life abandoned tube stations of the area, Raw Meat envisions these creepy, darkened subterranean settings filled with a family of cannibals descended from Victorian railway workers.

Abandoned City – New York in I Am Legend

The idea of a once-bustling metropolis utterly abandoned (by humans, anyway) serves as fodder for all sorts of fiction, from books to films. The 2008 adaptation of ‘I Am Legend’ starring Will Smith is just one of many giving us a glimpse of what New York City might look like if it were allowed to fall into ruin, taken back over by the forces of nature. Smith stars as a lone survivor of an epidemic that has turned most of the population into bloodthirsty mutants.

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