99 Fun Facts About Abandoned Places

Built to house workers at the nuclear plant that exploded in 1986, which Ukrainian city was evacuated and never resettled?

Pripyat. Nobody in the city of 49,000 was moved until about 36 hours after the explosion; the evacuation came on 27 April, and the town has stood empty ever since.

Which abandoned Namib Desert diamond-mining town has been reclaimed by the sands?

Kolmanskop boomed after a railway worker found a diamond there in 1908, but richer finds near Oranjemund drew the miners south; abandoned in 1956, its houses now stand knee-deep in sand.

Which industry built up, then emptied, Japan's Hashima Island, 'Battleship Island'?

Coal mining. Mitsubishi bought the island and housed more than 5,000 people on a rock 480 metres long; when the mine closed in 1974 they all left, and the apartment blocks were abandoned.

Which medieval hill town in Italy's Basilicata region was evacuated from 1963 after a series of landslides?

Craco. Landslides began emptying it in 1963 and the last residents were ordered out in 1980; the deserted hilltop then became a film set, used for the hanging of Judas in The Passion of the Christ.

Which Pennsylvania town was largely abandoned because of an underground coal-seam fire that has burned since 1962?

Centralia. The fire made national news in 1981, when the ground opened under a 12-year-old boy in a backyard and his cousin hauled him out; the borough has since been all but emptied.

Which European capital is home to the abandoned Spreepark amusement park?

Berlin. Spreepark opened in 1969 as East Germany's only amusement park and went bankrupt in 2001; its owner shipped six rides to Peru, and plans to save it died when cocaine was found hidden in one.

Which Philadelphia prison, open from 1829 to 1971, pioneered solitary confinement in cellblocks radiating like the spokes of a wheel?

Eastern State Penitentiary. Its silence and solitude were meant to bring penitence, but Charles Dickens, who visited in 1842, called the system 'cruel and wrong'; it was given up in 1913.

On which island is Varosha, the once-glamorous beach resort fenced off by the army in 1974?

Cyprus. Varosha's residents fled the advancing Turkish army meaning to return once things calmed down; a 1984 UN resolution says only they may resettle it, so its hotels were left to crumble.

Which mineral was mined at Wittenoom, the contaminated Western Australian ghost town?

Blue asbestos, or crocidolite, was mined at Wittenoom until 1966. The dust proved so deadly that Western Australia took the town off the map in 2007 and passed a law in 2022 to demolish what was left.

Houtouwan, a fishing village abandoned in the 1990s and since swallowed by vines, lies on an island off which city?

Shanghai. Some 2,000 fishermen and their families lived at Houtouwan on remote Shengshan Island until the early 1990s, when they left for better schools and jobs; creepers now cover their houses.

The saucer-shaped Buzludzha monument, opened in 1981, was built by which country's communist government?

Bulgaria. Party leader Todor Zhivkov opened it in 1981 on the peak where Bulgarian socialists had met in secret 90 years before; eight years later he was deposed, and all upkeep stopped.

Kayakoy, a hillside of stone houses left empty after the 1923 population exchange, is in which country?

Turkey. Kayakoy's Greek Orthodox townspeople were forced out to Greece, and the Muslims sent from Greece in their place did not settle on the hillside, which was left to fall into ruin.

Which city was purpose-built after 1986 to house Chernobyl plant workers displaced by the disaster?

Slavutych was laid out by teams from eight Soviet republics, each giving a district the style of its homeland; the plant's workers and their families began moving in during 1988.

The Ferris wheel in Chernobyl's abandoned amusement park was built to open on which Soviet holiday in 1986?

May Day. The park's grand opening was set for 1 May 1986, five days after the reactor exploded; the wheel never opened as planned and became the best-known image of the dead city.

Which atoll's 167 residents were moved in 1946 to make way for US nuclear tests?

Bikini Atoll's 167 islanders were moved to Rongerik in March 1946, ahead of Operation Crossroads; some went home in the 1970s but were taken off again in 1978 after absorbing caesium-137.

Hashima Island joined UNESCO's World Heritage list in 2015 as part of which series?

Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution is a series of 23 sites; the listing went through only after Japan agreed to acknowledge that Koreans had been forced to work on the island in wartime.

Which Aragonese town's Civil War ruins did Franco order left standing beside a rebuilt new town?

Belchite was wrecked in the battle of 1937; Franco kept the ruins as a monument to his victory and had a new town built beside them by about a thousand political prisoners, opening it himself in 1954.

Who gets a home in Pennsylvania's burning coal borough when its owner dies?

The state. Under a 2013 settlement the few who refused the buyouts may live out their lives there, but cannot sell or pass on their houses; the borough had already lost its ZIP code.

California's ghost town of Bodie is preserved in a state of what?

Arrested decay means Bodie's buildings are kept standing but never restored, their interiors still stocked with goods; fires in 1892 and 1932 had already destroyed most of the town.

What became of W. S. Bodey, the prospector after whom Bodie was named?

Died in a blizzard. Bodey found gold in 1859 and was caught by the storm that winter on a supply trip, before any town existed; the camp kept his name, though the spelling drifted to Bodie.

Which Texas port, destroyed by hurricanes in 1875 and 1886, was abandoned rather than rebuilt?

Indianola was a leading Texas port and the landing place for German immigrants until the hurricane of 1875; rebuilt, it was levelled again in 1886 and gave up its county seat that same year.

In which French village did Waffen-SS troops kill 642 people on 10 June 1944, almost the entire population?

Oradour-sur-Glane. The men were killed in barns and the women and children in the burning church; in 1946 the government declared the ruins a national memorial, and they stand as they were left.

The SS division behind a 10 June 1944 massacre was heading for which front?

Normandy. Das Reich was sent north after the D-Day landings four days earlier; harried by the Resistance on the way, its men hanged 99 townsmen in Tulle the day before the village massacre.

Which rock-cut desert city, abandoned for centuries, did the Swiss explorer Johann Burckhardt reveal to Europe in 1812?

Petra. Once a rich Nabataean trading capital, it emptied as trade moved away and for centuries sheltered only nomadic shepherds, until Burckhardt's account brought the world to its tombs.

Which gold-rush ghost town was the first capital of Montana Territory in 1864?

Bannack sprang from Montana's first big gold strike in 1862 and became the territory's first capital, but the legislature moved the seat to Virginia City in February 1865, barely a year on.

Founded in 1872 when the land was still Peru's, Chile's Humberstone and Santa Laura ghost-town works refined which commodity?

Saltpeter. Chile took this nitrate desert from Peru in the War of the Pacific, fought over the same mineral; the works boomed until synthetic fertiliser undercut them, and shut for good in 1960.

The pyramid-shaped Ryugyong Hotel, nicknamed the 'Hotel of Doom', towers over which Asian capital?

Pyongyang. The tower reached full height in 1992 and then stood as a windowless shell for 16 years; an Egyptian firm later finished its facade, but by 2019 it still had not opened.

Work on the Ryugyong Hotel halted in 1992 for what reason?

Economic crisis after the USSR collapsed: Soviet aid and investment dried up, building stopped with the shell complete, and a rusting crane sat on the summit until work resumed 16 years later.

The wreck of the SS Ayrfield in Sydney's Homebush Bay is nicknamed what?

The floating forest is a steamship built in 1911 that carried supplies to American troops in the Pacific in the Second World War; sent to Homebush Bay for scrap in 1972, its hull was left and mangroves took root.

Italy's island of Poveglia, empty since 1968, served for over a century as what?

A quarantine station: ships and their cargo were held at Poveglia in the 18th and 19th centuries. Its later hospital closed in 1968, and the ghost stories now told of the empty island are a recent invention.

Which city's future mayor won Italy's 2014 auction for a 99-year lease on Poveglia?

Venice. Businessman Luigi Brugnaro bid €513,000 for the lease in 2014, but the sale was called off; he dropped his claim on the island and was elected the city's mayor the next year.

The Sanzhi 'UFO houses', saucer-shaped seaside holiday pods begun in 1978 and never finished, stood in which country?

Taiwan. The brightly coloured pods were meant as a holiday village, but work stopped in 1980 and they stood empty for nearly three decades before the bulldozers arrived in December 2008.

Which corporation bought Detroit's derelict Michigan Central Station in 2018 and reopened it, restored, in 2024?

Ford Motor Company put 3,100 tradespeople to work on the depot, which had stood empty for 30 years as the emblem of Detroit's decline; it reopened in June 2024 as the heart of Ford's Corktown campus.

Michigan Central Station closed in January 1988 when which operator moved its trains to a smaller depot?

Amtrak had inherited the vast depot in 1971 and used only a fraction of it; after the last train left for Chicago, scrappers stripped the building and city inspectors urged that it be torn down.

Six Flags New Orleans, abandoned after Hurricane Katrina, first opened in 2000 under what name?

Jazzland went bankrupt within two seasons and reopened as Six Flags New Orleans in 2003; wrecked by Katrina's floodwater, the park was hired out as a film set for years before demolition began in 2024.

Japan's abandoned Nara Dreamland was a near-copy of which American park?

Nara Dreamland opened in 1961 as a copy of Disneyland in Anaheim, complete with a Main Street and a Sleeping Beauty Castle; Tokyo Disneyland's 1983 opening began its decline and it closed in 2006.

Henry Ford founded Fordlândia in the Brazilian Amazon in 1928 to secure a supply of what?

Rubber. Ford carved a Midwestern factory town out of the jungle, but blight ravaged the close-planted trees and the workers rioted; not one drop of its latex ever reached a Ford car.

The abandoned mining camp of Kennecott, Alaska, was built on one of the richest deposits ever found of which metal?

Copper. The find was so rich that J.P. Morgan and the Guggenheims pooled their money to dig it out; when the rich ore ran out, the mines closed in 1938 and the camp was left to the weather.

Bannerman's Castle, a mock-Scottish arsenal built from 1901 to store military surplus, stands on an island in which river?

The Hudson. Francis Bannerman bought so much surplus ammunition after the Spanish-American War that New York City would not let him keep it in his Manhattan store, so he moved it to Pollepel Island.

Jamaica's Port Royal, 'the wickedest city on Earth', was destroyed in 1692 by what?

The 7 June 1692 earthquake liquefied the sand spit: two-thirds of Port Royal slid into the harbour and a tsunami followed, killing around 2,000; Kingston was founded as its replacement.

Returning to the Roanoke colony in 1590, Governor John White found the settlers gone and what single word carved into the palisade?

CROATOAN, cut into a post, was the only clue. White took it to mean the settlers had moved to nearby Croatoan Island, but he sailed home without reaching it, and their fate was never established.

After Alcatraz prison closed in 1963, which group occupied the island for 19 months from 1969 to 1971, drawing national attention?

Native American activists calling themselves Indians of All Tribes occupied Alcatraz for 19 months from November 1969 to June 1971, citing treaty rights to surplus federal land.

Cambodia's Bokor Hill Station, a mountain resort abandoned twice in its history, was built in the 1920s by which colonial power?

France. Its colonists wanted a cool retreat from the heat, and close to a thousand labourers died building it in nine months; it was abandoned in the 1940s and again in 1972, when the Khmer Rouge closed in.

Spinalonga, off Crete, housed a colony for sufferers of which disease until 1957?

Leprosy. Treatment existed from the 1940s, yet the colony stayed open until 1957, closing only after a British expert's damning report on its neglect; the island has been uninhabited since 1962.

Dogpatch USA, an abandoned Arkansas theme park, was based on which comic strip?

Li'l Abner's hillbilly town of Dogpatch was rebuilt on an Ozark trout farm; cartoonist Al Capp, who had turned down earlier theme-park offers, joined as a partner, and it ran from 1968 to 1993.

Bangkok's 49-storey Sathorn Unique 'Ghost Tower' has stood unfinished since work stopped in 1997 because of what?

The Asian financial crisis began in Thailand itself, when the baht collapsed in the summer of 1997; the money dried up and the nearly finished tower was left as an empty shell.

Bombay Beach, a California resort turned near-ghost town, sits on the shore of which lake?

The Salton Sea was an accident: in 1905 the Colorado River broke through an irrigation canal and poured into the desert basin for two years. With no outlet it grew ever saltier, and the resorts died.

Fatehpur Sikri served as the Mughal capital from 1571 to 1585 under which emperor?

Akbar built his new capital beside the hermitage of the Sufi saint Salim Chishti, whose marble tomb still stands there, and left it after about 14 years; a failing water supply is the reason usually given.

Teufelsberg, the German hill under a derelict Cold War listening post, is made of what?

Wartime rubble: the debris of bombed-out buildings was heaped over an unfinished Nazi military-technology faculty until it formed a hill, and the Americans then crowned it with a listening station.

Heritage USA, South Carolina's defunct Christian theme park, was built by which couple?

Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker paid for Heritage USA by selling viewers $1,000 'lifetime' hotel stays; he was convicted of fraud in 1989, Hurricane Hugo battered the park that September, and it closed soon after.

The cook Mary Mallon was confined for decades on New York's North Brother Island as a carrier of which disease?

Typhoid. Mallon never fell ill herself and was freed in 1910 on a promise to stay out of kitchens; she broke it, was traced to a hospital outbreak in 1915, and spent the rest of her life confined.

Which polar explorer is buried at Grytviken, South Georgia's abandoned whaling station?

Ernest Shackleton died of a heart attack aboard the Quest at Grytviken on 5 January 1922, aged 47, at the start of a new expedition; his widow Emily asked that he be buried on South Georgia.

Times Beach, Missouri, was evacuated in 1983 after its road oil proved laced with what?

Dioxin. In the early 1970s a waste hauler sprayed contaminated oil on the town's dirt roads to keep the dust down; in 1983 the federal government moved everyone out, and the site is now Route 66 State Park.

What nickname did shortwave listeners give the Soviet Duga radar near Chernobyl?

The Russian Woodpecker was named for the sharp, repetitive tapping the Duga radar put onto shortwave sets around the world from 1976 until it fell silent in 1989; the giant antenna still stands near Chernobyl.

A WWII anti-aircraft fort off the English coast has been claimed since 1967 by which self-declared micronation?

Sealand occupies Roughs Tower, a Maunsell fort off Suffolk; pirate radio operator Paddy Roy Bates seized it in 1967 and declared the Principality of Sealand, complete with constitution, flag and anthem.

Terlingua, a ghost town near Big Bend, grew on mining cinnabar, the ore of which metal?

Mercury, or quicksilver, made Terlingua a boomtown until the Chisos Mining Company went bankrupt in 1942; the ghost town found new fame from 1967 as the home of a world chili championship.

Route 66 ghost town Glenrio, left stranded when Interstate 40 bypassed it, straddles which state line?

Texas and New Mexico. The filling stations stood on the Texas side, where fuel tax was lower, and the bars on the New Mexico side, because Deaf Smith County in Texas was dry.

Machu Picchu is thought to have been built as a royal estate for which Inca emperor?

Pachacuti is credited with building it as a mountain retreat; abandoned about a century later, it was little known beyond the valley until Hiram Bingham, led there in 1911, brought it to the world's attention.

Which largely ungoverned Hong Kong enclave of tower blocks was demolished by 1994?

Kowloon Walled City. When Britain leased the land around the old Chinese fort, it was left in a vacuum of authority and filled with unlicensed tower blocks, drug dens and back-street dentists until it was cleared for a park.

Aghdam, dubbed the 'Hiroshima of the Caucasus' after it was emptied and wrecked in 1993, lies in which country?

Azerbaijan. Armenian forces captured Aghdam in 1993 and its people fled; left in ruins for 27 years, it came back under Azerbaijani control in November 2020, with plans to rebuild it.

Ross Island, the ruined headquarters from which Britain ran a penal colony, lies in which Indian Ocean island group?

The Andamans. Britain ran its island penal settlement from tiny Ross Island until the 1940s; in 2018 India renamed it for Subhas Chandra Bose, who stayed there in 1943 under the Japanese occupation.

India's coastal town of Dhanushkodi was wiped out in 1964 by what?

A cyclone. Its storm surge drowned the town and swept away a passenger train with everyone aboard; the government declared Dhanushkodi unfit to live in, and it was never rebuilt.

Picher, Oklahoma, dissolved in 2009, was a major centre for mining which two metals?

Picher's lead and zinc mines in the Tri-State district left toxic 'chat' piles and undermined streets, putting it in the Tar Creek Superfund site; a federal buyout and a 2008 tornado finished it off.

Gilman, Colorado, was abandoned in 1984 on whose orders?

The EPA ordered Gilman cleared in 1984 because waste from the Eagle Mine below had poisoned the groundwater; the cliffside town was listed for federal cleanup and remains private land, closed to visitors.

Tom Kelly built his 1906 house in Rhyolite, Nevada, from 50,000 discarded what?

Glass bottles. Kelly used the boomtown's beer and liquor empties, and his Bottle House outlasted nearly everything else in Rhyolite; Paramount restored it in 1925.

Calico, California, was bought and restored from 1951 by the founder of which attraction?

Knott's Berry Farm founder Walter Knott bought the old silver town in the 1950s and rebuilt all but its five surviving buildings from old photographs, then gave Calico to San Bernardino County in 1966.

Danvers State Hospital is thought to have inspired the Arkham sanatorium in whose fiction?

H. P. Lovecraft names the Danvers asylum outright in 'Pickman's Model' and 'The Shadow over Innsmouth'; his Arkham in turn gave Batman's Arkham Asylum its name, and most of the hospital was razed in 2006.

Which future Nazi leader, wounded at the Somme, recuperated at the Beelitz-Heilstätten sanatorium in 1916?

Adolf Hitler spent two months there with a leg wound; the complex later served as a Soviet military hospital until 1994, and East Germany's deposed leader Erich Honecker was admitted in 1990.

Prora, the vast Nazi holiday complex on Rügen built for 20,000 guests, belonged to which programme?

Strength Through Joy, the Nazi leisure organisation, built Prora's long row of identical blocks between 1936 and 1939; war halted the work, and not one holidaymaker ever stayed there.

Balaklava in Crimea hid a once-classified underground Soviet base, opened as a museum in 2003, for what?

Submarines. The base was tunnelled under a mountain to ride out a nuclear strike and was one of the Soviet navy's best-kept secrets; abandoned in 1993, it was stripped by metal thieves before it became a museum.

Cahaba, now a ghost town, was the first permanent capital of which US state?

Alabama's first capital stood where the Cahaba meets the Alabama River and was prone to floods; the legislature left for Tuscaloosa in 1826, and losing the county seat to Selma in 1866 finished the town.

Whose headquarters moved into Nicosia International Airport after it closed in 1974?

UN peacekeepers made the airport their headquarters once the 1974 ceasefire left it inside the buffer zone; a Trident airliner damaged in the fighting was left to rot on the apron for decades.

During the Siege of Sarajevo, the derelict 1984 Olympic bobsleigh track was used as what?

Bosnian Serb forces used the Trebević bobsleigh track as an artillery position during the 1992–96 siege, drilling fighting holes into one of the final turns; it later became a graffiti canvas before restoration efforts began in 2014.

Which architect designed Detroit's Packard Automotive Plant, a notorious ruin for decades before demolition began in 2022?

Albert Kahn was hired in 1903 and became the car industry's favourite architect; the plant outlived Packard itself and stood derelict for decades until the city began pulling it down in 2022.

Kijong-dong, North Korea's 'Peace Village' in the DMZ, is known abroad by what nickname?

Propaganda Village. Observers say its bright buildings are empty shells with painted-on windows and lights on timers, and for years its loudspeakers broadcast across the line to the South.

Villa Epecuén, a lakeside spa town that lay under salt water for 25 years after a 1985 flood, is in which country?

Argentina. A surge on Lake Epecuén broke the embankments in November 1985 and the resort slowly drowned under 10 metres of brine; when the lake fell back around 2009, one man, Pablo Novak, moved home.

Which volcano's eruptions from 1995 buried Plymouth, the capital of Montserrat?

Soufrière Hills began erupting in July 1995, and pyroclastic flows buried Plymouth in 1997; the town remained Montserrat's de jure capital while government functions moved to Brades.

Lake Dolores, an abandoned Mojave Desert waterpark, stands beside the interstate from Los Angeles to which city?

Las Vegas. The park beside Interstate 15 opened to the public in 1962, was reborn as Rock-A-Hoola in 1998 and shut for good in 2004; skateboarders then took over its dry slides and pools.

Pyramiden, a Soviet-run mining town that Sweden founded, stands in which Arctic archipelago?

Svalbard. Sweden founded the town in 1910 and sold it in 1927 to the Soviet Union, whose mining trust ran it on Norwegian soil until it shut the pits in 1998, leaving Lenin's bust to watch over the empty streets.

On which New York island, its last buildings abandoned in 1977, has the city buried more than a million of its dead?

Hart Island. Since 1869 the city has laid its poor and unclaimed dead in trenches there, for generations dug by jail inmates; the Parks Department now runs the island and relatives may visit.

Eruptions in 1967 and 1969 destroyed British and Chilean bases where in Antarctica?

Deception Island is a flooded volcanic crater that ships sail into through a narrow gap called Neptune's Bellows; the eruptions wrecked the research huts built beside its old whaling station.

Vozrozhdeniya Island, site of a Soviet bioweapons laboratory, lay in which water body?

Vozrozhdeniya lay in the Aral Sea; as the sea shrank the island joined the mainland in 2001, exposing the ghost town of Kantubek and the anthrax burial pits of the Aralsk-7 laboratory.

Which US city's subway tunnels, dug in the 1920s and abandoned when the money ran out, never saw a train?

Cincinnati began digging along the bed of a drained canal in 1920, ran out of money in 1927 and cancelled the scheme a year later; about two miles of empty tunnel still lie beneath Central Parkway.

Which remote Scottish island group had its last 36 islanders evacuated in 1930?

St Kilda. Disease and hardship had worn the community down, and the last islanders left together on 29 August 1930; since then only the staff of a military tracking station have wintered there.

Which steamship burned in 1904, killing 1,021, before beaching on North Brother Island?

General Slocum was carrying a church outing from Manhattan's Little Germany when she caught fire in the East River; the captain ran her aground on the island, but most of the 1,342 people aboard died.

Louisville's Waverly Hills Sanatorium closed in 1961 after the antibiotic streptomycin tamed which disease?

Tuberculosis. Waverly Hills opened in 1910 and grew into a five-storey hospital by 1926; once a drug could cure its patients the wards emptied, and the building now sells tours as a haunted hospital.

Thieves ransacked the Land of Oz park museum in North Carolina during a 1975 fire and took which original film costume?

Dorothy's dress, one of those Judy Garland wore, was owned jointly by the park and Debbie Reynolds, who had cut the opening ribbon in 1970; it vanished when the museum was ransacked during the fire.

Croatia's derelict Haludovo Palace Hotel opened in 1972 with a casino club run by the founder of which magazine?

Penthouse founder Bob Guccione opened a casino club there in 1972 for foreign high-rollers; the partnership collapsed within a year, the hotel later sheltered war refugees, and it shut around New Year 2002.

Tskaltubo's crumbling sanatoriums in Georgia have housed refugees from which conflict?

Abkhazia. Families who fled the war of 1992-93 moved into the spa town's deserted Soviet sanatoriums as a stopgap, and a community of them was still living in the crumbling rooms a quarter of a century later.

Canfranc, a palatial border station left idle when its line through the Pyrenees was cut in 1970, stands in which country?

Spain. A derailment in 1970 wrecked a bridge on the far side of the border and it was never rebuilt, stranding the grand station at the end of a branch line; the building has since become a hotel.

Why was New York's ornate City Hall subway station closed in 1945?

Its curved platform was too short for the longer trains then coming into service and could not be extended; the 6 train still loops through the dark station to turn round.

Holland Island, whose last house the water took in 2010, lay in which bay?

Chesapeake Bay. Erosion ate the island from under some 360 watermen and farmers, who had left by 1922; a minister spent years trying to save the last house, which fell in October 2010.

Sewell, an abandoned mining town in the Chilean Andes, is known as the 'City of' what?

Staircases. The slopes were too steep for wheeled vehicles, so Sewell climbs the mountainside around one great central stairway; its miners were later moved down to the valley.

The liner SS America, renamed American Star, was wrecked in 1994 in which Atlantic island group?

The Canaries. Sold to be refitted as a hotel ship, the American Star went aground on Fuerteventura; within two days the surf had snapped her in two, and the sea took the rest over the years.

Spain's €1.1 billion Ciudad Real airport, closed in 2012, drew a 2015 bid of how much?

€10,000 was the winning bid at the 2015 auction, from an investor group called Tzaneen International, for an airport that cost over €1 billion; the sale fell through, and it later found work storing grounded airliners.

Moynaq, Uzbekistan's stranded port, lost its sea mainly to irrigation for which crop?

Cotton. Soviet planners turned the Amu Darya and Syr Darya onto desert fields, the sea that fed Moynaq's fishing fleet drained away, and its rusting trawlers now sit on sand far from any water.

Shicheng, a 'Lion City' flooded on purpose in 1959 and rediscovered in 2001, lies under a lake in which country?

China. Shicheng was drowned behind the Xin'an Dam and forgotten for decades; a 2001 expedition found its Ming and Qing stonework still standing 40 metres down in Qiandao Lake.

Alberto Burri entombed the ruins of old Gibellina, Sicily, under a vast 'Cretto' of what?

Concrete. Burri buried the rubble of old Gibellina, destroyed in 1968, under a white shroud whose channels follow the old streets; the money ran out in 1989, and the work was finished only in 2015.

A 1971 accident at the Soviet bioweapons lab on Vozrozhdeniya Island spread which disease?

Smallpox. A research ship strayed too close to an open-air test and a young scientist aboard fell ill; she carried the virus home to her port town, and ten people in all were infected, three of them fatally.