93 Fun Facts About Ghost Towns

Which California ghost town is preserved in a state of 'arrested decay'?

Bodie's interiors stay as the last residents left them, shelves still stocked; fires in 1892 and 1932 left fewer than a tenth of its roughly 2,000 buildings standing.

What 1986 event left the Soviet city of Pripyat abandoned?

The Chernobyl explosion at reactor No. 4 on 26 April 1986 forced Pripyat's residents out the next day; they were told the evacuation would last three days.

Which Namibian diamond town near Lüderitz now has houses knee-deep in sand?

Kolmanskop grew up after a railway worker found a diamond there in 1908; once the mines moved south it emptied in the 1950s, and Namib sand has drifted through its houses ever since.

Why was the Italian hilltop village of Craco largely abandoned in the 20th century?

Landslides and quakes emptied Craco: residents began moving downhill to Craco Peschiera in 1963 after a series of landslides, and the last were ordered out after the 1980 Irpinia earthquake.

The French village of Oradour-sur-Glane was destroyed in a massacre during which conflict?

World War II's Waffen-SS killed the villagers on June 10, 1944; the ruins were left standing as a permanent memorial.

What is the nickname of Hashima, Japan's abandoned coal-mining island?

Hashima Island, once a bustling undersea coal mining facility, is widely known as Gunkanjima, or 'Battleship Island,' because of its resemblance to a warship when viewed from a distance.

Which Pennsylvania town became a ghost town because of an underground coal fire burning for decades?

Centralia's fire had smouldered for 19 years when, in 1981, the ground opened under a 12-year-old boy, who clung to a tree root until a cousin pulled him out; two years later Congress voted $42 million to buy out the town.

What natural disaster buried the Caribbean capital of Plymouth in the 1990s, turning it into a ghost town?

A volcanic eruption of the Soufrière Hills, dormant for centuries, sent pyroclastic flows over Plymouth and the town was permanently abandoned in 1997; the island's government moved north to Brades.

Rhyolite, a 1905 gold-rush town near the eastern edge of Death Valley, is in which US state?

Rhyolite is in Nevada, just outside Death Valley National Park; it sprang up in 1905, withered after the financial panic of 1907 scared off investors, and had its electricity switched off in 1916.

Pyramiden, a Soviet coal-mining ghost town shut in 1998, sits on which Norwegian archipelago?

Svalbard is Norwegian, but under its 1920 treaty other signatory states may mine there, as Russia still does; Pyramiden passed from Swedish to Russian hands in 1927 and was worked until 1998.

The deserted Humberstone and Santa Laura works in the Atacama Desert, UNESCO-listed in 2005, refined what?

Saltpeter, a nitrate dug from the desert for fertiliser, made northern Chile rich until synthetic nitrate undercut it; output slid after the 1929 crash and both works were abandoned in 1960.

The abandoned Alaskan camp of Kennecott grew up around mines producing which metal?

Copper: prospectors spotted what looked like a green meadow high on a mountainside, and it turned out to be malachite beside a rich ore known as copper glance.

The ruined old village of Belchite stands beside its rebuilt namesake as a memorial to which war?

The Spanish Civil War wrecked Belchite in a two-week battle in 1937; instead of rebuilding it, the regime kept the ruins and had a new town built alongside, partly by prisoners held in a camp there.

Which remote Scottish island community asked the government to evacuate it in 1930?

St Kilda's last 36 islanders chose to go after a young woman's death that winter; on 29 August 1930 they left an open Bible and a small pile of oats in each house and locked the doors.

Which ride in Pripyat's amusement park became the emblem of the abandoned city?

Ferris wheel: the park was due to open officially on 1 May 1986, in time for May Day, but the whole city was evacuated on 27 April and the opening day never came.

Firefighters reportedly burned what in May 1962, starting the Pennsylvania mine fire that emptied a borough?

The town landfill sat in an abandoned strip-mine pit; volunteers were hired to burn the rubbish before Memorial Day, and the flames are thought to have crept through an unsealed hole into the coal seams below.

Railway worker Zacharias Lewala started the 1908 Namibian diamond rush by showing his find to whom?

August Stauch, a German rail inspector supervising Lewala's track gang, recognised the stone; within months the German Empire declared the coastal strip a Sperrgebiet, or prohibited diamond area.

Which company bought Japan's Hashima Island in 1890 and mined coal from beneath the sea there until 1974?

Mitsubishi shut the mine in 1974 and every resident left within months; at the 1959 peak 5,259 people had been packed onto the tiny island, among the most crowded places on Earth.

What event emptied Varosha, Famagusta's beach-resort quarter, of its residents?

The 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus emptied Varosha: its Greek Cypriot residents fled that August as the Turkish army advanced, and the army kept the quarter fenced off, hotels and all, until part of the beachfront reopened in 2020.

The Turkish ghost village of Kayaköy lost its Greek Orthodox community for good under which 1923 agreement?

The Treaty of Lausanne settlement of 1923 brought the Greek-Turkish population exchange, which uprooted Christians in Turkey and Muslims in Greece alike; the homes of Kayaköy's 6,500 Greeks have stood empty ever since.

The Western Australian town of Wittenoom was wiped from official maps because of decades of mining what?

Blue asbestos (crocidolite) was mined at Wittenoom until 1966; the state struck the town's name from official maps and road signs in 2007 and evicted the last resident in 2022.

Which Missouri town was abandoned after its residents were exposed to high levels of dioxins?

Times Beach, southwest of St. Louis, had its dirt roads sprayed for dust control in the 1970s with waste oil that carried dioxin; the federal government bought out the town in 1983 and it was disincorporated in 1985.

St. Thomas, a Nevada farm town, was drowned in 1938 as which Colorado River reservoir filled?

Lake Mead rose over St. Thomas after its last resident, Hugh Lord, rowed away from his house in June 1938; decades later the falling lake let the town's ruins resurface.

The ghost town of Rhyolite, near Death Valley, is best known for a house built chiefly of what?

Empty bottles, some 50,000 that had held beer and liquor, went into the house miner Tom Kelly built in 1906; Paramount restored it in 1925 to use in a silent film.

Which theme-park founder bought and rebuilt the California ghost town of Calico in the 1950s?

Walter Knott of Knott's Berry Farm bought Calico in 1951 and rebuilt it; his uncle had grubstaked the prospectors who found its richest mine, and Knott gave the town to San Bernardino County in 1966.

Bannack, a gold-rush ghost town, briefly served in 1864 as the first capital of which US territory?

Montana Territory's first legislature met at Bannack in 1864 before the capital moved to Virginia City; sheriff Henry Plummer had been hanged by vigilantes that January as an accused road-agent boss.

Which future US president managed the Sons of Gwalia gold mine in Western Australia in 1898?

Herbert Hoover, then a young engineer for Bewick, Moreing and Co., ran the Sons of Gwalia mine in 1898; when the mine closed in December 1963 the town of Gwalia emptied almost overnight.

Which Caribbean island's capital, Plymouth, has stood abandoned inside an exclusion zone since 1997?

Montserrat has kept Plymouth as its capital on paper, though the government works from Brades in the north and about two-thirds of the islanders left after the south was closed off.

The Azerbaijani city of Aghdam was largely destroyed after being occupied in 1993 during which conflict?

Armenian forces captured Aghdam in July 1993 during the First Nagorno-Karabakh War and razed most of it to deter returnees; Azerbaijan regained the ruined city in November 2020.

The Spanish village of Foncebadón is reviving thanks to pilgrims walking to which city?

Santiago de Compostela's pilgrim road runs through Foncebadón, where by the 1990s only a mother and her son still lived; the revival of the Camino brought hostels and bars back to the village.

Japan's abandoned Hashima Island inspired the villain's deserted island lair in which James Bond film?

Skyfall's makers modelled Raoul Silva's hideout on Hashima after Daniel Craig met a film-maker who had made a documentary about the island; the scenes themselves were built with sets and computer imagery.

A seven-floor miners' apartment block built on Hashima Island in 1916 was Japan's first large building made of what?

Reinforced concrete was chosen to stand up to typhoons; over the next 55 years more blocks, a school and a hospital were packed onto the rock around that first building.

The hospital in Namibia's sand-filled diamond ghost town had one of southern Africa's first what?

X-ray machines were a rarity when the town's hospital got one, and it is said to have doubled as a check on workers who swallowed stolen diamonds; the town also had an ice factory and a ballroom.

The Japanese town of Namie, emptied by an evacuation order in March 2011, lies in which prefecture?

Fukushima's Namie lay downwind of the stricken nuclear plant; many residents sheltered in the west of the town, straight in the path of the plume, because official forecasts of its direction were not passed on.

Which Antarctic explorer is buried at Grytviken, an abandoned whaling station on South Georgia?

Ernest Shackleton died of a heart attack aboard his ship at South Georgia in 1922; his body was already on its way to England when his widow asked that he be buried on the island, among the whalers.

The gold-rush ghost town of Rhyolite, near Death Valley, takes its name from what?

An igneous rock: rhyolite is the pale, silica-rich volcanic rock of the hills around the townsite; the boom was so brief that a town with an opera house and a stock exchange in 1907 had its power cut off within a decade.

California's best-known gold-rush ghost town has been what since 1962?

State Historic Park status came in 1962, and since then its buildings have been stabilised, never restored: repairs only stop them falling down, a policy California calls 'arrested decay'.

Pripyat, the Soviet workers' city founded in 1970 and emptied in 1986, stands in which present-day country?

Ukraine: the city stands in Kyiv Oblast, close to the border with Belarus, and takes its name from the river beside it; it was proclaimed a city only in 1979, seven years before every resident left.

How does T. Lindsay Baker's book Ghost Towns of Texas define a ghost town?

Its reason for being is gone: Baker's test is 'a town for which the reason for being no longer exists'; other writers narrow the term to places abandoned because they stopped paying their way, leaving out towns emptied by disaster.

Which city on the Golan Heights was destroyed before the Israeli withdrawal of June 1974?

Quneitra, the Golan's main town, was found by a UN-commissioned survey to have been deliberately demolished before Israel handed it back in June 1974; Syria left the ruins standing and built a museum to the destruction.

The 'Lost Villages' of Ontario were flooded in 1958 by the construction of what?

The Saint Lawrence Seaway project's Moses-Saunders power dam flooded ten communities near Cornwall on 1 July 1958, 'Inundation Day'; about 6,500 people had been moved to the new towns of Ingleside and Long Sault.

Nether Hambleton and Middle Hambleton in England were flooded to create which reservoir?

Rutland Water, filled from 1976 to supply the East Midlands, drowned Nether Hambleton and most of Middle Hambleton; Upper Hambleton survives on the peninsula that juts into the reservoir.

Which French ski resort stands above a dam lake that drowned its original village in 1952?

Tignes lost its old village to the Chevril dam in 1952 and grew again higher up as a ski resort; when the lake was emptied for inspection, about once a decade, the ruins came back into view.

Buhen, a pharaonic fortress town in ancient Nubia, was drowned in 1964 beneath which reservoir?

Lake Nasser rose behind the Aswan High Dam and covered Buhen in 1964, after a team under Walter Emery had excavated it; its temple of Horus was moved to the national museum in Khartoum.

Residents of Arenal and Tronadora were relocated in the 1970s to make room for an enlarged lake in which country?

Costa Rica enlarged Lake Arenal behind a hydroelectric dam; the old towns of Arenal and Tronadora now lie on the lake bed, and their people were resettled in new towns on the shore, one of them Nuevo Arenal.

Wharram Percy's lords all but emptied the village by the early 1500s to farm what?

Sheep paid better than ploughland as wool prices rose, so Baron Hilton evicted four families around 1500 and turned the last ploughland to pasture in 1527; the ruined church is the last medieval building standing.

Which Suffolk town, once a port as big in area as medieval London, was mostly lost to the sea?

Dunwich began falling to the North Sea in the storms of 1286, and one in 1347 took some 400 houses; it still sent two MPs to Parliament until 1832, one of the most notorious rotten boroughs.

Why was Dorset's Tyneham evacuated in December 1943?

The War Office wanted a firing range: Tyneham's 225 people left a note on the church door asking that their homes be treated with care, but the Army bought the land outright in 1948 and nobody moved back.

Imber, on Salisbury Plain, was emptied in 1943 so which army's troops could train there?

American troops were preparing for the invasion of Europe; Imber's villagers got 47 days' notice on 1 November 1943 and were never allowed home, though the church still opens for worship each year around St Giles' Day.

Henry Ford built the Amazon town of Fordlândia in 1928 to grow a supply of what?

Rubber for Ford's tyres was the goal: Fordlândia's closely planted rubber trees fell to leaf blight and pests, the project moved to Belterra in 1934, and Ford's grandson sold both sites back to Brazil in 1945.

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

Argentina's Villa Epecuén went under in November 1985 when a surge on its salt lake broke the dike; the water peaked about 10 metres deep, and when it drew back in 2009 one old resident, Pablo Novak, moved home alone.

Armero, Colombia, was erased in 1985 by lahars from which volcano?

Nevado del Ruiz erupted on 13 November 1985; as ash fell that afternoon, officials and the town priest told people to stay calm and go indoors, and that night its lahars buried Armero and more than 20,000 of its 29,000 people.

What wiped out Thistle, Utah, in April 1983?

A landslide that dammed the river in April 1983 backed the Spanish Fork up over Thistle; federal agencies called it the costliest landslide in US history, and it brought Utah's first presidential disaster declaration.

A 1964 cyclone left India's Dhanushkodi unfit for living and also swept away what?

A passenger train from Pamban was swept off the line with everyone aboard on the night of 22 December 1964; Dhanushkodi, until then a transit point between India and Ceylon, was never rebuilt.

Chile's empty Andean mining town of Sewell is known as the city of what?

Staircases: Sewell was built on a slope too steep for wheeled vehicles, around one great central stairway rising from the railway station; some 15,000 people lived there at its peak.

Houtouwan, a deserted fishing village near Shanghai, is famous for being engulfed by what?

Greenery swallowed Houtouwan after its 2,000 fishermen left for the mainland, the last of them by 2002; creepers now blanket the empty houses on Shengshan Island, and the village draws tourists instead.

Kantubek, a ghost town on an island in the Aral Sea, housed staff of what Soviet facility?

Kantubek housed staff of a biological weapons test site, Aralsk-7, on Vozrozhdeniya Island, closed in 1992; a US-led team later spent three months neutralising 100 to 200 tonnes of buried anthrax for about US$5 million.

Storms wrecked Devon's Hallsands in 1917 after years of offshore dredging for what?

Gravel for a naval dockyard, the Keyham extension near Plymouth, was dredged off Hallsands at up to 1,600 tons a day until the licence was revoked in 1902; with its beach lowered, the village fell to the storms of January 1917.

Capel Celyn, a Welsh-speaking village, was drowned in 1965 to supply water to which city?

Liverpool's corporation pushed the Tryweryn reservoir through by a private Act of Parliament in 1957, so Welsh councils never got a say; Capel Celyn's dozen farms and houses vanished under Llyn Celyn, opened in 1965.

The Russian town of Mologa was drowned in the 1940s beneath a reservoir on which great river?

Volga water rose behind the Rybinsk dam in the 1940s and covered Mologa, which stood where the Mologa river joins it; around 130,000 people were moved out of the valley to make way for the reservoir.

Old Goussainville, north of Paris, emptied out after 1974 when what opened nearby?

Charles de Gaulle Airport opened in March 1974 with flight paths over the old village, and noise drove residents out; a year earlier a Tu-144 at the Paris Air Show had crashed into Goussainville, killing eight on the ground.

Spinalonga, the Cretan islet uninhabited since the early 1960s, was last used as what?

A leper colony held Spinalonga's last community until 1957, when the patients were moved to a hospital near Athens; a priest stayed until 1962 so the islet's dead could be commemorated for five years, as Orthodox custom asks.

The ruined medieval Armenian capital of Ani was nicknamed the city of how many churches?

Ani was styled the City of 1,001 Churches at its 11th-century peak under the Bagratid kings; archaeologists have traced about 50 churches, and the Mongol sack of 1236 and a 1319 earthquake emptied it.

The Gedi Ruins, a Swahili stone town abandoned in the 1600s, lie in which country?

Kenya's Gedi was dug from 1948 by James Kirkman, whose finds gave its houses their names, among them the House of the Chinese Cash, the House of the Porcelain Bowl and the House of the Scissors.

Cambodia's French-built Bokor Hill Station was abandoned again in 1972 when who moved in?

Nine hundred people died in nine months building the resort, whose grand hotel opened in 1925; it was among the last Khmer Rouge strongholds into the 1990s.

What 1996 disaster led Russia to close Kadykchan, a coal town in Kolyma, and pay its residents to leave?

A fatal mine explosion killed six workers in 1996 and the authorities shut the town's last pit; residents were paid to move away, the main buildings were blown up, and the 2010 census found nobody left.

Terlingua, a Texas ghost town, grew around mines digging red cinnabar ore for which metal?

Mercury, or quicksilver, made Terlingua: by 1922 it supplied 40 percent of the country's output, and owner Howard Perry ran the mine from his Chicago office, using code books to keep its reports secret.

Thurmond, a near-empty West Virginia town, is mostly owned by which federal agency?

The National Park Service owns most of Thurmond as part of New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, and its old railway depot is a visitor centre; in the 2005 town election six of the seven residents ran for office.

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

Alabama's legislature met at Cahaba from 1820 until backers of Tuscaloosa, pointing to floods and fevers where two rivers meet, won a vote to move the capital in 1826; the county seat followed to Selma in 1866.

In 1917, about 60 members of which union were run out of Jerome, Arizona, in a cattle car?

The Industrial Workers of the World had called a strike at Jerome's mines; in July 1917 some 250 armed vigilantes loaded about 60 suspected Wobblies into a cattle car and shipped them out, the same month as the larger Bisbee Deportation.

Bombay Beach, a faded 1950s resort town, sits on the shore of which California lake?

Salton Sea water came from the Colorado River, which burst through an irrigation canal in 1905 and filled a dry basin; Bombay Beach drew holidaymakers to its shore until the lake grew too salty.

Barkerville, British Columbia's preserved gold-rush town, is named for a prospector born in which country?

England: Billy Barker, a Cambridgeshire waterman's son, struck gold on Williams Creek in 1862 and gave the boom town his name, yet he died penniless in a Victoria old men's home in 1894.

Why did Kitsault, a BC mining town, empty in 1982 after just 18 months?

Prices crashed: molybdenum collapsed and the mine shut, leaving a brand-new town with its homes, shops and swimming pool intact; a businessman later bought the whole place.

Quebec's Val-Jalbert, a company village deserted in the late 1920s, grew up around what industry?

Pulp and paper built Val-Jalbert: its mill at the foot of the Ouiatchouan Falls shut in 1927, laid-off workers stayed on hoping it would reopen, and in 1929 the company ordered every house boarded up.

Walhalla, an old gold town in Victoria, Australia, finally got what in December 1998?

Mains electricity reached Walhalla only in December 1998, though its Long Tunnel mine had been lit by electricity as early as 1884; the cricket ground sits on a levelled hilltop because the valley had no flat land.

Real de Catorce, in San Luis Potosí, boomed and then emptied with its mines of which metal?

Silver built Real de Catorce, and the town all but emptied once its mines failed; the main way in is still the one-way Ogarrio tunnel, about 1.5 miles long, and Huichol pilgrims still cross the desert to this sacred ground.

Which volcano, born in a Michoacán cornfield in 1943, buried a town in lava up to the top of its church?

Parícutin's lava took more than a year to reach San Juan Parangaricutiro, so everyone got out alive; residents rebuilt nearby as Nuevo San Juan, and the church ruins still stand above the flow.

Chinese-built Kilamba, 750 apartment blocks paid for with oil and once dubbed a ghost town, lies in which country?

Angola had China's CITIC build Kilamba about 30 km from Luanda for a reported US$3.5 billion, repaid in oil; flats advertised from US$120,000 sat empty until mortgage subsidies and price cuts filled them.

Ross Island in the Andamans was renamed in 2018 after which leader, who raised India's flag in the islands in 1943?

Subhas Chandra Bose hoisted the tricolour at Port Blair on 30 December 1943, while Japan held the Andamans; the island was renamed 75 years later to the day.

Legend says Kuldhara's villagers in Rajasthan fled overnight to escape whom?

A cruel minister, Salim Singh of Jaisalmer, is the villain of the legend: in the best-known telling he demanded a village girl, and the Paliwal Brahmins slipped away rather than hand her over.

Mario Bagno bulldozed the Italian village of Consonno in the 1960s to build what?

Mario Bagno razed Consonno from 1962 to build a Las Vegas-style resort, the 'City of Toys', with a mock minaret, a pagoda and a castle gateway; landslides in 1976 and 1977 cut the access road and the project died.

After a 1968 quake levelled Gibellina, Sicily, Alberto Burri covered the ruins with what?

White cement was poured over the rubble of old Gibellina by Alberto Burri from the mid-1980s, keeping the street plan as walkable cracks; money ran out in 1989, and the work was finished only in 2015, twenty years after his death.

Doel, a near-empty Belgian village, spent decades slated for demolition to expand what?

The Port of Antwerp had plans from 1965 to swallow Doel for new docks; after decades of protest and a 24-year court fight, a deal in March 2022 let the village stay, 1611 stone windmill and all.

Neftegorsk, a Russian oil town never rebuilt after a 1995 earthquake killed some 2,000 residents, stood on which island?

Sakhalin's Neftegorsk collapsed in the night because its 17 apartment blocks had never been built to withstand earthquakes; the survivors were resettled in other towns on the island.

Mardale Green in England's Lake District was submerged in the 1930s under which reservoir?

Haweswater's dam, built by Manchester Corporation from 1929 to 1935, raised the lake about 29 metres and drowned Mardale Green; the Royal Engineers blew up its houses for practice and the church was dismantled stone by stone.

Grafton, Utah, seen in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, lies just south of which park?

Zion National Park lies just north of Grafton, whose first settlement was wrecked by a Virgin River flood in January 1862; the families rebuilt a mile upstream, and repeated floods later drove most of them away.

Akarmara, a Soviet mining quarter emptied by war in 1992–93, is in which breakaway region?

Akarmara was a coal-mining quarter of Tkvarcheli in Abkhazia, a town besieged in the war of 1992-93; its apartment blocks and factories emptied in the early 1990s and only a few dozen people stayed on.

Anyox, a BC smelter town abandoned in 1935, was finished off by what in 1942 and 1943?

Forest fires in 1942 and 1943 burned the last wooden buildings of Anyox, whose smelter had shut in 1935 with three years of unsold copper stockpiled; its acid rain had already stripped the hillsides bare.

Uranium City, a busted Saskatchewan boomtown, lies just north of which lake?

Lake Athabasca's north shore drew uranium miners in the 1950s, but when the mines closed in 1982 almost everyone left; the 2016 census counted just 73 residents.

After its mine closed in 1987, what became of many buildings in Pine Point, Northwest Territories?

Moved away: the houses were sold off cheaply and many buildings went to Hay River, Fort Resolution and northern Alberta, the ice arena among them; the rest were demolished and the site cleared.

Taiwan's Sanzhi 'UFO houses', an unfinished pod resort razed by 2010, were aimed at whom?

The pods were marketed as a holiday resort for US military officers posted to East Asia; work stopped in 1980 amid losses and fatal accidents that locals blamed on cutting a dragon sculpture in half to widen the road.

Volunteers restored and reopened what in the stone ruins of Farina, a South Australian ghost town?

An underground bakery now opens for a few weeks each year in the ruins of Farina, run by volunteers; the town was founded in 1878 by farmers who believed rain would follow the plough, and nobody has lived there since 1967.

Kangbashi, dubbed a 'ghost city' in 2009, is a district of which Inner Mongolian city?

Ordos built Kangbashi from scratch, and it had about 30,000 residents when it was branded a ghost city in 2009; by 2017 it housed 153,000, and a Forbes writer argued the label had been pinned on it too soon.