Ghost Towns
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97 free Ghost Towns trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
13 free ghost towns trivia questions with answers. Explore the mysterious world of abandoned settlements with our engaging ghost towns trivia quiz. Test your knowledge about famous deserted locations across the globe and discover fascinating historical facts about why these once-thriving communities were left behind. Can you answer all 97 questions correctly?
30 of 97 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which California ghost town is preserved in a state of 'arrested decay'?
Bodie
Bodie boomed after a gold strike in 1876 and had about 8,000 residents by 1879; today interiors are left exactly as they were, dust and all.
Q 02What 1986 event left the Ukrainian city of Pripyat abandoned?
Chernobyl explosion
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.
Q 03Which Namibian diamond town near Lüderitz now has houses knee-deep in sand?
Kolmanskop
Kolmanskop grew up after a railway worker found a diamond there in 1908; once the mines moved south it was abandoned in 1956, and Namib sand has drifted through its houses ever since.
Q 04Why was the Italian hilltop village of Craco largely abandoned in the 20th century?
Landslides and quakes
Landslides and quakes emptied Craco: evacuation began in 1963 after a series of landslides, a 1972 flood worsened the damage, and the 1980 Irpinia earthquake finished the job.
Q 05The French village of Oradour-sur-Glane was destroyed in a massacre during which conflict?
World War II
World War II's Waffen-SS killed the villagers on June 10, 1944; the ruins were left standing as a permanent memorial.
Q 06What is the nickname of Hashima, Japan's abandoned coal-mining island?
Battleship 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.
Q 07Which Pennsylvania town became a ghost town because of an underground coal fire burning for decades?
Centralia
Centralia's underground coal fire has burned for decades beneath the borough; Pennsylvania condemned the buildings and the population fell from about 1,000 in 1980 to a handful of holdouts.
Q 08What natural disaster buried Plymouth, the former capital of Montserrat, turning it into a ghost town?
Volcanic eruption
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.
Q 09Rhyolite, a 1905 gold-rush town near the eastern edge of Death Valley, is in which US state?
Nevada
Rhyolite is in Nevada, in Nye County about 120 miles north-west of Las Vegas; founded in 1905, it was nearly deserted by 1916 after the Panic of 1907 dried up investment.
Q 10Pyramiden, a Soviet coal-mining ghost town shut in 1998, sits on which Norwegian archipelago?
Svalbard
Svalbard's Pyramiden was founded by Sweden in 1910 and sold to the Soviet Union in 1927; the nearest settlement today is Longyearbyen, 50 kilometres to the south.
Q 11The deserted Humberstone and Santa Laura works in the Atacama Desert, UNESCO-listed in 2005, refined what?
Saltpeter
Humberstone and Santa Laura refined saltpeter, sodium nitrate leached from caliche ore; the best known of the Atacama nitrate towns near Iquique, Humberstone shut in 1960 after synthetic nitrates killed demand.
Q 12The abandoned Alaskan camp of Kennecott grew up around mines producing which metal?
Copper
Prospectors spotted what looked like a green meadow high on a hillside; it turned out to be malachite, alongside the ore known as copper glance.
Q 13Which war's 1937 battle left the old village of Belchite in ruins, kept as a memorial?
The Spanish Civil War
Q 21The Turkish ghost village of Kayaköy was emptied in 1923 following which agreement?
Treaty of Lausanne
The Treaty of Lausanne settlement of 1923 mandated the Greek-Turkish population exchange; Kayaköy's Greek Orthodox residents, who knew it as Livissi, were deported and the village was never resettled.
Q 22The Western Australian town of Wittenoom was wiped from official maps because of decades of mining what?
Blue asbestos
Blue asbestos (crocidolite) was mined at Wittenoom from 1937 to 1966; the town was degazetted in 2007, its name removed from maps, and the last resident was moved out in 2022.
Q 23Which Missouri town was abandoned after its residents were exposed to high levels of dioxins?
Times Beach
The Spanish Civil War's Battle of Belchite in August-September 1937 wrecked the old village; Franco ordered the ruins left standing and a new Belchite was built alongside them after 1939.
Q 14Which remote Scottish island was evacuated at its residents' own request in 1930?
St Kilda
St Kilda's last 36 residents left Hirta on 29 August 1930 after petitioning the government; the islands passed to the National Trust for Scotland in 1957 and are a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Q 15Roughly what was the population of the Chernobyl workers' city when it was evacuated in April 1986?
49,000
Pripyat had about 49,000 residents when buses emptied it on 27 April 1986; its new Ferris wheel had been due to open officially on May Day, five days after the disaster.
Q 16Firefighters lit what in May 1962, starting a Pennsylvania mine fire that emptied a town?
The town landfill
The dump sat in an abandoned strip-mine pit beside a cemetery, and the flames found their way into the coal seams beneath.
Q 17In what year did the US Postal Service discontinue the ZIP code of the burning Pennsylvania town?
2002
All the borough's real estate had been claimed under eminent domain in 1992; the last seven residents were allowed to stay for life in 2013.
Q 18Railway worker Zacharias Lewala started the 1908 Namibian diamond rush by showing his find to whom?
A German rail inspector
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.
Q 19Which company bought Japan's Hashima Island in 1890 and mined coal from beneath the sea there until 1974?
Mitsubishi
Mitsubishi's seawalls and land reclamation tripled the island's size to house its burgeoning ranks of workers.
Q 20What event emptied Varosha, Famagusta's beach-resort quarter, of its residents?
The 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus
The 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus emptied Varosha: its Greek Cypriot residents fled in August 1974 and the Turkish army fenced off the quarter, which had been one of the Mediterranean's busiest resorts.
Times Beach, west of St. Louis, had its dirt roads sprayed with dioxin-laced waste oil in the early 1970s; the EPA ordered a buyout in 1983 and the town was disincorporated in 1985.
Q 24St. Thomas, Nevada, was drowned under 70 feet of water when which reservoir filled behind Hoover Dam?
Lake Mead
Lake Mead's drought-exposed ruins have since resurfaced; the Spanish village of Aceredo, drowned in 1992, similarly reappeared in 2022.
Q 25The ghost town of Rhyolite, near Death Valley, is best known for a house built chiefly of what?
Empty bottles
Tom Kelly built Rhyolite's Bottle House in 1906 from roughly 50,000 empty bottles of beer and liquor; it survived the bust that left the town almost empty by 1916.
Q 26Which theme-park founder bought and rebuilt the California ghost town of Calico in the 1950s?
Walter Knott
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.
Q 27Bannack, a gold-rush ghost town, briefly served in 1864 as the first capital of which US territory?
Montana
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.
Q 28Which future US president managed the Sons of Gwalia gold mine in Western Australia in 1898?
Herbert Hoover
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 within weeks.
Q 29In which year did Montserrat's Soufrière Hills volcano begin its modern series of eruptions?
1995
The Soufrière Hills volcano, dormant for centuries, began erupting on 18 July 1995; Plymouth was evacuated that year and permanently abandoned in 1997.
Q 30The Azerbaijani city of Aghdam was largely destroyed after being occupied in 1993 during which conflict?
The First Nagorno-Karabakh War
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.