The most creepy ghost towns, abandoned and forgotten. Modern ghost towns (103 photos) Dead places
There are many beautiful cities in Russia that attract crowds of tourists. But there is a category of people who are not attracted by brand new buildings and clean streets, relaxing on the beach or going to expensive shops. They call themselves stalkers and are ready to endure a long journey, bad smells and mountains of dust, if only in search of traces of bygone years. Ghost towns of Russia - dead cities abandoned by people, become the object of their excursions. We will walk with them along the unexplored streets filled with obsolete worn signs.
Ghost towns of Russia: dead settlements
Magadan Region. Abandoned urban-type settlement (PGT) Kadykchan. Previously, one of the objects of the Gulag was located here. People settled in this place because of the rich coal deposits in 1943. The population of the town reached almost six thousand when a tragedy occurred: an explosion in a mine. The village was closed, the heating was turned off. Only four hundred old-timers remained in the settlement, refusing to leave it. In 2003, Kadykchan was given the status of an unpromising settlement, and residents began to be resettled. There were old cars in the garages, furniture and books in the houses.
In the Komi Republic located urban-type settlement Khalmer-Yu. In the distant past, the local Nenets brought the dead to this place, considering the place sacred. In 1942, a seam of valuable coal was discovered here. The mine was liquidated in 1993. In 1995, the issue of clearing the city of the population was decided radically: by the forces of the OMON, the inhabitants of Khalmer-Yu were taken out of the town against their will. Now in an abandoned village there is a military training ground.
In Neftegorsk located on Sakhalin Island, there were four kindergartens and one comprehensive school. In 1995, the graduates celebrated last call in one of the cafes in the city. Glasses clinked and cigarettes smoked. Nobody knew it was theirs last hours. On that day, Neftegorsk experienced a 10-magnitude earthquake that claimed the lives of more than two thousand citizens. Rescuers went to the place. The survivors received apartments and free higher education for kids. We dispersed to different cities, and Neftegorsk was empty.
Perm region. Old Gubakha is an abandoned settlement of coal miners. In the 18th century, two coal deposits were discovered in the area. In 1924, a state district power station No. 3 named after V.I. Kirov. A holiday village has been formed on the basis of an abandoned town. The old buildings were almost completely swallowed up by vegetation.
City of Mologa was located at the confluence of the river of the same name into the Volga. People have lived in this place since the 12th century. In 1935, the construction of the Rybinsk hydroelectric complex began, which included the flooding of territories, among which was Mologa. AT last years existence of the city in it functioned several cathedrals, factories, schools. Prisoners were involved in the construction of the hydroelectric complex and the destruction of the city. Residents were hastily relocated to other settlements. Mologa, due to the lowering of the reservoir level, is shown from the water several times a year.
The ghost towns of Russia beyond the Arctic Circle are dead cities, bound by the cold. Nizhneyansk- an empty village in the Ust-Yansky ulus. In the forties it was created as a promising seaport. In 1999, the population did not exceed 2.5 thousand people. Gloomy two-story blocks of buildings stretch along the street deep into the city. The wires are broken, the lights are knocked down, the equipment is abandoned.
Ryazan Oblast. Kursha-2 is a settlement of workers, created for the development of the riches of the forest. By 1936, about one thousand inhabitants lived in the town. The summer turned out to be hot and a strong fire broke out. They realized it late, only when the wooden bridge was already engulfed in fire. Of the entire population of Kursh-2, 20 people survived. Today, on the site of the village, there are burnt ruins overgrown with grass. Although the town was restored in post-war years, after closing railway it was completely abandoned.
Vologodskaya Oblast. The city of Charonda, once with 11 thousand inhabitants, gradually turned into a village, and then into a ghost settlement. Located on the picturesque shores of Lake Vozhe, the settlement is of great cultural importance. Russia's ghost towns of this kind, although they turned into dead cities a long time ago, deserve more attention. In 2015, the last indigenous resident of the village died. The old church of St. John Chrysostom, until the very extinction of the village, fed wooden houses with electricity, thanks to a generator. At the moment, the device is broken, the depopulated village freezes under the snow.
Cities - candidates for ghosts
On the coast of the Kara Sea there is an almost abandoned urban settlement Amderma. It was founded in the summer of 1933 for the extraction of fluorite. Expeditions in the Arctic were supported by the Amderma radio station. Here the sea and airways. Since the 1990s, the town began to decline. Withdrawn garrison, oil exploration expedition, closed most of enterprises. The population is about five hundred people.
Tula region . The village of Krapivino, like Charonda, was previously medieval city. Since 2002, the Nettle Festival has been held on the territory of the village. There are two churches and a cathedral on the territory. The population in 2010 was one thousand people. Residents try to be careful, avoiding bricks falling from old houses.
There are many such villages. Some of them have been abandoned for a long time, others are quietly dying out before our eyes. Ghost towns of Russia, and villages are overgrown with tall grass, wild animals settle in houses.
A thinking person, a building person, a creative person sometimes spends his whole short life in search of the meaning of existence. In order to find your way in the wilderness of the world, you have to realize yourself as the master of fate, which in itself requires effort on the soul. It is much easier to be an artificial creation when your destiny is known in advance. However, predetermined utility is not eternal, sooner or later matches and files, tires and boots, cars and factories become unnecessary. Entire cities perish, leaving stone skeletons to profit looters or tourists. So it was, is and will be, every century has its own Pompeii and Klondike.
The tragic fate of the city of Pripyat is known to everyone, and especially to the Eastern Slavs. Those in their 30s can easily recall the anxieties of 1986. Many people are still worried about the misfortune of 24 years ago, more and more people are ready to pay $ 70 for a cult trip through the dead city, where they are waiting for periodically updated toys in sandboxes and sinister ones, the authors of which were kicked out of the city in disgrace without the right to further visits.
It is hard to imagine how often there are cities with a similar share both in Russia and on distant continents. The reasons why thousands of settlements turn into ghost towns are different. But the fates of the inhabitants are very similar, each of them experienced a painful break in life and divides it in memory into “before” and “after”. As a rule, "before" is a very good tense. Many dead cities prospered shortly before their death.
If only the deaf have not heard about the catastrophe of Pripyat, then the broad masses do not even suspect the existence of other abandoned cities. None of this information made secrets, but did not seek to advertise: who cares about someone else's grief? History chose to remain silent about many things. Just think, they threw a thousand or two citizens out of habitable apartments. Natives of the disappeared cities and their descendants today are looking for each other on the Internet and even meet where empty childhood homes are filled with tears of memories.
The situations in which busy cities and large towns become ghostly are different, although there are many unifying moments in the biography. Standard trouble number 1 is the elimination of a settlement due to the closure of a city-forming enterprise. This means that the plant or mine, from which the whole city “feed”, has ceased to be profitable. This means that the firm must be closed, not particularly considering the fate of the townspeople. 5 years after Chernobyl accident there was a thermonuclear collapse of a great country in terms of damage, and ghost towns on the territory of the USSR began to multiply. These are evicted mining settlements both in the north of Russia and in Tajikistan. This is Agdam shot by artillery in flat Karabakh and an icy Russian town in Norwegian Svalbard. The redistribution of land and property, the shuffling of priorities, the general transition to gas and oil products have deprived these places of any prospects for revival.
Kadykchan
Halmer-Yu
Pyramid
We can safely say that it is economic troubles that are the degenerators of abandoned cities. The very concept of a ghost town came to us from the United States. Dozens and hundreds of former boomtowns in the bearish corners of the Appalachians and the baking deserts of the West, which have disappeared forever or are preserved for tourists - this is the history of the USA, a country that has not yet been a quarter of a millennium. American cinema has infected fans of the films "", "Children of the Corn" and "The Hills Have Eyes" with the fashion for tours to the dead cities. In the prototype of Silent Hill, the city, they go for truly hot impressions. A fire has been burning underground for 40 years, and is not going to die out. The soles of the sneakers melt on the walkers.
Centralia
On the other side of the prairies, in the too sunny Nevada, an American with a huge ichthyosaur on the emblem is languishing in the heat. A little wilder to the West - and we are in the deserted epicenter of the passions of the times of the gold rush, the town where, thanks to the trustees, 200 houses and buildings of the late 19th century have been well preserved. Prospecting settlements at one time were chic not for life, but for death. Everything you saw in the westerns really happened in Bodie and in Berlin.
On the other side of the equator, in Chile, there is also where lovers of trips to abandoned cities can take a walk. The monsters of the US economy have always had a special interest in natural resources Chile. On dollar investments in the development of seams of saltpeter, a town grew in the desert, and next to an abundant copper mine in the Andes -. These ghost towns are well preserved, thanks to the Chilean authorities and the leadership of UNESCO. All year round there are enough tourists with cameras - vacationers who want to escape from the Pacific horizon to something unusual, mysterious.
Humberstone
South Africa experienced its diamond boom in the era of monopolies. To live on diamonds meant to bathe in luxury. Before the First World War, it was customary in the city (now Namibia) to wash down workdays with cold champagne, and in the theater, in the middle of the most expensive sands in the world, the most fashionable vaudevilles of that time were staged. Kolmanskop is still charming with pictures of sun-drenched desolation.
Another reason why peaceful settlements turn into ghost towns is worse than any economic crisis, but at least logical. These are cities affected by armed conflicts. After wars of any scale, wounds remain on the body of civilization, but not all of them heal. In some places, dead cities were left in ruins as a warning to posterity. So, Civil War in Spain, immortalized in the ruins of the town, and the results of the Nazi invasion of France are carefully guarded under the sky of the martyr city.
But from, the birthplace of the famous port wine, soon, perhaps, nothing will remain. The work of the Karabakh military is successfully continued by brick and metal hunters. Today's Agdam is of no interest to either Karabakh or Azerbaijan. Pigs and other livestock graze under the arches of the mosque.
Another bargaining chip in the game with machine-gun fire was the closed quarter in the center of Famagusta, in Cyprus. The once-chic resort is surrounded by a thorny fence. It serves as a neutral zone on the border between the Turkish and Greek parts of the island. For more than 30 years, Varosha has been patrolled by the Turkish army, whose soldiers shamelessly plundered this piece of paradise in their time.
Military men do not get along with housing stock objects even in peacetime. Empty military camps are not uncommon in the vast expanses of the motherland. Yes, and abroad Soviet army managed to "inherit". The town not far from Prague was for a long time the object of fierce hatred of the Czech population, and after the exodus of the SA in 1991, it turned into a home for drug addicts, marauders and corrupt love.
The next type of abandoned cities are settlements that have gone under water or are at risk of flooding. In the pampas of Argentina, you can admire the salty ruins of a spa resort, a healing estuary that once went under water due to the fault of land reclamators. Plans to dive to the bottom of the great American rivers in the heart of the United States, which was half empty due to the struggle for the rights of people of color in the second half of the 20th century. In the city, from time immemorial, there has been an increased concentration of racists; then they simply survived from Cairo. Since then, the business center of the city has been uninhabited.
Special topic - closed cities, victims of man-made accidents, in the list of which Pripyat is the first. The explosion in the mine served as a formal pretext for the resettlement of Kadykchan, digging under the city in search of brown coal shook the fate of the Italian city, which allowed filmmakers to turn the empty houses into scenery for a film about the life of the insane.
He does not ignore those corners of civilization that have suffered from various cataclysms. Not all dead cities are rebuilt in the same place, because. it is fraught with a repetition of the tragedy. Earthquakes in southern Italy devastated the ancient villages and, but the settlements of the same name quickly grew a couple of miles from the ruins. You should carefully explore the remains of the baroque-village life, so that the nice excursion does not end in failure and a turning point.
In the 21st century, ghost towns have accepted into their world community, a port town in southern Chile. Chaiten was evacuated in May 2008 due to an unexpected volcanic eruption that had been dormant for many thousands of years. In the valley of the Rio Blanco, a local end of the world broke out - it seemed that the very mouth of the volcano was spitting thunderbolts; shower jets, mixing with hot lava into a stream of mudflow, similar to concrete, flooded the already deserted Chaiten, and everything in the area was covered with a thick layer of ash.
And now let's go to amazing, shocking Asia. The most implausible disappeared cities were and are on the shores of the Chinese seas. Fortunately, unfortunately, today on the map of Hong Kong there is no monstrous abode of anarchism and the Confucian spirit, which was called "". But even 20 years ago, up to 50 thousand people lived and worked in the former fort, which turned into a monolithic superdormitory. Oddly enough, in such close quarters, traditional crime was practically absent.
On one of the 500 deserted islands of Nagasaki Prefecture (Japan), life was once in full swing. The island is officially called, popularly - Gunkanjima ("cruiser island"). The resemblance to a warship is clearly visible from the sea, and no one is allowed to enter Khashima's land without a permit. The super-dense East Asian mining community was left to fend for itself in 1974 when Mitsubishi announced the closure of the local coal mines. Hasima periodically "flashes" in movies, video clips, his concrete labyrinths inspire the authors of computer games and anime.
Abandoned cities are not only the past of the world, but also its unfulfilled future. The Taiwanese resort was built in the 1970s in a deliberately cosmic style, with complex technologies that were beyond the power of many workers. Therefore, there were enough fatal emergencies at the construction site. The ambitious plans of the developers were put to an end by the credit crisis of the early 80s, then they decided to dismantle the miracle houses of San Chi and ... the cases of death resumed. The superstitious Chinese decided not to anger fate anymore and left everything as it is.
Brings to the attention of readers briefly mentioned in this review. Welcome to the uninhabited world of the dead zone, and let no one walk away offended!
Many materials are published in Russian for the first time!
There are many unexplained phenomena in the world. However, the most interesting and mysterious have always been. There are many nuances and reasons for their occurrence. In one case, these are large-scale catastrophes, and in the other, inexplicable phenomena. Here are a number of the most famous and interesting ten ghost towns that still excite the minds of contemporaries today.
Taiwan, the dead city of San Zhi
Sometimes even the most ambitious projects become a failure by fate, chance or inexplicable reasons. This is the city of San Zhi in Taiwan.
It was built as the greatest and unique. The project of the city was created in the seventies. allocated for construction great amount money, and the architecture itself was amazing. For a decade, construction was in full swing, but no customers were observed. Everyone was afraid of this city of glass and plastic. This is strange for us, because in our time it attracts tourists and the rich who want to relax. Then such styles in architecture were frightening.
Throughout the construction, the city was plagued by setbacks. Basically, these were the ridiculous and horrific deaths of workers, installers and guides. It is worth saying that the excursion groups did not find a place for themselves and tried to leave the entertainment complex as quickly as possible. Soon the money for the construction ran out, and investors abandoned the project. It was immediately chosen by local homeless people, but they could not live in it for a long time, since the dead constantly appeared to them.
After lengthy proceedings in the government of the country, they decided to completely demolish the city. However, the locals were not allowed to do so. According to the beliefs of the people, the spirits of the dead can, and as long as they have their own city, no one bothers anyone.
In any case, this is probably the most misterious story, and the city of San Zhi rightfully occupies .
Chernobyl
At number two, one of the most terrible and mysterious cities in the world is Chernobyl, Ukraine.
Chernobyl became abandoned after the disaster that occurred in 1986. An explosion at a nuclear power plant shocked the whole world without exception.
The wind carried the radioactive particles. The city was empty within a month, as the government was afraid of disclosure. People lived for several more days, not knowing that a mortal threat hung over them. The mass export put an end to the existence of this small town. In those days, Chernobyl was the great pride of the USSR, but in the end it became the biggest disappointment.
It is worth noting that a huge number of films have been shot about him, computer games have been created. Even at the moment, the phrase “Pripyat is a ghost town” causes shivers in the body. A huge amount of radiation made Chernobyl and its territory both dangerous and popular. Now tourists from all over the world and people who call themselves stalkers go there. They are willing to pay money for excursions and the opportunity to see ghosts caused by anomalies in places where radiation accumulates. Excursions are held daily to the reactor itself, covered with a dome, and just around the city, which was abandoned. Guides show apartments with leftover furniture, toys in kindergarten And so on. On the general background, it actually looks creepy and unpleasant.
Abandoned Chernobyl will attract tourists and ghost hunters for decades to come.
Famagusta
Among the most famous places in the world is Famagusta - a ghost town, the island of Cyprus.
Famagusta, the most famous abandoned city in the world, is located on the sunny touristic legendary island of Cyprus. No one lives in it except the wind. Silence and trees that sprout through concrete walls are his destiny for many more years to come.
The reason for the desolation of the city was the war between the two states - Turkey and Greece. They did not divide the right to territory among themselves. And now Famagusta stands in complete desolation and is covered with barbed wire. It has become a border between two states that do not go to reconciliation.
The once successful and prosperous center was completely plundered, only individual buildings remained intact, but have already begun to collapse under the influence of water, wind and sun. You can’t come to its territory, but the abandoned city still attracts a huge and irrepressible desire to visit it.
Villa Epequeen, Argentina
This once beautiful place is now one of the most famous abandoned ghost towns on the planet. The villa was built on the banks of a beautiful estuary and opened as a huge spa, in which the rich improved their health for huge sums of money. However, the authorities of the city seemed to have few buildings and clean water on the coast, and they decided to expand the territory by expanding the freshwater lake. However, less than ten years later, the water from the reservoir began to flood the beaches and the resort area.
Nature warned that it was not worth interfering with the sequential course of events. However, the authorities of Villa Epekeen decided that it was still worth strengthening the city's borders with dams, and dumping excess water into irrigation fields.
Nature could not stand this careless attitude and in one day completely flooded the city. The water rose 15 meters up, and even mixed with fresh water. Residents had to drop all their belongings and leave. Salt and sun have turned a once-prosperous place into whitish ghosts.
Soon a new spa resort grew nearby, and tourists are taken to the Villa with pleasure, as it is a local landmark, and former residents are trying to look for traces of their long-standing stay.
Centralia, USA
If you have ever played a game called Silent Hill or watched the movie of the same name, you should know that the idea was an example - the abandoned city of Centralia in Pennsylvania.
This is a really scary and creepy place with constantly rising smoke in the cracks in the pavement and in the houses. Once this city was a successful and prosperous settlement of hard workers who mined anthracite coal. He lay very close to the surface. However, the development was closed, and the residents successfully established their lives and quietly existed, earning a living by farming and other things.
One fine day, the mayor of the city decided that it was time to burn heaps of garbage outside the city, as an inspection would soon arrive. However, he did not take into account how disastrous this would be and turn Centralia into an abandoned city of the world. It turned out that anthracite lies very close to the surface, and even after the workers burned the garbage heaps, it continued to smolder methodically.
The authorities miscalculated not only in this, but also in the fact that they closed the development, since there was a lot of fuel left there. For a long time, everyone turned a blind eye to the poisoning of people. carbon monoxide. Centralia continued to live in peace. The impetus for complete desolation was the more frequent tremors underground and the breaks in asphalt and houses at the most unexpected moments. Coal burns in the bowels, and the hot smoke needs an outlet to the surface. Thus, the city authorities evacuated people. However, it still burns to this day. Abandoned streets and houses smoke, and the air is saturated with carbon monoxide.
Neftegorsk
Among the most famous places in the world is Neftegorsk, Russian Federation.
Neftegorsk is probably the worst example of an earthquake. A terrible event happened in 1995. The city was founded as a settlement for oil workers who worked in it on a rotational basis. However, years passed, and high wages and job security turned the town into a developing and successful one. However, it also became the last shelter for most of its inhabitants.
So on May 25 in the evening there was an earthquake of 10 points on the Richter scale. Not a trace of the city remained, only a few buildings survived. More than two thousand people were buried alive under the ruins. They decided not to restore Neftegorsk, but only built a huge monument, which recalls the tragedy that happened on May 25, 1995. Thus, he enters the most terrible abandoned ghost towns, which were not just abandoned, but destroyed by the elements of nature.
Detroit, USA
The city still exists and is partially inhabited. It is worth saying that it was founded in the 17th century and was considered one of the most successful. A thriving industry, a huge number of stately buildings, amazing architecture, all this was once. Now Detroit can be safely brought into abandoned ghost towns.
The first impetus to desolation was the construction of huge corporations - Ford and General Motors. They are car manufacturers. The city becomes industrial, pollution only grows every year. The second step is to populate Detroit with the black population. Moreover, most of them are criminals and the poor. The city simply began to rob. Crime reached unprecedented heights, and the white population simply began to leave.
The gradual desolation and lack of jobs has done its job, and now the ghost towns of the world have replenished with one more representative.
Time Beach, USA
A town in Missouri was destroyed by human hands. The small settlement decided to deal with the huge dust content of country roads. In order to improve the situation, the authorities decided to spend money. However, either for lack of funding or for some other reason, an unknown contractor was hired. They did not check his documents or the means with which he decided to spray the roads.
For a small amount, he successfully completed the work entrusted to him. However, after a few years, the city completely died out. It turned out that the agent used by the contractor was dioxide. This is the strongest poison that causes mutations and a lot of serious diseases, as well as pestilence.
This is how the town was destroyed, as they say, with their own hands, due to a banal lack of finance. From it there were only dead houses and cracked asphalt.
Chaiten, Chile
The port town of Chaiten completely died out after the volcanic eruption that happened in May 2008.
The main thing is that the authorities managed to evacuate the population and save it from inevitable death. Despite the fact that the village is located deep in the mountains. It is worth saying that the volcanic eruption lasted from May to September 2008. The city was completely covered in ashes. Only 10% of the houses remain. Everything is covered with a thick layer of ash several meters high.
Namie, Japan
The catastrophe of our time, which happened in September 2013, shocked. In Japan, the Fukushima nuclear power plant exploded, turning a successful city with a huge population into an abandoned one.
A great misfortune struck all countries of the world, since Japan has always been considered the most responsible and strict in its approach to electronics and inventions. However, the worst thing happened - a nuclear explosion.
Thus, the city overnight turned into an exclusion zone. No one is allowed to be on its territory, since the dose of radiation reaches unprecedented heights.
Video about the most abandoned cities
What ghost towns do you know? Let us know about them in the comments.
Ghost towns are scattered all over the planet and silently keep their secrets. The creations of human hands, abandoned by people, stand empty and silent for decades. They are not destroyed, they are simply abandoned - at one point people left them due to insurmountable reasons. This could be due to the threat natural disaster, man-made disaster, war or economic crisis.
This list contains the most famous ghost towns in the world!
1 Pripyat, Ukraine
Perhaps the most famous ghost town is Pripyat. This city in Ukraine is relatively young - it was built in 1970. In 1986, about 50 thousand people lived there, the first park was opened, and the infrastructure was actively developed. And one day - April 26, 1986, the city was evacuated due to an accident on Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Until now, this city is full of radiation, so excursions and groups of stalkers enter its territory only occasionally.
2 Gunkanjima, Japan
Hashima Island in the East China Sea, nicknamed Gunkanjima (cruiser), in early XIX century was an ordinary rock near Nagasaki. Coal was discovered there, so the Japanese artificially built the island and began to develop the deposit. The city was the most densely populated place on the entire planet - on an area of 0.063 square meters. m. lived more than 5 thousand people! The peak of activity was reached in the middle of the 20th century, and in 1974 the mines were completely closed, and the city became a ghost.
3 Kolmanskop, Namibia
The history of this city began in 1908, when one of the railway workers discovered diamonds in the southern part of the Namib Desert. The deposit was handed over to August Strauch, who built a German town on this site with a hospital, schools and a stadium. But the diamond reserves dried up after a couple of years, and people faced terrible conditions. The city was constantly bombarded with sandstorms, there was no water and communication with the world. In 1954, the last inhabitants left the city, and it was left standing in the middle of the desert.
4 Famagusta, Cyprus
In the 1970s, the city of Famagusta was the tourist center of Cyprus. It was especially famous, it housed many hotels and hotels that were visited by celebrities from all over the world. In 1975, the Turkish army invaded Famagusta and drove the Greeks out of their homes. The Varosha quarter has become a ghost town, because according to the UN resolution of 1984, only its residents can return to it. At the moment, this huge tourist area of the city is slowly being absorbed by nature.
5 Kilamba, Angola
Cities don't always become ghosts because they've been abandoned. Some cities were never settled, for example, the huge city of Nova Cidid de Kilamba near the capital of Angola. It is designed for 500,000 people, and more than $3 billion has been spent on construction. In 2012, the city slowly began to be populated, but in fact it still remains a ghost. Among the inhabitants of Angola, there are few representatives of the middle class who could afford such expensive housing. At the moment, there is only one school in which people carry children from afar.
6 Tawarga, Libya
Ghost town in Libya was abandoned local residents in 2011 due to the genocide. The rebels began a real persecution of the indigenous peoples of Tavarga, which was once founded by the descendants of black slaves. In addition, this city was under the patronage of the Gaddafi regime, so the rebels ruthlessly destroyed the population - 1,300 people are still considered missing. Nearly 30,000 people have left the city and still cannot return to their homes. The Libyan government cannot provide them with security and protection from bullying.
7 Kayakoy, Turkey
The Turkish village of Kayakoy has a rich history, but that hasn't stopped it from becoming a ghost. It was founded in the 19th century by the Greek community and had a developed infrastructure. But in the 1920s, the Greeks were forced to leave the places belonging to the Turks, so the villagers just left overnight. In addition, in 1957, a strong earthquake destroyed the last islands of civilization in Kayakoy.
8 Sanzhi, Taiwan
This city can hardly be called a ghost, since in 2008 it was decided to demolish it. Unfortunately, it belongs to those buildings where people have never settled. In 1975, it was decided to build an unusual complex of houses in the form of UFO saucers. They were built from fiberglass and concrete, taking into account the latest technology. However, in the 1980s, when the complex was almost completed, a crisis began in Asia, which led to a freeze on construction. The alien houses were abandoned, and Taiwan decided to demolish them in order to build a park on this site.
9 Oradour-sur-Glane, France
This village in France received the title of a martyr city. Today, it still stands as a silent reminder of the atrocities of the war, and a new town of the same name has been built nearby. Oradour in 1944 was inhabited by French partisans who captured a German officer. In retaliation, the SS killed all the inhabitants of the village - 205 children, 240 women and 197 men. Since then, the city has been a memorial center.
10 Kadykchan, Russia
One of the most famous abandoned cities in Russia is Kadykchan. It is located in the Magadan region, and was completely abandoned by people in the early 2000s. The city was built in the middle of the 20th century near a coal deposit, but after an explosion in 1996, the mine was closed. The residents of the village began to be slowly resettled, and in 2001 the houses were completely disconnected from electricity.
Paris is not only in France, but also in China, however, it is very small. The construction of the city of Tianducheng began in 2007, then in China there was a fashion for copies of European sights. There is the Eiffel Tower, three times smaller than the original, the Arc de Triomphe and the Park of Versailles. However, housing here is so expensive that the city has practically remained a ghost - despite the splendor, no one lives in Tianducheng.
All these cities are completely deserted, so they gradually fall into disrepair, and nature wins back its territory, covering the gray buildings with lush greenery.
Ghost towns of Russia are scattered throughout the territory. Each of them has its own history, but the end is the same - all remained abandoned by the population. Empty houses still retain the imprint of human presence, in some you can see abandoned household items, already covered with dust and dilapidated from the past time. They look so gloomy that you can shoot a horror movie. However, this is what they usually come here for.
New life of ghost towns in Russia
Despite the fact that cities are left abandoned for various reasons, they are often visited. In some settlements, the military organize training grounds. Dilapidated buildings, as well as empty streets, are good to use to recreate extreme living conditions without the risk of civilian involvement.
Artists, photographers and representatives of the film world find a special flavor in abandoned buildings. For some, such cities are a source of inspiration, for others - a canvas for creativity. Photos of dead cities can be easily found in different versions, which confirms their popularity among creative people. In addition, modern tourists find abandoned cities curious. Here you can plunge into a different side of life, there is something mystical and creepy in lonely buildings.
List of known empty settlements
There are quite a few ghost towns in Russia. Usually such a fate awaits small settlements, in which residents are mainly employed in one enterprise, the key to the city. What was the reason for the mass relocation of residents from their homes?
- Kadykchan. The city was built by prisoners during the Second World War. It is located next to coal deposits, so most of the population was involved in the work at the mine. In 1996, there was an explosion that killed 6 people. It was not part of the plans to restore mining, the residents received compensation amounts for resettlement to new places. In order for the city to cease to exist, the supply of electricity and water was turned off, and the private sector was burned. For some time, two streets remained inhabited, today only one elderly man lives in Kadykchan.
- Neftegorsk. Until 1970 the city was called Vostok. Its number slightly exceeded 3,000 people, most of whom were employed in the oil industry. In 1995, there was a strong earthquake: most of the buildings collapsed, and almost the entire population was under the ruins. The survivors were resettled, and Neftegorsk remained a ghost town of Russia.
- Mologa. The city is located in the Yaroslavl region and has existed since the 12th century. It used to be big shopping center, but by the beginning of the 20th century its population did not exceed 5,000 people. The government of the USSR in 1935 decided to flood the city in order to successfully build a hydroelectric complex near Rybinsk. People were evicted by force and in the shortest possible time. Today, ghostly buildings can be seen twice a year when the water level drops.
There are many cities with a similar fate in Russia. In some, a tragedy occurred at the enterprise, for example, in Industrial, in others, the mineral deposit simply dried up, as in Staraya Gubakha, Iultin and Amderma.
Young people left Charonda year after year, as a result of which the city eventually died out completely. Many military settlements simply ceased to exist on orders from above, the inhabitants moved to new places, leaving their homes. It is believed that there are such ghosts in every region, but little is known about most of them.