What Abandoned Places Teach Us

With Halloween around the corner, an article by Taylor Markarian in Reader’s Digest highlights 35 “creepy abandoned cities and ghost towns” that often serve as a lesson in human hubris, overreach, or planning failures.

As Markarian notes, “Places are abandoned for all sorts of reasons—economic collapse, regime change, sickness, war and natural disaster—and each set of ruins tells its own fascinating story.” In many cases, urban legends and ghost stories pop up to retroactively explain why a place was abandoned to ruin, but a more mundane explanation will often suffice.

Among the abandoned sites listed, which include Old West ghost towns and forts suspended above the Atlantic Ocean, are:

• Centralia, Pennsylvania, where an underground coal fire has been mysteriously burning since 1962.
• A Ukrainian city abandoned after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
• Alabama’s first state capital, abandoned because of repeated flooding and war.
• A Chinese ghost town that replicates Paris, France.
• A Middle Eastern settlement suddenly abandoned by its residents.

See the source article for the full list and some striking photos.