Abandoned Places

Beneath our feet lie entire worlds that were once bustling with life—and then abandoned to darkness. We're descending into six underground cities you can actually explore today, from Turkey's multi-level Derinkuyu to the frozen Soviet mining town of Pyramiden's tunnel system. Grab your headlamp and join us as we rank these subterranean ghost towns by their eerie preservation and historical significance.

For a few hours on April 27, 1986, the children of Pripyat finally got to ride the bright yellow ferris wheel they'd watched being built for months—a final moment of joy before evacuation. Now it stands as the most haunting symbol of Chernobyl, forever unfinished. We explore the untold story of this single abandoned ride and the lives it never got to touch.

In the 1920s, Henry Ford carved two American-style towns deep in the Amazon jungle to fuel his tire empire. Today, both Fordlândia and Jaguari stand as eerie monuments to industrial hubris, where Art Deco water towers rust beside strangler figs and the rainforest slowly devours what Ford once called the future.

From a hurricane-ravaged Six Flags to a dystopian wonderland in Berlin, these forsaken fun zones tell stories of bankruptcy, disaster, and changing times. Join us as we explore rusting roller coasters, overgrown carousels, and Ferris wheels that will never turn again—each one a haunting monument to abandoned joy.

In 1908, a railway worker found a diamond sparkling in the Namib Desert sand, sparking a rush that built Kolmanskop into an impossibly luxurious town with a bowling alley, ballroom, and the first X-ray machine in the southern hemisphere. Today, sand pours through shattered windows and fills ornate rooms waist-deep, creating one of the world's most haunting and photogenic ghost towns. We explore how extreme wealth and harsh desert combined to create—and destroy—this surreal settlement.

When radiation forces entire cities into silence, what remains? We explore the eerie parallels and stark differences between Pripyat's frozen Soviet time capsule and Fukushima's modern Japanese ghost towns—from their disaster timelines to how nature and government policies have shaped these forbidden landscapes decades apart.

From ivy-strangled treatment rooms to forests growing through shattered skylights, these former mental institutions tell a dual story of forgotten patients and nature's unstoppable return. We're counting down five asylums where the boundary between human architecture and wild overgrowth has completely dissolved, creating some of the most haunting abandoned spaces on Earth.

Once home to over 5,000 people crammed into concrete high-rises on a facility smaller than a city block, Hashima Island was the most densely populated place on Earth. Then, in 1974, the coal ran out and every resident left within months, leaving behind a perfectly preserved snapshot of 1970s Japanese industrial life that has been slowly crumbling into the sea for fifty years.

Where we came from.

These power houses built our nation.