Urban explorers and photographers have a tendency to keep exact locations a secret, but somewhere in Spain lies a porcelain doll factory that was abandoned decades ago. The business was dropped in a hurry, it seems, as many half-made dolls and doll-making equipment was left behind to decay. See a collection of photographs from inside, and read about the history of the porcelain doll business at Environmental Graffiti. Link

(Image source: Abandonalia)

Gedi is an abandoned city in Kenya that had a stone palace, several stone homes, and a mosque, with features such as a water system that put medieval Europe to shame. Relics from Europe and Asia have been found there, indicating global trade. The city had a population as high as 3,000 people at its height in the 13th century. But for some reason, the residents left and no one has lived there for hundreds of years. See lots more pictures of Gedi at Kuriositas. Link -via the Presurfer

(Image credit: Flickr user Viaggi Spensierati)

Lil’ Drac is a baby short-tailed fruit bat that was taken in to raise by hand when his mother was too stressed to care for him. He’s about the size of your thumb, and as cute as a baby bat can be. Read Lil’ Drac’s story at Bat World Sanctuary. Link -via HuffPo

All over the world, cities are cutting budgets, and zoos are often high on the hit list. The result is often abandoned facilities that cost too much to tear down. Thanks to urban explorers who are also photographers, we get to see these formerly fine facilities in their decaying abandoned states. Let’s just hope all the animals have a better place to live now. Pictured here is the zoo in Charleroi, Belgium, which was a victim of recessions that affected the entire city. See the rest at Environmental Graffiti. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Peter Van den Bossche)

You would think that Japan’s overpopulation problems would force them to hang on to every bit of inhabitable land they own, but these images show otherwise. Hashima Island, nicknamed Ghost Island, was abandoned entirely after the mine which had been running for over 80 years was closed in 1974.

The black and white photos add a sense of despair to the abandoned cityscape, and although Hashima Island has been covered before here on Neatorama, I think the beautiful photographs in this gallery warrant a second look.

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A monument to communism sits in the middle of Bulgaria in Buzludzha National Park. Like many oversize Soviet-era constructions, it is falling into ruin. But what’s amazing about this building is that it is only 30 years old! Kuriositas has a look inside at the once-glorious architecture with its massive propaganda artwork and the poor condition it has fallen into only ten years after its abandonment. Link

(Image credit: Wikipedia user Infobgv)

From the beaches of Thailand to the deserts of the U.S, for a variety of reasons, some very expensive vacation resorts were deemed a loss, and no longer worth the trouble of upkeep. Years later, the photographs fascinate by illustrating their falls from grace. Environmental Graffiti shows us places that were once luxurioius playgrounds for tourists and celebrities, but are now being reclaimed by nature. Shown is a resort in Famagusta, Cyprus, which was permanently emptied when Turkey invaded in 1974. Link

(Image credit: Julienbzh35)

Fans of abandoned places and urban exploration are in for a treat, with a look at an aircraft graveyard at Vozdvizhenka air base in the Primorsky Krai region of eastern Russia, just 40 miles from the Chinese border. There is no security to stop urban explorers, just the aircraft sitting unused, with grass growing under them and nature doing its best to reclaim the base. See more pictures at UrbanGhosts. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Maks Maydachenco)

On a hill called Teufelsberg (Devil’s Mountain) near Berlin, an abandoned facility complete with “radar domes” stands. It was once used as a listening station for the US to intercept Soviet communications, and then abandoned when West and East Berlin were reunited. It was built over top the remains of a Nazi war college. Exploring this station is difficult, as it is deteriorating. One of the dangers is an open 10-story elevator shaft! See a set of pictures at Environmental Graffiti. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Nate Bolt)

Photo Credit: Alexander Belenkiy

One of my favorite things is to come across abandoned buildings and do a little exploring–legally of course. If you like abandoned buildings, then English Russia has a good deal of items for you to peruse, from elaborate and abandoned houses in the Tagia to planetariums–this one in particular is being demolished–the last wooden planetarium in existence. It’s located in the city park of Penza, Russia and actually has some pretty nifty stuff in it, along with some pretty… um, shall we say interesting dioramas, plenty of cosmonaut history, and lots and lots of propaganda about Pluto being a planet and all (so last decade). Not somewhere I’d take the kiddies on a field trip, but interesting to rifle through.

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Abandoned places can be creepy. Morgues are always creepy to most people. Put them together, and you’ve got some really creepy places -and even more so when you know their history. Environmental Graffiti has a photo collection of abandoned morgues in hospitals, asylums, municipalities, military bases, and even this one from Ellis Island. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Vilseskogen)

Oh, how I wish these weren’t abandoned. Sanzhi Pod City in Sanzhi District, New Taipei City, Taiwan, looks like something straight out of the Jetsons. The complex of pod apartments was built in 1978… or, almost built. The funding went awry and now all that’s left are these futuristic-looking ruins. Retronaut has a great gallery of the place if you’d like to see more. Link

Image credit: Cypherone

The Mothball Fleet is the group of decommissioned Navy ships stored at Suisun Bay, just north of San Francisco. These ships served in conflicts going back to World War II, and now they are gradually being scrapped. Photographer Scott Haefner and friends managed to spend several days exploring and photographing these ships, despite security guards. Read about how they pulled off the caper, and see the collection of photos at Scott’s website. Link -via the Presurfer

Many cities and urban centers these days are discovering the increasing problem of figuring out what to do abandoned buildings and structures. As populations and industries change many large factories, apartment complexes and even theme parks are left as empty rusting hunks of man-made waste. One publishing company is trying to brainstorm a solution in an upcoming book.

The concept is the brainchild of Gregory Crawford, who recently launched a Kickstarter project in a bid to fund his book, Fall Apart Park, and a publishing company called The Afterwords Archive.  The project will offer creative transformation proposals for abandoned buildings and places, through a combination of fiction, non-fiction, journalism and photo-essays, while adopting re-purposed materials.

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Ransom Riggs of mental_floss takes a haunting tour through the history and current state of California’s Salton Sea. Music by Michael Picton.

There’s a plethora of T.V. shows out there that explore the creepiness of abandoned buildings, visiting them at the witching hour with night cams, trying to record ghostly spirits making an attempt to communicate with the living. But those same abandoned buildings can be quite gorgeous too. Photographer Matt Lambros has captured that beauty in a gallery of pictures – that’s the South Carolina State Hospital above. He’s also been exploring the abandoned Brooklyn’s Kings Theater for a documentary called After the Final Curtain.

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The Caribbean island of Montserrat once had its government and most of the island’s services centered in the small town of Plymouth. The community was evacuated in 1995 due to volcanic activity. In 1997, an eruption buried Plymouth under several feet of ash, rock, and lava. It has been an exclusion zone ever since, and no residents have returned. See a collection of 40 pictures of what’s left. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Nick Brooks)

Of all the forgotten and mysterious places in the Five Boroughs of New York City, few have histories as rich and interesting as that of North Brother Island. Situated in the Hell Gate, a particularly treacherous stretch of the East River, North Brother was home to the quarantine hospital that housed Typhoid Mary, was the final destination of the General Slocum during its tragic final voyage, and was the site of an experimental drug treatment program which failed due to corruption. Riverside Hospital, the name of the facility on the island throughout its various incarnations, treated everything from smallpox and leprosy to venereal disease and heroin addiction; after the Second World War, it housed soldiers who were studying under the GI bill. The entirety of the island has been abandoned since 1963; over a dozen buildings remain, in various states of disrepair.

The Kingston Lounge not only has more on the history of the island, but lots of pictures of the buildings in their process of decay. Link -via Breakfast Links

“The building’s sole inhabitants were a flock of pigeons that left behind what he estimates to be about 140 cubic yards of guano. There was no plumbing, and the electrical wiring was in shambles,” he said. Still, he knew he’d found his home. “I thought it would be a perfect clubhouse for me,” he said. “It’s probably a guy thing.” After a small number of visits he purchased the property for a little less than $100,000 and moved in the turn of the new millennium – January 1, 2000!

Yatzer has a fantastic gallery of the home, which Hurlbut renovated into a liveable space a mere two years later: Link (Photo: Robert Rausch of GAS Design Center/NY Times)

In pre-WWII Japan, the Emperor was still revered as a living deity and to look upon him was thought of as an immense privilege. Distribution of the Imperial Family Portraits was not compulsory and schools had to petition to the Ministry in order to receive one, which was usually granted on grounds of academic excellence. Because the official portraits were on loan from the Imperial Household Ministry, protecting the picture from harm was deemed of utmost importance. Having the picture lost or damaged, even from natural disasters like fires or earthquakes, was seen as such a serious failure of duty that there were incidents of school officials committing suicide in an act of repentance.

There are plenty of pictures of the house and contents, but Gakuran has many more photographs he did not publish because of the fine line between documenting history and invading the former occupant’s privacy. Link -via Metafilter

Skyscrapers are a huge investment to build, are placed on pricey urban real estate, and contain lots of rental space, so you might be surprised that any are completely unused. Some are victims of poor planning; others are abandoned when the area suffers financial decline. Some of the older towers are unsafe due to age or toxic materials. The building shown here is Michigan Central Station in Detroit, built in 1913. See twelve such empty buildings at Web Urbanist. Link -via Rue the Day

Johnston Atoll is a US territory covering about 50 square miles of islands in the remote Pacific Ocean. From 1934 to 2003, it was under the control of the US Navy and was used as launch site for nuclear testing and super-secret experimental aircraft and who knows what else. The base was abandoned when the atoll was turned over to the US Fish and Wildlife Service. See photographs from various phases of the base’s history at Urban Ghost Media. Link

(Image credit: Google Earth)

Before he became one of FBI’s Most Wanted Fugitives, Osama bin Laden was actually a frequent tourist to the United States, visiting family in Florida. Now, Osama’s family mansion lies empty as you can see in this fascinating post about abandoned homes of the world’s "super villains", over at Dark Roasted Blend:

This house was the residence of Bin Laden’s nephew in Florida. Osama was a frequent guest there. 17+ acres, 1.5 million dollars, built in the 1920s … Not much is known about the house itself. As for why is it abandoned: according to this source, the government flew the nephew and his family out right after 9/11 (or not). The house spent a few years on the market, but there were no taker

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Urban explorer Kyle Merriman, who brought us pictures of Nara Dreamland, has a new collection of photographs from an abandoned hospital in Tainan, Taiwan.

As we entered it was clear we weren’t the first visitors it had received. Prescription drugs, lay scattered across tables and floors, while others remained unopened. Broken syringes crunched underfoot and bottles of formaldehyde still kept their mysterious contents. The wind followed us inside, slamming random doors and causing the peeling wallpaper to dance. It was a spooky place to say the least.

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Kyle Merriman recently visited Nara Dreamland, the abandoned Disneyland knockoff theme park in Nara, Japan that was built in 1961 and closed in 2006. He found it to be fairly intact, except for the fact that there are no people there and the weeds have grown everywhere. See the state of the park in a gallery of 56 photographs. Link

Previously at Neatorama: Nara Dreamland, an Alternate Universe Disneyland

The coal-mining colony of Hashima Island off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan, is called the Battleship Island because of its high seawalls (doesn’t the photo above look like a battleship?). When oil replaced coal in the 1960s, Hashima fell into disuse and was abandoned, thus earning it another well-deserved nickname: The Ghost Island.

Dark Roasted Blend has a fascinating article about the island ruin:

Hashima is, for many ruin fans, the rotting and collapsing grail, the benchmark all other crumbling structures are measured against – and seeing pictures of the place it’s easy to see why. Not only is Hashima frighteningly preserved in some places, as if the residents had just stepped out as few minutes before, but it is also, contrarily, spectacularly falling down. Beyond its current awe-inspiring state of decay, the island’s dramatic isolation and its bizarre history make it the ruin of ruins.

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Considering the small population of the continent, Antarctica has a lot of abandoned settlements. In such extremely low temperatures, it is much easier to leave structures and possessions behind than to take them with you when you leave. Harsh conditions also preserve what is left, since bacteria and mold that break down materials elsewhere on earth can’t survive in Antarctica. Camps and settlements abandoned 100 years ago still sit, appearing just as they did when they were in use. The hut shown was left by Sir Ernest Shackleton in 1909. See and read about ten of these places at WebUrbanist. Link

(Image credit: Noah Stryker)

The largest shopping mall in the world is no longer the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota. The South China Mall near Guangzhou, China is twice as big! This is not a success story; there are only about a dozen stores open in the giant facility. However, because the mall is considered “too big to fail”, it is kept open with a staff working every day. The series POV tells the story in a 13 minute video. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by lord_yo.

We don’t know why abandoned places are so creepy, but they are. Here are 20 abandoned places in Europe that are a little too creepy for us to handle.

This was once the largest hemp and rope factory in Europe, dating back to 1840. A state-of-the-art water system facilitated steam- and water-powered machines through a labyrinth of tunnels that carried water throughout the complex. It was closed just over a decade ago…

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by yugosakimi.

Ever wonder what happens if a conjoined twin perishes while still attached to their sibling? In much the same way, Camilo Jose Vergaga explores the results of having one half of a building deserted while the other half remains inhabited.

In some cases, one half has undergone radical renovations and looks entirely different than its mate. In other cases, the old one has been cut from the new, leaving a lopsided half on its own. Sometimes the impacts cut deep as one half rots and and is filled with squatters while the other is maintained.

More than your typical urban decay images of abandoned places, this juxtaposition of occupied and unoccupied shows the stark before-and-after contrast – the then as well as the now, side by side in a way rarely seen.

In poor neighborhoods, when someone is taken to the hospital or otherwise leaves their home the neighbors and police tend not to watch out for the place in order to prevent problems. As the population of Camden continues to decrease these mismatched pairs only grow in number.

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Abandonments can be amazing to visit, but are all the more fascinating when they are located on the edges of the known world. One of the things that sets antarctic abandonments apart from other abandoned towns and cities is the fact that the remoteness of their location keeps them preserved like few places in populated regions ever are – providing a frozen-in-time (forgive the pun) picture of what life was like when their inhabitants left or perished in the cold.

Does Antarctica have the most ghosts of any continent? On a per capita basis, the answer is yes. While the South Pole and environs doesn’t have a permanent population, there are on average 2,500 people living there during the year — approximately 4000 in summer and 1000 incredibly hardy ones in winter (source). While no complete necrologies exists for the Antarctic, at least 268 people have died there since humanity first decided it was a good place to visit. So if the ghosts divvie the work evenly, each one only has to haunt 9.68992 inhabitants.

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Urbanist.

Photographer Kevin Bauman took exquisite photographs of 100 abandoned houses in Detroit, Michigan. He has managed to turn the economic crisis, in form of crumbling houses in various stages of disrepair, into an artwork.

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by algonkin.

Inspired by a scene of abandoned London in the zombie horror flick 28 Days Later, Ian Mansfield of IanVisits blog decided to bike down to London early Christmas morning and snap a few photos. This one above is of Piccadilly Circus, in London’s West End, completely devoid of humans.

Link | More at Ian’s Flickr photoset

While the South Pole and environs doesn’t have a permanent population, there are on average 2,500 people living there during the year — approximately 4000 in summer and 1000 incredibly hardy ones in winter (source). While no complete necrologies exists for the Antarctic, at least 268 people have died there since humanity first decided it was a good place to visit. So if the ghosts divvie the work evenly, each one only has to haunt 9.68992 inhabitants.

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