PUBLIC MARKS from gregg with tag "ghost cities"

Atlas Obscura is the definitive guide to the world's wondrous and curious places.

An interactive look at the growth, decline, and revival of the city of Detroit through historic and present-day pictures.

The 38 Most Haunting Abandoned Places On Earth.

Pyramiden, the former Soviet coal town in Svalbard with the most northern Lenin-monument of the world, was for almost 80 years the communist advance guard in the capitalist abroad. Ceded by Norway in 1920, confirmed in a special agreement, about 1.000 workers mined coal in the short summers and long winters in the middle of the Arctic Ocean. They were compensated by relatively luxurious living conditions. With the collapse of Communism, the end of Pyramiden began. Nowadays the town is a stony monument for the decline of the Soviet Union and is rediscovered by tourists, exploited by junk dealers and resettled by polar bears, arctic foxes and sea gulls.

If you were committed to a psychiatric institution, unsure if you’d ever return to the life you knew before, what would you take with you? That sobering question hovers like an apparition over each of the Willard Asylum suitcases.

Asylum: Inside the Haunting World of 19th-Century Mental Hospitals

In 1995, the city of Plymouth on the island of Montserrat was evacuated and an exclusion zone was set up because of an impending volcano eruption. In 1997, the volcano erupted burying the city in 40 feet of ash. Ever since, residents have been banned from coming back. Here are some pretty crazy pictures inside Montserrat's exclusion zone, one of only a handful of exclusion zones in the world