That's Spooky

I've written before about my fascination with remote, sparsely populated areas....
Pitcairn Island...Gay, Michigan...anywhere in Siberia -- I TOTALLY want to go there! Even more interesting to me, however, are places that have been abandoned. As a kid, my favorite episode of The Brady Bunch was the one where they find a ghost town. "How could they ever bring themselves to leave???" I wondered as the end credits rolled (I also wondered how Mike Brady, an ARCHITECT, could have been dumb enough to design a house for nine people that only included three bedrooms and two bathrooms -- clearly, this man was incompetent). I would have stayed in that ghost town, and claimed it for myself. I mean, think of it -- a place that USED TO have people, but is now empty! Like The Brady Bunch, that's creepy, intriguing, and stimulating in all the right ways.


I want to know the histories of such locations. Why would everyone just pack up and ditch their town? Sure, in the case of, say, Detroit, the answer is obvious...but what about well-to-do resort communities, or thriving industrial centers? Were the people forced out by their governments, or did they just all kind of slowly move away for economic reasons? Was there some kind of natural disaster that made life there no longer possible? Or, did a really annoying neighbor move in who made everyone else want to leave? There are lots of abandoned places in the world, and their stories are certainly worth investigating.

Well, thanks to Fark, I recently stumbled across a great website with a beautiful gallery of several abandoned cities. It can be found at DirJournal.com. Let's see, we've got some of the more famous ones -- like my old favorite, Pripyat Ukraine, which was abandoned after the Chernobyl disaster in the mid-80s...and then there's Centralia, Pennsylvania, the site of an underground coal mine fire that still burns to this day. Also on the list, though, are dozens that I've never heard of. Take this island in Japan. It was once a mining center with thousands of people, but was shut down in the 70s by its owner, the Mitsubishi Corporation:

And check out this Russian city. Its twelve thousand inhabitants were evacuated following a (you guessed it!) mining disaster in 1996:

Awesome. Now here's one that doesn't involve mining. It's in Azerbaijan. Thirty thousand people fled when war basically destroyed their city in the 90s:

And finally, the weirdest place on the list, Kowloon Walled City. Apparently, fifty thousand people lived in this incredibly-packed area of Hong Kong until the government forced everyone out in the 1980s. Sadly, I don't think it's still actually there (the authorities demolished it to make room for a Shoney's or something), but DirJournal's description of the place is fascinating:

And the site features many, many more! Amazing stuff, really, with pics all in stunning high-resolution. If you want to read a bit of obscure, somewhat morbid history, check it out. That's http://www.dirjournal.com/info/abandoned-places-in-the-world/ . Now have a nice weekend.

b.