1. Nome’s Dark History: Nome, Alaska
Nome, Alaska, sits on the Bering Sea coast at the edge of the continent, and its history earns the description of dark and unsettling. The city grew from a gold rush boomtown in 1900, when 20,000 people flooded onto the frozen tundra in search of gold. What they built and what they left behind have been slowly reclaimed by the subarctic landscape, leaving Nome with a visual texture of abandonment that’s hard to find anywhere else in the country.
The missing-persons cases attached to the region have added a modern layer of unease atop the historical one. The combination of remote location, extreme climate, and layered history produces a place that rewards slow attention. The drive into Nome from the surrounding tundra, with abandoned mining equipment rusting in the permafrost, starts the experience before you reach the city.
2. Kennecott Ghost Town: McCarthy, Alaska
If Nome is the unsettling version of Alaskan abandonment, Kennecott is the spectacular one. This bone-chilling abandoned ghost town sits deep in the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, accessible only by a 60-mile dirt road that terminates at the edge of the Kennicott Glacier.
The copper mining operation here ran from 1903 to 1938 and left behind a cluster of red-painted industrial buildings clinging to the mountainside above the glacier. The scale and preservation are both extraordinary. The Kennecott Mines National Historic Landmark protects the buildings, which means the decay has been arrested enough to walk through them without restoring them to something that no longer looks abandoned. The approach road through the Wrangell Mountains adds an additional hour of scenery that prepares you for what’s coming.
3. The Historic Decline: Gary, Indiana
Gary, Indiana, was once one of America’s most powerful cities. Founded in 1906 by U.S. Steel and named after the company’s chairman, it boomed through the mid-20th century as a steel industry powerhouse – a city of nearly 180,000 people at its peak, flush with jobs, families, and ambition. Then the steel industry collapsed. By the 1980s, the exodus had begun, and it never really stopped.
Over the years, Gary became infamous for its thousands of abandoned buildings and structures. While massive demolition initiatives have begun clearing the blight, large swaths of the city remain frozen in time, slowly being reclaimed by nature. Pro tip: get a permit to photograph the abandoned classrooms and churches in town.
4. The Abandoned Melrose Resort: South Carolina
On Daufuskie Island, a South Carolina barrier island accessible only by ferry, the Melrose Resort stands as one of the state’s most haunting abandoned landmarks. Built in 1987 with two championship golf courses (one designed by Jack Nicklaus), a 50-room inn, a beach club, and hundreds of acres of coastal property, it ran smoothly for roughly 15 years before a 2001 ownership change set its downfall in motion.
The new developer borrowed over $17 million to purchase the property and raised another $10 million from private investors by promising strong returns-returns that never materialized. The FBI and IRS launched an investigation, and the developer ultimately pled guilty to wire and tax fraud in what amounted to a Ponzi scheme. Bankruptcy followed in 2009, Hurricane Matthew battered what remained in 2016, and today the resort sits in dramatic decay: lobby floors are pooled with standing water, a ballroom is stripped of its ceiling, and a golf pro shop is partially swept away by wind and weather.
The property has since been listed for sale and gone under contract, but legal disputes over ferry access to the island’s dock have continued to stall any revival – leaving Melrose in limbo, slowly surrendering to the salt air and sea.
5. Sea Breeze: An Abandoned Beach Town in New Jersey
Sea Breeze, a former resort town tucked along the Delaware Bay in Cumberland County, New Jersey, had a run of bad luck that would be hard to invent. The community first gained a following in the late 1880s, when ferry service from Philadelphia brought tourists to its bayfront shores, and a 40-room hotel was built in 1887 to meet the demand. That hotel burned down in 1890. A second hotel replaced it, reportedly served drinks through Prohibition, and burned down in 1940. Hurricane Gloria took out the Sea Breeze Tavern in 1985, a beloved local spot that had operated under the same family’s ownership since it opened.
Floods, fires, and EPA demolitions claimed most of what was left, and the remaining residents eventually sold their properties to the state’s Department of Environmental Protection. Today the land is partly a wildlife refuge, the beach is still accessible, and a few people make the trip out for the sunsets and the solitude. Just know you’re about three miles from the nearest sign of civilization, and the area still floods.
6. Florida’s Abandoned Town: Hillside Estates
This entire abandoned Florida neighborhood community seemed to have evaporated almost overnight. The mass exodus from the housing development known as Hillside Estates in Brooksville, Florida, was caused by the greed and corruption of the housing board, leaving behind an entire village of untouched homes and buildings.
Hillside Estates was specifically a public housing project run by the local housing authority, who misused funds, leaving the community unable to keep up with repairs and maintenance. Sadly, residents of the community were forcibly moved out over the course of just 90 days in 2012.
7. Infamous Cult Compound Ruins: Texas
Thirty years after it burned to the ground, the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco, Texas, still draws visitors looking to reckon with one of the most tragic standoffs in American history. The 51-day siege between cult members and federal law enforcement ended on April 19, 1993, when the entire compound went up in flames, killing roughly 80 people, including leader David Koresh and at least 22 children. Four ATF agents also died in the gunfight that kicked everything off.
Today, if the gates are open, you can drive in (a $ 10-per-car donation is suggested) and walk through a site that’s equal parts memorial and time capsule. The swimming pool, which was being converted into a bunker when the standoff began, is the only major structure still standing intact. Dual memorials honor both the cult members and the fallen agents, a chapel now serves as a visitor center, and trees have been planted for each of the victims. Caretakers aren’t always on site, but if you catch one, they may share historic photos and documents that rarely see the light of day.
8. Freetown State Forest: Freetown, Massachusetts
Freetown State Forest in southeastern Massachusetts sits inside what paranormal researchers call the Bridgewater Triangle, and its reputation as one of the state’s most unsettling places is built on more than folklore. The documented history alone is grim: a 15-year-old girl’s body was found tied to a tree in 1978, three additional murders occurred in the forest between 1987 and 2001, and investigators looking into a 1980 killing were approached by locals reporting Satanic cult activity in the woods.
Animal carcasses and blood-stained clearings added weight to those claims. The supernatural layer is just as dense, with reported UFO sightings, mysterious orbs, Pukwudgie sightings from Wampanoag tradition, and even an account from President Ronald Reagan of strange lights in the sky overhead. With more than 50 miles of trails, it’s genuinely beautiful to hike in daylight. After dark is a different calculation.
9. Underwater Ghost Town: Virginia
Virginia’s Smith Mountain Lake hides more than just scenic views. Beneath its surface, legend has it, lies the underwater ghost town of Monroe. Monroe was founded in 1818 by Abner Anthony and vanished from tax records by 1869, and likely went underwater for good when Appalachian Power built a dam and the lake began filling in 1963.
No one can fully prove or disprove Monroe’s existence, but scuba divers have spotted a submerged bridge in the murky depths, and the sheer volume of underwater timber points to a past that’s still down there somewhere. The local legend lives on at Sunken City Brewing Company in nearby Hardy, named in its honor. Whether Monroe is a bona fide ghost town or a particularly compelling piece of Virginia folklore, the mystery is very much alive.
10. The Ghost Town of Portal: Nebraska
In Sarpy County, Nebraska, a grim piece of local folklore has attached itself to an otherwise unremarkable bridge. The legend centers on a one-room schoolhouse that once stood in the ghost town of Portal, where a teacher in the early 1900s allegedly snapped without warning and murdered every student in the building with a hatchet. Some versions of the story include decapitation; every version agrees she cut out each child’s heart and threw them from the nearby bridge to hide what she’d done.
No historical record of any such massacre exists, but that hasn’t stopped people from reporting strange sounds and sightings near what locals now call Heartbeat Bridge, named for the rhythmic thumping visitors claim to hear when crossing it at night. The schoolhouse itself has since been relocated to Papillion, where it serves as a field trip destination, though the legend followed the bridge and never left.