No matter where you live, there's probably an abandoned building or two nearby.
While, in most cases, the reasons for the abandonment are mundane, once in awhile, the
story is far more interesting.
And creepy.
Here are the true stories behind these spooky abandoned places.
Doomed futurism
The famous abandoned "pod houses" of northern Taiwan reveal a vision of the future, 1970s-style.
Construction on the UFO-like abodes began in 1978; the plan was to use them for vacation
resorts on two sites on the coast off the East China Sea.
According to the Taipei Times, financial troubles and irreconcilable differences between co-owners
over the next decade ultimately doomed the on-again off-again project, which was halted
in 1989.
Rumors abound about the sites, including stories about a number of deaths during construction.
Another story is that there's an old Dutch graveyard under one of the pod sites.
Some also say a sculpture of a dragon—a symbol of luck—was partially destroyed to
improve road access during the initial build, cursing the land.
Regardless, the pod houses lay abandoned for three decades, accessed only by squatters,
ghost hunters, and the weather, before demolition work began in 2008 at one of the sites to
make way for a new resort.
An attic full of secrets
The "Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane" was built towards the end of the 19th century,
on the bank of Seneca Lake in upstate New York.
Despite the now-offensive name, the asylum reportedly offered so-called "moral treatment"
— meaning the patients were treated well, especially for the time.
Unfortunately, as with any place that attempts to look after severely ill people, there were
a lot of deaths.
It's estimated that around half of all the patients who arrived never left.
But that's not the creepiest part.
When the asylum was closed down in the '90s, workers made a discovery in the attic.
They found 400 suitcases, carefully wrapped and labeled, that had belonged to patients
who had died.
The average stay at Willard was 30 years, so staff packed a patient's possessions into
the suitcase they had arrived with and stored them in the attic, where they remained as
a time capsule for hundreds of forgotten lives.
Suicide Hotel
The Hotel del Salto sits on high cliffs overlooking the Bogota River in Columbia.
It was built in that spot in 1923, for the view it offered of the spectacular Tequendama
Falls nearby, and it was a popular destination for wealthy travelers for 60 years.
Unfortunately, pollution in the river became so bad that tourism dwindled, and the hotel
eventually closed in the 1990s and was left abandoned.
According to legend, the Falls was an important site for indigenous people during the Spanish
conquest of the 1530s.
Rather than submit to slavery, they chose to throw themselves off the falls and to their
death, in the belief that they would transform into an eagle on the way down and fly away.
After the Hotel del Salto closed, it reportedly became a popular spot for local people to
try it for themselves.
In 2013, the hotel was remodeled and converted into a museum.
Creepy tower, creepier hill
In an attempt to listen in on Soviet radio communications in Berlin during the cold war,
the U.S. built a "listening station" on top of a hill in a forest near the border.
It operated right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall, at which point it was abandoned.
What makes this abandoned site extra creepy is that the hill the listening station was
built on is not natural, but was in fact constructed from the remains of approximately 400,000
buildings from Berlin destroyed in the war.
The man-made hill was named Teufelsberg, or "Devil's Mountain."
All that rubble was dumped there to cover up the remains of a Nazi military school that
once occupied the site.
The Allies reportedly tried to destroy the facility by blowing it up, but it ended up
being easier to just bury the Nazi institution with an enormous pile of old rubble.
Massacre-turned-memorial
Located in the center of France, Oradour-sur-Glane was a vibrant little village for centuries.
That all changed following the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6th, 1944.
In an apparent response to attacks from the emboldened French resistance, on June 10th,
a Nazi SS panzer division entered the village and rounded up the residents.
At first, they claimed to be doing an identity check, but once the villagers were all collected,
they separated the women and children from the men and locked them in the church.
When the massacre was over, 642 men, women, and children lay dead.
The village was then ransacked and set on fire, and the SS left the next morning after
drinking more than 20 bottles of champagne.
After the war, the village ruins were left as a permanent monument to the atrocity — a
warning for future generations.