8.
LA’S DESERTED UNDERGROUND TUNNELS
It’s probably safe to assume that not many people spend much time thinking about subterranean
infrastructure.
In fact, many towns and small cities operate mainly above-ground.
But in some places, entire networks of tunnels were built to keep things running smoothly
– or secretively.
And, just like any other type of building, many have been abandoned over the years.
In many cases, these labyrinths functioned as a space-saving mechanism in crowded cities
that lack space on ground-level.
In the 1920s, the city of Los Angeles built a subway system that serviced hundreds of
trolley cars daily, even as competition from the automobile became an ever-present looming
threat.
Ridership peaked during World War II, but the city’s five subway lines were all retired
by 1955 and replaced with a street-level bus system.
Parts of the abandoned tunnels were filled in, but most of them still sit, unused, beneath
the LA streets.
They represent just a portion of the city’s dark, dirty, and forgotten underground passageways,
including 11 miles (17.7 km) of service tunnels that housed several basement speakeasies during
the Prohibition era.
LA’s tunnels have also reportedly been used for transporting large sums of money and shuttling
high-profile criminals to court.
One of these labyrinthine networks is rumored to be accessible via an easy-to-miss elevator
behind the city’s Hall of Records building.
Inside, visitors can expect to encounter long, dimly-lit passageways filled with iron gates,
old machinery, large mysterious chutes, random (and sometimes overturned) office furniture,
and boxes that appear to contain paperwork.
Honestly, there’s not much going on in the tunnels beneath Los Angeles today, but the
city is as busy as ever above-ground.
And it’s for this exact reason that these networks give off the wildly deceptive impression
of a forgotten city whose golden era is long over.
7.
TRENTON PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL
Opened in 1848, the New Jersey State Lunatic Asylum was New Jersey’s first public mental
hospital.
It was founded by Dorothea Dix, an advocate for the mentally ill, but the hospital turned
into a house of horrors after Dr. Henry Cotton took over as the new medical director.
Believing that untreated syphilis infections were the source of mental illness, he made
it customary to mutilate patients through needless surgeries.
Dr. Cotton also removed patients’ teeth, parts of the stomach, the gallbladder, and
other organs and body parts.
He claimed that these procedures had an 85 percent cure rate, which is obviously questionable
in hindsight, especially since many patients died under his care.
Nevertheless, Dr. Cotton’s practices remained in place into the 1960s, decades after he
passed away.
When the hospital finally stopped these brutal treatment methods, several of its wings were
abandoned and left to decay.
Part of the site is still in use, and it remains controversial to this day, although the problems
have less to do with the doctors and revolve mainly around patient-on-patient violence.
The deserted sections of the hospital are in disarray.
Old, broken, and dirty furniture fills the rooms, paint is peeling from the walls, and
graffiti is scrawled on the walls and fixtures of a dark auditorium.
Floors are scattered with artwork, computers, personal belongings, old ceiling tiles, an
old piano, and medical equipment, including stretchers, walkers, blood transfusion supplies,
and wheelchairs.
There are signs on the doors reminding staff to keep them locked at all times and piles
of boxes filled with old paperwork.
Now known as the Trenton Psychiatric Hospital, the dilapidated facility is one of the few
abandoned asylums in New Jersey that haven’t been torn down.
It’s closed to the public, but those who are curious can take a virtual tour courtesy
of an Abandoned New Jersey documentary featuring the hospital.
6.
MUSLYUMOVO
The 1986 nuclear accident at the Chernobyl power plant went down in history as the world’s
worst nuclear disaster.
It’s so famous that its popularity overshadows another major nuclear incident that happened
in Siberia 29 years earlier.
During the 1950s, one of Russia's biggest dumping grounds for radioactive materials
could be found along the banks of the Techa River in the Ural Mountains.
Between 1949 and 1956, the Mayak nuclear complex dumped billions of cubic feet of waste into
the river.
Then, in 1957, a load of highly toxic waste exploded at Mayak, releasing copious amounts
of radioactivity into the air.
The Soviet government kept the incident quiet, which was pretty easy to do since the remote
facility was kept secret from the public.
As many as 270,000 people were affected, but the authorities didn’t bother to tell most
of them.
Some residents were moved right away, while others were simply left to carry on with their
lives as usual.
It wasn’t until the collapse of the Soviet Union during the 1990s that the gravity of
the disaster became widely known.
In 2009 – more than 50 years after the accident – residents of the hardest-hit village,
Muslyumovo, were given the choice to either relocate or receive a $30,000 payout.
But many who chose the payout never received it, while others were swindled by crooked
real estate agents.
Villagers who opted to relocate were moved just a mile down the road.
Their new village, Novomuslyumovo, is well within the contamination zone.
Most of the homes in the old village were destroyed, while others were disassembled
and moved to the new village.
But some buildings remain, including an abandoned school.
In fact, not everyone has left Muslyumovo.
A handful of residents, mostly belonging to the Tatar ethnic group, are stuck living in
what’s left of the community because they allegedly lack the proper documents to qualify
for help with relocating.
The nuclear plant still operates today, and many believe that it continues to dump hazardous
waste into the river.
Residents of both the new and old Muslyumovo are plagued by health problems from the radiation.
When Radio Free Europe journalists visited the area and snapped photos, they were confronted
by police.
It seems as though the government remains intent on keeping the far-reaching effects
of the disaster as quiet as possible.
5.
RIVER COUNTRY WATER PARK
As many as 30 million guests visit Walt Disney theme parks each year.
With the exception of a months-long closure amid the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, these
amusement parks are almost never empty.
So it’s hard to imagine what they would look like in a post-apocalyptic world.
But if you’ve visited the Contemporary Resort or ridden the Space Mountain roller coaster
at Walt Disney World in Orlando, perhaps you caught a glimpse of a nearby abandoned and
overgrown water park.
River Country was Disney’s first water park.
It opened in 1976 and was in business for 25 years before shuttering its doors in 2001.
The park closed simply because it was losing business to Disney’s newer water parks and
evidently wasn’t worth keeping open.
It didn’t take long for nature to reclaim the deserted slides, bridges, and other fixtures
at River Country.
Vines wrapped themselves around signs, dead trees fell onto water slides, and vegetation
grew on walkways and staircases.
Trespassing onto the site came with major risks, including a lifetime ban from Disney
theme parks, so most people only caught a glimpse of River Country from afar before
it was demolished in recent years.
But a few photographers managed to access the decaying water park while it was still
there and captured snapshots of the eerily dismal, moss-covered ruins.
4.
SALTON SEA RESORTS & BEACHES
The Salton Sea is a saline lake in southern California that has dried up and reappeared
several times.
Measuring 35 by 15 miles (56 x 24 km), the current body of water was formed in 1905,
when flooding from the Colorado River broke through a canal gate.
By the time repairs were made two years later, the Salton Basin was filled with water for
the first time since the 16th century.
It became a popular holiday destination during the 1950s and ‘60s.
Hotels, resorts, and vacation homes popped up along the lake’s eastern and western
shores.
But business owners and visitors were blissfully unaware that the Salton Sea was not there
to stay.
It exists as part of a cycle that repeats every 400 to 500 years, and will eventually
disappear.
This starts to happen when the sea’s freshwater source runs dry.
There’s also no drainage outlet.
These conditions increase the water’s saline levels and cause it to evaporate.
The first signs of trouble in the Salton Sea appeared during the 1970s, when pollution
from agricultural runoff killed entire animal populations, spread diseases, and made the
salty environment even less hospitable to wildlife.
In the meantime, farmers began to use water more efficiently, leading to less runoff into
the lake.
Increasing amounts of hazardous dust got blown into the air as more of the seabed became
exposed.
No vacationer wants to breathe toxic air, hang out on a beach where hundreds of dead
fish routinely wash ashore, or swim in heavily polluted water that smells like rotten eggs.
Tourists stopped coming to the Salton Sea, residents moved away, and the once-bustling
neighborhoods and resorts became like ghost towns.
Many of these summery, pastel-colored buildings are still there today, acting as a sad reminder
of the region’s bygone glory days.
Weathered resort signs, broken-down vintage cars, deserted campers and boats, and empty,
graffiti-covered swimming pools that once sat just feet from the water stand helplessly
as the shoreline gets further and further away.
The shrinking sea is no longer safe for swimming, boating, or fishing – although there are
barely any fish living in it at this point – and has created one of the biggest public
health and environmental emergencies in modern history.
3.
TEXOLA
The arrival of Route 66 brought prosperity to many of America’s small towns.
But the construction of new interstate highways bypassed many of these places, leaving them
struggling, and in some cases, abandoned entirely.
One such town, known as Texola, is in western Oklahoma.
It was originally a farm town, but the tourism that came along with Route 66 soon became
a cornerstone of the local economy.
During its heyday, Texola’s population peaked at nearly 600 residents.
But the catastrophic Dust Bowl period during the 1930s and the arrival of the nearby I-40
in the early 1970s drove people to move elsewhere in search of better prospects.
By 1980, the population fell to 100, and today there are now only a few dozen residents still
living there.
While it hasn’t quite achieved “ghost town” status, Texola certainly resembles
a ghost town.
It’s filled with abandoned historic buildings, including an old gas station, a one-cell jail
with a vintage truck parked outside, and numerous homes, bars, and restaurants that stand eerily
empty.
The town is also home to the Tumbleweed Grill and Country Store – it’s the oldest operating
restaurant along Route 66.
Texola is just one of many similar towns that the historic road passes through.
Some say that driving Route 66 is like stepping back in time, while others compare it to a
post-apocalyptic wasteland.
There are even sections of the road that are unpaved, including the infamous Jericho Gap
in Texas, where travelers were known to get their vehicles stuck in the mud.
Locals were welcoming to the stranded tourists, who brought so much business to Jericho that
it could no longer survive after that section of the road was rerouted during the 1930s.
2.
TAWERGHA
Violence often forces residents to flee their town or city and complicates their ability
to return.
This is what happened to the 48,000 inhabitants of Tawergha, Libya who were displaced by civil
war in 2012.
They were uprooted by militias, who took control of the city and proceeded to destroy it in
an apparent attempt to stop anyone from coming back.
In the wake of an uprising that saw the ouster of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, the rebel
forces accused Tawergha’s residents of supporting the disgraced former leader.
A peace charter was signed in 2018, finally allowing residents to return to the city – or
what’s left of it, rather.
With no electricity, running water, or telecommunications and extremely limited education and medical
care, Tawergha’s infrastructure was devastated.
Many, if not most of its utility plants, hospitals, schools, homes, shops, and administrative
buildings were destroyed.
In addition to the physical damage, many residents chose not to return out of fear.
They dismissed the peace treaty as Muslim Brotherhood propaganda and worried that they
would be attacked if they went back to Tawergha.
As of mid-2021, less than 7,000 people had returned to Tawergha.
That number is suspected to be increasing, but the city reportedly remains mostly uninhabitable
and empty.
1.
IMBER
Located in a remote part of England’s Salisbury Plain, the small, isolated village of Imber
dates back to pre-Roman times.
From the beginning, the community was somewhat separated from the “outside world.”
Many of its residents were farmers, and the nearest market town was several miles away.
The population peaked at 440 during the 1850s.
Britain’s Ministry of Defence began slowly buying up the village during the 1890s.
In 1943, the government evicted the remaining 150 residents so it could use the property
for military training exercises.
They were given just 47 days to leave, but most people complied because they saw it as
their duty to help the war effort and because they were told that they could return within
six months.
But even after the conflict ended, villagers were banned from returning to Imber.
Many homes were destroyed, but several crumbling buildings remain, including a pub, a schoolhouse,
and a deserted military village.
The Ministry of Defence still uses the land for Army training, but the ghost village is
open to the public for 50 days every year, and the St. Giles Church is occasionally open
for services.
It’s the only remaining intact building, thanks to the Churches Conservation Trust,
a nonprofit dedicated to preserving England’s historic churches.
An extensive restoration effort and regular maintenance have left it looking strangely
out-of-place against the backdrop of visibly decrepit structures that fill the rest of
Imber.
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