Sanjhih

It's futuristic. It's haunted. It's abandoned. It's the pod-town in Taiwan. More pictures here.

Ani, City of a Thousand and One Churches

Ani is a medieval ghost town on the borders of Turkey and Armenia. Now a military zone between enemy states, it used to be a city that rivalled Istanbul, Baghdad and Cairo. Peruse the ruins of Ani.

Un Lun Dun

London used to be creepily charming. Much has changed. Or maybe not.

Detroit In Ruins

Detroit is slowly dying. Watch it suffer after the space warp.

London, Thy Name is Vanity

Blither about how the image was generated.

(Almost) Nobody lives in Kadykchan

Kadykchan was a tin-mining community before the colapse of the Soviet Union and a mining accident that killed some people. A town of around 10,000 people now barely reaches 300.

More heebie-jeebies-giving pictures after the jump.

Centralia, Pennsylvania (or Amputating Route 61)

Centralia is a ghost town. Isn't that a strange phrase? It surreptitiously makes the admition that it once was alive. A living, breathing organism functioning on a level of self-organisation different than ours. Centralia was built around, if not literally then certainly metaphoricaly, a coal mine.
Around a century after the town was born, a fire started which lit one of the coal veins on fire. Underground. I don't know about you but I think there's something primevally spooky about an underground fire.
The fire burned for twenty years before finally opening a gaping chasm right under a frollicking child which was only saved due to extremely fortuitous circumstances. That, as they say, was the final straw. It was decided that everyone should and would be relocated. All three thousand of the residents. It took forty-two million dollars to do that.
However, some of the residents decided to stay, now technically squatters in their own family houses.

Saint Dymphna, mother of Gheel

Occasionally, and it usually happens when I start losing hope for the human race, something happens or I find out something which makes me happy to be a member of this species. The same thing happened when I found out about Gheel. Gheel is a village in Antwerp, Belgium where instead of institutionalising mentally ill people, they integrate them. So, rather than locking them away where they can't see them, they treat these people as the equals that they are. Enlighten yourselves here and here.