Abandoned haunted places in the USA make up a strange subgenre inside urban exploration. Half the iconic American ghost stories happen inside ruins that nobody owns anymore: a coal town on fire for sixty-three years, an asylum where a patient left her silhouette burned into the floor, a potter's field with a million unclaimed graves on it. The country has more abandoned hospitals, ghost towns, and decaying churches than any other on Earth, and a surprising number of them carry documented paranormal lore that predates the modern urbex era.
This list is strict. Every site below is still abandoned in 2026: no ticketed ghost hunts, no museum hours, no haunted attractions where you swipe a credit card at the gate. Just sixteen genuine ruins where the paranormal claims are anchored by real history, real deaths, and real records. Some you can walk into freely. Others will get you arrested. All of them have been catalogued by paranormal investigators, local historians, or both, and almost all sit on our interactive map with verified GPS.
What follows is a road map for paranormal urbex across the United States, ranked by a mix of historical weight, photographic value, and how genuinely haunted the place feels when you actually stand inside it.
Free urbex GPS: how Urbex Maps changes the game
Most American urbex catalogs hide their coordinates behind paywalls, Patreon tiers, or invite-only Discord servers. We do the opposite. The Urbex Maps interactive map lists more than 238,000 abandoned sites worldwide with GPS, photos, and access status, and every spot in this article is free to add to your personal map in two clicks. No credit card. No subscription. No drip-feed of "premium" coords. Click the button under any spot below, sign in, and the location ships straight to your profile. The aim is simple: explorers helping explorers, the way urbex used to work before everyone started selling spreadsheets.
Why some famous haunted places do not make this list
A strict survey of abandoned haunted places has to exclude sites that have effectively become ghost-themed amusement parks. Eastern State Penitentiary, Pennhurst Asylum, Waverly Hills Sanatorium, the Stanley Hotel, the Winchester Mystery House, the LaLaurie Mansion, the Lizzie Borden House, the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, the Mansfield Reformatory, the West Virginia State Penitentiary at Moundsville, and the Villisca Axe Murder House: all genuinely haunted by reputation, all gated by ticket booths, gift shops, scheduled overnight investigations, and active staff. None of them qualify as urbex in 2026. We also dropped a few sites that were paranormal landmarks but no longer exist as ruins: the Packard Plant in Detroit was demolished in December 2024, Six Flags New Orleans completed demolition in March 2026, the Six Flags AstroWorld parcel in Houston has been a parking lot since 2006. The sixteen sites below are different. They are actually abandoned, actually accessible (in most cases), and actually scary.
1. Centralia, Pennsylvania
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Drive Route 61 north out of Ashland, Pennsylvania, and the road eventually ends at a guardrail. Beyond it, the asphalt is cracked open like an old wound, hissing steam in winter. This is Centralia, the anthracite town that has been on fire since May 1962, when borough firefighters cleaned out a landfill sitting in an abandoned strip-mine pit and failed to fully extinguish what they had lit. An unsealed opening let the flames slip down into the labyrinth of coal seams running under town. They have not gone out since. By 1979 a gas station owner stuck a dipstick into his underground tank and pulled it out at 172 degrees Fahrenheit. In February 1981, twelve-year-old Todd Domboski was standing in his grandmother's backyard when the ground opened beneath him and swallowed him into a 150-foot sinkhole filled with carbon monoxide and superheated steam. His cousin yanked him out by a tree root. Congress eventually freed up forty-two million dollars for relocation, Governor Bob Casey invoked eminent domain on every property in the borough by 1992, and the ZIP code 17927 was discontinued in 2002. The fire, geologists estimate, has enough coal underneath to keep burning for another 250 years.
Locals report disembodied voices in the smoke, shadow figures crossing the old graffiti highway, and a persistent feeling of being watched near the Centralia ghost town cemetery. The site directly inspired the fog-bound town of the Silent Hill film franchise, and the screenwriters visited Centralia during production. The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Ukrainian Catholic Church still holds Sunday services on a hilltop overlooking the smoke, which only adds to the dissonance.
Centralia is freely accessible by car off Route 61. The famous graffiti highway was buried in 2020 by the state, but steam vents, the cemetery, and a few foundations remain visible. State police patrol but do not chase respectful visitors. Avoid the obvious steam holes: the carbon monoxide is real, and the ground above some abandoned shafts is not as solid as it looks.
Read the full deep dive: Centralia, Pennsylvania: Inside America's Burning Ghost Town.
2. North Brother Island, New York
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From the Bronx waterfront you can just see it: a twenty-acre smudge of trees and crumbling brick in the East River, between Rikers and the South Bronx. North Brother Island is officially off limits to the public, patrolled as a wildlife sanctuary for nesting herons, but its real charge is human. The oldest building on the island went up in 1885 to house Riverside Hospital, an isolation facility for smallpox, typhus, scarlet fever, and tuberculosis. It is also where Mary Mallon, the Irish cook the press called Typhoid Mary, spent the last twenty-three years of her life confined to a small cottage. She had infected at least 122 New Yorkers, five of them fatally, while remaining symptomless herself. She died on the island in November 1938. Eighteen years before that, on June 15, 1904, the wooden excursion steamer General Slocum caught fire and beached on the island's south shore. More than 1,021 passengers, most of them German immigrant women and children from the Lower East Side, drowned or burned. Nurses and patients ran into the surf to pull bodies out of the water. It was the deadliest single-day disaster in New York City until September 2001.
After World War II the island briefly housed veterans and their families, then reopened in 1952 as a juvenile drug treatment facility that closed in 1963 amid scandals over staff corruption and patient abuse. Visiting historians and patrol staff describe footsteps in the empty wards, cold spots in the morgue, and faint voices near the General Slocum landing site. Mary Mallon's bungalow is a particular hot spot for paranormal investigators, and the island is consistently cited on lists of America's most abandoned haunted places.
Access is strictly forbidden. NYC Parks holds it as a bird sanctuary, kayak landings have led to arrests, and the buildings are structurally dangerous (vines pulling down the Tuberculosis Pavilion, trees growing through floors). The legal way to see it is from the Bronx shore at sunset, or via a permitted research trip.
Read the full deep dive: North Brother Island: Typhoid Mary's Prison and NYC's Forbidden Ruin.
3. Picher, Oklahoma
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Picher sits at the northeast corner of Oklahoma, in country so quietly poisoned that the EPA finally declared the whole town unfit for human habitation. Founded in 1913 around a stupendously rich vein of lead and zinc ore, the place boomed through both world wars supplying the metal that built American bullets and brass casings. At its peak it held more than 14,000 people. The cost of all that mining was 14,000 abandoned shafts honeycombing the bedrock, seventy million tons of mine tailings dumped on the surface, and thirty-six million tons of mill sand and sludge piled into hills the locals called chat. Children rode bikes on the chat piles. Pickup trucks raised lead dust. In 1994, a study found that 35 percent of children tested in Picher had blood lead levels exceeding the federal safety limit. The Tar Creek Superfund Site, established in 1983, eventually swallowed forty square miles. Then, on May 10, 2008, an EF4 tornado tore directly through what remained, killing six and destroying 150 homes across twenty blocks. The federal buyout went out the next year. Picher officially dis-incorporated on September 1, 2009.
Reports from former residents include disembodied children's laughter near the old elementary school, lights moving inside the abandoned Picher Mining Field Museum, and shadow figures on the chat piles at dusk. The 2008 tornado dead are said to linger around the flattened neighborhoods. It is one of the few abandoned haunted places in America where the danger is mostly chemical rather than structural: respirators are recommended on windy days, and the rust-red water in Tar Creek is leaching lead and zinc from a century of mine waste.
The town is condemned but the roads remain open and signage is minimal. There is no active patrol. Most homes have been demolished, a few municipal buildings still stand, and the chat piles rise like Martian dunes on the horizon. Pair the visit with the abandoned Cardin and Treece townships ten minutes away across the Kansas line.
Read the full deep dive: Picher, Oklahoma: America's Most Toxic Superfund Ghost Town.
4. Hart Island, New York
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Hart Island) is one mile long, a third of a mile wide, and contains more than a million human bodies. It sits in Long Island Sound off the Bronx coast, visible from City Island on a clear day. New York City bought it in 1868 for $75,000, and the next year began burying the city's unclaimed dead in pine boxes. Adults are stacked in trenches in groups of 150. Infants are stacked in groups of 1,000. Inmates from Rikers Island do the digging for a small daily wage. Before the potter's field, the island had already cycled through every form of municipal warehousing New York could invent: a training camp for United States Colored Troops in 1864, a Confederate prisoner of war camp holding 3,400 men by 1865, a women's lunatic asylum, a yellow-fever quarantine, a tuberculosis sanatorium, a Nike missile base during the Cold War, a juvenile reformatory, and finally a city prison that closed in 1966. Most of those buildings still stand, gutted by time and salt air.
The burials never stopped. During the AIDS crisis in 1985, the first New York victims were placed alone in a special section fourteen feet down rather than the usual five, in case the disease was contagious through soil. During COVID-19 in April 2020, drone footage caught Rikers inmates in white hazmat suits digging fresh trenches because the city morgues had overflowed. Visitors and former inmates describe whispers, shadow figures in the old TB hospital, and the unmistakable sound of crying from the infant section. The AIDS-era graves are said to be a particular epicenter of unease.
In December 2019 the city transferred the island from the Department of Correction to NYC Parks, theoretically opening it up. Public ferries now run twice a month for relatives of the buried, but wandering the buildings is not permitted and past trespassers have been arrested. Buildings are dangerously unstable.
5. Kings Park Psychiatric Center, New York
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Building 93 rises out of the woods on Long Island's North Shore like something out of a Stanley Kubrick movie. Thirteen stories of neoclassical brick, completed in 1939, blank windows staring across what used to be a self-contained city of 9,300 patients. Kings Park Psychiatric Center opened in 1885 as the Kings County Farm, a place for New York City to ship its overflow mental patients out where the air was better and the land was cheap. It quickly grew into one of the largest psychiatric institutions in the United States. Patients farmed, made shoes, ran a piggery, generated their own electricity, and were buried in their own cemetery when they died. Treatments evolved with the century: hydrotherapy, insulin shock, electroconvulsive therapy, prefrontal lobotomy, and finally the antipsychotic Thorazine, which arrived in the mid-1950s and emptied wards faster than anyone had expected. By 1996, the campus had been hollowed out by deinstitutionalization, and the state pulled the plug.
Most of the grounds became Nissequogue River State Park in 2006. Hikers walk paved roads now grown over with weeds. Joggers pass empty solariums. Building 93, declared too dangerous to enter and too expensive to demolish, sits sealed behind chain-link. It is Long Island's most documented haunted urbex site. Reports include disembodied screams from Building 93, full-body apparitions in the morgue tunnels, and a recurring shadow figure in the old children's ward. Multiple paranormal investigation TV shows have filmed here.
Park grounds are open to the public, but entering any building is illegal trespass. Park police patrol the Building 93 perimeter actively. The iconic smokestack was imploded in March 2013, and smaller buildings have been knocked down in waves of demolition between 2012 and 2017. Two group homes still operate on the property under Pilgrim Psychiatric Center, which makes the place feel less abandoned than it actually is.
6. Times Beach, Missouri
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Times Beach was a postwar Route 66 town twenty miles west of St. Louis, the kind of place where families bought cheap river-bottom lots and built bungalows by the Meramec. It was founded in 1925 as a promotional gimmick by the St. Louis Star-Times newspaper: buy a six-month subscription, get a twenty-by-one-hundred lot. By the early 1970s, around 2,000 people lived there. The roads were dirt, and to keep dust down the town hired a waste-oil hauler named Russell Bliss to spray the streets. Bliss charged less than anyone else. The reason, it eventually emerged, was that the oil he was using had been collected from the Northeastern Pharmaceutical and Chemical Company, which had manufactured hexachlorophene during 1970 to 1972. The byproduct of that process was 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin, one of the most toxic compounds known to chemistry. Bliss sprayed roughly 160,000 gallons of it on Times Beach in 1972 and 1973. People got sick. Horses dropped dead at the Shenandoah Stables he had also sprayed. The EPA finally tested the soil in early December 1982. The very next day, the Meramec flooded and washed the contamination across every yard.
In February 1983, the federal government announced a $33 million buyout. Governor John Ashcroft disincorporated Times Beach on April 2, 1985. The houses were demolished, the debris incinerated on site (a process that ran until 1997), and the land became Route 66 State Park, which opened in 1999. Today the visitor center is the only original Times Beach building still standing. Former residents and park rangers report shadowy figures along the old town road, phantom 1970s music from where the diner used to stand, and unexplained chemical smells on still nights. The Steiny's Inn building (now the visitor center) is rumored to be the most active spot.
Site is fully accessible during park hours. The grass mound covering the incinerator residue is off limits, but the rest of the old town footprint is open for walks. Bring a Route 66 atlas: the original alignment runs straight through what used to be Main Street.
7. Bachelor's Grove Cemetery, Illinois
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Bachelor's Grove sits in a clearing inside Rubio Woods Forest Preserve on the southwest edge of Chicago, off a path of broken concrete that used to be the Midlothian Turnpike. The Turnpike was rerouted in the early 1960s and the cemetery, founded in the 1830s by English and German settlers from the Bremen area, was effectively orphaned. By the 1970s the place had become a teenage drinking spot and then, almost by accident, the most famous haunted cemetery in America. The first recorded burial may have been William B. Nobles in 1838, though Eliza Scott in November 1844 is the better-documented entry. The cemetery saw active burials into the twentieth century. The last interment on record was Robert Shields in 1989.
Somewhere along the way the place picked up its catalog of ghosts. There is the White Lady, also called the Madonna of Bachelor's Grove, said to walk the cemetery on full-moon nights carrying an infant. There is the Phantom Farmhouse that appears at the edge of the clearing with its porch light on, then dissolves when approached. There are phantom cars on the old Midlothian Turnpike, glowing orbs over the pond where local lore says Capone-era gangsters dumped bodies, and an apparition of a two-headed creature near the gate. In August 1991, a Ghost Research Society photo captured what looks unmistakably like a transparent woman in a long Victorian dress sitting on a tombstone. The image has been debated for decades and never definitively explained.
Free public access by foot trail from 143rd Street. Cook County police patrol after dark. The cemetery is fenced and the gate is locked, but the chain-link is routinely cut open by visitors. Markers have been heavily vandalized; many original stones are propped back up against trees. This is one of the few paranormal urbex spots in America that can be visited as a day trip from a major airport.
8. Glenn Dale Hospital, Maryland
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Twenty miles outside Washington, D.C., set back from a quiet two-lane road in Prince George's County, Glenn Dale Hospital is exactly the kind of place that ends up on every list of America's creepiest abandoned hospitals. It opened in 1934 as a tuberculosis sanatorium for patients D.C. could not fit into its overcrowded city hospitals. The complex was a small self-contained world built on 216 wooded acres: an adult hospital, a separate children's hospital, dormitories for the nurses, a chapel, a power plant, a farm, a morgue, and a network of steam tunnels that ran underneath everything so patients with active TB could be moved between buildings without going outside. At peak, the hospital held more than 1,200 patients. The introduction of streptomycin in the late 1940s and isoniazid in the early 1950s made tuberculosis a curable disease almost overnight. The wards emptied. The complex pivoted to chronic care, became a refuge for D.C.'s overflow nursing-home and psychiatric population, and finally shut in 1981 for failing to meet new federal codes.
Reports include a ghostly child in the abandoned pediatric ward, screaming voices in the tunnels at night, full-body apparitions of nurses, and a tall dark figure in the morgue. Local lore embellishes a rumor that the on-site incinerator was used to dispose of patient remains. The historical record disputes this: the incinerator handled hospital waste, not bodies. The morgue, however, was real enough.
Glenn Dale was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2011 but remains threatened, listed by Preservation Maryland as endangered. It is fenced and aggressively patrolled by Park Police 24/7 with floodlights, motion sensors, and cameras. Arrests are frequent. It is one of the hardest haunted urbex targets in the DC region, and the photos that do circulate online tend to be drone shots.
9. Letchworth Village, New York
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Letchworth Village opened in 1911 on 2,362 acres in the hamlet of Thiells, Rockland County, about an hour up the Hudson from Manhattan. It was named after William Pryor Letchworth, a reformer who had argued that people with epilepsy and intellectual disabilities should be cared for in a humane farm setting rather than warehoused in city asylums. The original campus was designed accordingly: small cottages instead of huge wards, farmland, a dairy, woodworking shops. For a brief moment in the 1910s, it was considered a model facility. Then it filled up. By the 1950s, Letchworth held more than 4,000 residents in spaces designed for far fewer. The photographer Irving Haberman documented the conditions in the late 1940s. His images of naked children rocking in catatonic silence in stripped-bare day rooms made national newspapers. In 1950, Dr. Hilary Koprowski selected Letchworth residents for the first human trials of a live-virus polio vaccine. The first subject was an eight-year-old child.
In 1972, Geraldo Rivera's exposé Willowbrook: The Last Great Disgrace turned New York's institutions, including Letchworth, into a national scandal. The state began closing them down. Letchworth shuttered in 1996. Persistent reports describe children's cries and laughter in the abandoned cottages, full-body apparitions in Stewart Hall, the sensation of being followed in the cemetery of numbered graves (1914 to 1967), and shadow figures in the underground tunnels.
Most cottages are accessible on foot from public roads via the Letchworth Cemetery. Stony Point police patrol intermittently. Floors are collapsing, asbestos is everywhere, and several cottages have been partially demolished. This is one of the most visited abandoned haunted places on the East Coast precisely because so little of it has been torn down.
10. Forest Haven Asylum, Maryland
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Forest Haven occupies about 300 wooded acres in Laurel, Maryland, just inside Prince George's County. Opened in 1925 as the District Training School for the Mentally Retarded, it was supposed to be a humane alternative to the warehouses where Washington, D.C. had been dumping its disabled wards. The early publicity used phrases like "open air, sunshine, and useful work." What it became, by the 1970s, was one of the worst-documented institutional disasters in American history. Court records and investigative reporting eventually detailed it in horrible specificity: residents starved or choked because staff fed them while lying flat on the floor. Sexual assault by orderlies. Untreated infections. A staff member caught stealing more than $40,000 from residents' personal accounts in 1981. At least 400 deaths occurred under suspicious circumstances, including ten documented cases of aspiration pneumonia from improper feeding. A mass grave on the property holds 389 bodies. A federal judge ordered the place shut. It closed on October 14, 1991.
The buildings still stand. Patient files still sit in metal cabinets. Medical equipment, a dentist's chair, children's toys, even old report cards have been left behind, untouched. Walking through Forest Haven feels less like urbex and more like a crime scene that nobody finished processing. Reports include children's voices in empty dormitories, full-body apparitions in the dental clinic, doors slamming on their own, and an oppressive presence near the mass grave of 389 unmarked bodies. It is among the most reported haunted urbex sites in the DMV region.
Owned by D.C. government, technically off limits. Patrolled by U.S. Park Police with arrests common. Buildings are decayed and structurally dangerous, but documents, files, and equipment remain, which keeps drawing urbex photographers despite the legal risk.
11. Holy Land USA, Connecticut
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Holy Land USA sits on Pine Hill above downtown Waterbury, Connecticut, marked by an LED cross that lights up at night and can be seen from Interstate 84 for miles. The cross is real, modern, and electrified, installed in 2008 and replaced again in 2013 with a 65-foot LED version that changes color according to the Catholic liturgical calendar. Everything beneath the cross is the strangest thing on the hill. In 1956, a Waterbury attorney named John Baptist Greco started building, by hand and with volunteer labor from his Catholic Campaigners for Christ, a miniature replica of biblical Jerusalem and Bethlehem. He used cinderblocks, plaster, scrap lumber, and chunks of stone. There were Stations of the Cross, a stable for the Nativity, a Garden of Eden, a tomb of Christ, and a series of dioramas illustrating Bible passages. The lettering of the Holy Land USA sign on the hill was modeled on the Hollywood sign, deliberately. At its peak in the 1960s and 1970s, the park drew 40,000 visitors a year. Greco closed it to the public in 1984 to make improvements he never completed. He died in 1986.
The park sat unmaintained for almost three decades. Cinderblock biblical buildings collapsed. Plaster figures broke apart in the rain. The original cross fell down. Then, in July 2010, sixteen-year-old Chloe Ottman was murdered on the grounds by another local teenager. The crime, and the macabre setting, made national news. Local lore reports apparitions of monks and biblical figures along the Stations of the Cross trail. After the 2010 murder, visitors describe sobbing and cold spots near the murder site. The illuminated cross at night is famously unsettling.
In 2013, Waterbury mayor Neil O'Leary and businessman Fred Blasius bought the property for $350,000 to clean it up. They installed a new cross, fenced the grounds, and partially reopened the park to the public in September 2014 for daylight hours only. The eerie ruins of Greco's original creation still litter the hillside.
12. Norwich State Hospital, Connecticut
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Norwich State Hospital opened in October 1904 on a 900-acre site straddling the Norwich-Preston town line along the Thames River in southeastern Connecticut. It began modestly: a single building, 95 patients, the Hospital for the Insane. It grew over half a century into a self-sustaining city of more than 30 buildings: dormitories, dining halls, a power plant, a fire station, a working farm, even its own cemetery. The peak came in 1955, when 3,184 patients were committed there. Like Kings Park, like Letchworth, like every Kirkbride-era asylum in America, Norwich shrank fast once chlorpromazine and deinstitutionalization took hold. By the 1980s the population was a fraction of what it had been. The hospital closed for good on October 10, 1996.
For more than a decade afterward, the campus was simply left to rot, and that is when Norwich earned its paranormal reputation. The Salmon River School building, the abandoned Lodge, and the underground tunnel system became destinations for urbex photographers, paranormal investigators, and TV crews. Ghost Hunters filmed there. So did Life After People. Reports include disembodied voices in the Salmon River School, an apparition known as the "Shadow Doctor" in the tunnels, cold spots and EVP recordings in the old morgue, and the persistent feeling of being watched in the Lodge.
Connecticut transferred the 393-acre property to the town of Preston in 2009 for a single dollar. The Mohegan Tribe signed a development agreement in May 2016 to turn the site into Preston Riverwalk. Systematic demolition started in 2011 and most of the original buildings are now gone. Only the Administration Building remains as of 2024, slated for preservation. Active construction site, trespass enforced strictly, coal ash contamination present. Most urbex footage online is pre-2018.
13. Bombay Beach, California
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Bombay Beach is 223 feet below sea level, the lowest community in the United States, on the eastern shore of the Salton Sea in California's Imperial County. The town was developed in the late 1920s and exploded in the 1950s, when the Salton Sea was the Riviera of the Southwest. Frank Sinatra dropped in. The Beach Boys played there. Sonny Bono kept a house nearby. Speedboats raced on water that, at the time, supported tilapia in the millions. The catastrophe was slow. The Salton Sea has no natural outlet, and decades of agricultural runoff from the Imperial Valley kept dumping fertilizer and salt into a closed basin. By the late 1970s the salinity passed the threshold for most fish to survive. Massive die-offs followed. The famous beaches turned out, on close inspection, to be made not of sand but of crushed fish skeletons. The smell was apocalyptic in summer. By the early 1980s the resorts were boarded up. Trailers were abandoned. Whole streets emptied.
Then, around 2016, something unexpected happened. A producer named Tao Ruspoli, hotelier Stefan Ashkenazy, and art-world heiress Lily Johnson-White launched the Bombay Beach Biennale, an unsanctioned art festival that turned the dying town into a surrealist installation. There is a drive-in theater of crushed cars. A swing set in the actual sea. A door on the beach leading nowhere. Around 230 residents still live in trailers and shacks, median age 60. Less classical haunting than uncanny atmosphere: locals report mirages of crowded 1950s beaches, ghostly speedboats heard from empty water, and shadowy figures in the abandoned trailers. The whole town reads like a vision of post-apocalyptic California.
Freely accessible 24/7 by car off Highway 111. Most ruins on public lots, some trailers still private. Toxic dust storms common in dry months: the receding shoreline now exposes a playa loaded with agricultural chemicals.
14. Athens Lunatic Asylum (The Ridges), Ohio
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The Athens Lunatic Asylum opened in January 1874 on a hilltop south of Athens, Ohio, overlooking the Hocking River and the campus of what would become Ohio University. It was designed by architect Levi T. Scofield in the Kirkbride Plan style: a single immense building, 853 feet long, with staggered batwing wings designed by Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride to maximize sunlight, ventilation, and patient classification. Eventually the property grew to over 1,000 acres and 78 buildings. The treatments ranged from compassionate to barbaric. Hydrotherapy, electroconvulsive shock, prefrontal lobotomy (the surgeon Walter Freeman performed dozens here in the 1950s), insulin coma. Three on-site cemeteries hold roughly 1,930 patients, marked for decades only by numbers.
The story that turned Athens Asylum into a paranormal landmark happened in 1978. A patient named Margaret Schilling vanished from her ward in early December. She was found six weeks later, dead, in a sealed top-floor room of a long-disused women's ward. She had taken off her clothes, folded them, and lay down on the concrete floor next to a south-facing window. Her body decomposed slowly in the cold and the sun, leaving a permanent silhouette stained into the concrete. The Schilling stain is still there. Multiple attempts to scrub or seal it have failed. The asylum closed in 1993 and was transferred to Ohio University, which renamed it The Ridges. Other reports include disembodied female voices in the abandoned wings, full-body apparitions in the Kirkbride wards, and unexplained EVPs in the three cemeteries of numbered graves.
Most of the main Kirkbride building has been adapted for university offices and the Kennedy Museum of Art, but several wings remain sealed and abandoned. The cemeteries and outer buildings are open to walkers. The Schilling stain ward is permanently closed; do not try the door.
15. Hudson River State Hospital, New York
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Hudson River State Hospital opened in October 1871 on the bluffs above the Hudson River, on the Poughkeepsie-Hyde Park town line. The main building is one of the great American examples of High Victorian Gothic architecture, the first time the style was used for an institutional building in the United States. Frederick Clarke Withers designed the buildings. Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted, fresh off Central Park, designed the grounds. The result was an enormous Kirkbride structure with pointed-arch windows, slate roofs, ornamental ironwork, and four-story brick wings staggered along a 1,200-foot footprint. The campus, with its self-sustaining farm, its own railroad spur, and a population that peaked above 6,000 patients in the 1950s, was a self-contained Victorian fantasy of mental hygiene. Like every American asylum, it shrank with the antipsychotic revolution and the deinstitutionalization wave of the 1960s and 1970s. The hospital fully shut in 2003.
For a decade afterward, the abandoned campus became one of the most photographed urbex sites in the Northeast. Then, on May 31, 2007, lightning struck the south wing and started one of the worst fires in Dutchess County history. The roof of an entire Kirkbride wing collapsed. Reports include disembodied screaming in the burned-out south wing, full-body apparitions in the chapel, and the persistent sound of horse-drawn carriages on the old service road. The Kirkbride wing is widely cited on East Coast paranormal lists.
The state sold the property to a developer in November 2013. The Hudson Heritage project, a $300 million mixed-use plan with 750 residential units, broke ground in 2016. Demolition swept through most of the outbuildings between 2016 and 2020. The site is heavily fenced with private security 24/7 and arrests are frequent. The main Kirkbride structure, the library, the chapel, and the amusement hall have been slated for restoration under the National Historic Landmark protection in effect since 1989.
16. City Methodist Church, Indiana
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City Methodist Church in Gary, Indiana, is what happens when American optimism builds a cathedral and then the city around it disappears. Groundbreaking was January 25, 1925. The building was completed in 1926 at a cost of around one million dollars, half of which was paid by U.S. Steel. The Gary Works steel plant was a few blocks away and the church's first congregation was full of steelworkers and their managers. The architecture is Gothic Revival, designed by Lowe & Bollenbacher of Chicago. Nine stories tall in places. A 4,000-square-foot sanctuary. A 1,000-seat theater called Seaman Hall, a gymnasium, classrooms, a dining hall, offices. At peak membership in the 1950s, more than 3,000 worshipers belonged to City Methodist. Then Gary collapsed. Steel manufacturing shifted overseas in the 1960s and 1970s. The city lost more than half its population. White flight hollowed out downtown. By 1975 the church could no longer afford its own roof. The congregation moved out on October 5 of that year.
The building was sold for a token sum to a series of preservation efforts that all failed. In 1997 a fire gutted the upper floors. In 2011 a section of the roof collapsed. Today the sanctuary stands open to the sky. Trees grow through the floor. Ivy climbs the buttresses. The Gothic arches frame raw weather. Reports include organ music in the empty sanctuary, choir voices echoing from collapsed balconies, and shadow figures in Seaman Hall. The roofless sanctuary at sunset is widely considered one of the most atmospheric abandoned paranormal ruins in the Midwest.
The church has appeared, uncredited or otherwise, in films including A Nightmare on Elm Street: Freddy's Revenge, Transformers, Pearl Harbor, and Sense8. It is fenced but historically easy to access via breaches along Washington Street. Police presence in downtown Gary is minimal. Floors are rotted, falling masonry a real risk. Hard hats recommended.
FAQ: Abandoned haunted places in the USA
Is it legal to visit these sites?
It depends on the site. Centralia, Picher, Times Beach, Bombay Beach, and the public-trail approach to Bachelor's Grove are all freely accessible during daylight. Athens Lunatic Asylum (The Ridges) is open as Ohio University property except for the sealed wings. Holy Land USA reopened partially in 2014. Letchworth Village cottages are accessible on foot from a public road. The other seven sites (North Brother Island, Hart Island, Kings Park Building 93, Glenn Dale Hospital, Forest Haven, Norwich State, Hudson River State Hospital) are strict trespass with active enforcement, and entering structures can carry felony charges in several jurisdictions.
Which is the most haunted of the sixteen?
By volume of documented paranormal reports, Bachelor's Grove Cemetery and the Athens Lunatic Asylum lead the pack. Bachelor's Grove holds the famous 1991 Ghost Research Society photograph, and Athens holds the Margaret Schilling stain, two of the most-cited paranormal artifacts in the United States. Forest Haven Asylum is the densest in terms of documented institutional abuse turned into hauntings.
Which is the easiest to access?
Centralia, Pennsylvania, hands down. You park off Route 61, walk past a guardrail, and you are in. Bombay Beach is a close second: drive up, park, wander the trailers and the Biennale art. Times Beach is a public state park with a paved trail.
What is the best season for a paranormal urbex road trip?
Late October is the obvious choice for atmosphere, but technically the best urbex window in the Northeast and Midwest runs from mid-March to mid-May (snow gone, leaves not yet out, sightlines clear, mosquitoes minimal). The Salton Sea is unbearable in summer; visit Bombay Beach between November and March. Centralia is most photogenic in winter when the steam vents are visible against snow.
Are the paranormal claims actually real?
That is for each visitor to decide. Most of the lore here is well-documented in local press, paranormal investigation TV shows, and Wikipedia. Some claims have been debunked (the Glenn Dale incinerator was for waste, not bodies). Others, like the Schilling stain at Athens and the Bachelor's Grove 1991 photograph, remain unexplained after decades of scrutiny. The history is what gives the lore weight: real deaths, real institutional abuse, real disasters.
Can I get free GPS coordinates for these sites?
Yes. Every spot in this article has a green "Add to my map" button under its name. Click it, sign in with email (free, two clicks), and the GPS coordinates land in your personal Urbex Maps profile. No paywall. No premium tier. Browse the full database of 238,000 verified abandoned sites at the Urbex Maps interactive map.
Go further
For the broader American urbex picture, our flagship 50-states pillar on abandoned places in the USA covers one site per state, mixing ghost towns, asylums, missile silos, and theme parks. If you want to compare American paranormal urbex with the European tradition, the German Lost Places pillar walks the 16 Bundesländer through abandoned sanatoriums, Soviet airfields, and Nazi bunkers, and the Italian abbandonati pillar catalogs Craco, Poveglia, Sammezzano, and the legacy of the Basaglia law asylums.
Whether you start with Centralia or Bachelor's Grove or end up driving the Salton Sea at sunset, the American paranormal urbex map remains the densest in the world. Every site on this list is still standing, still abandoned, and still adding lore. Pin the coordinates to your map, plan the trip in shoulder season, and bring a respirator for Picher. The country is still haunted, and the buildings are still empty.
