Indiana is the Rust Belt state that gets overlooked, and that oversight is a mistake. With 423 documented abandoned places on the Urbex Maps atlas -- one of the highest counts of any state in the Midwest -- Indiana offers a density of abandoned industrial, institutional, and commercial sites that rivals Ohio and Pennsylvania while carrying a distinct identity rooted in steel, railroads, and the peculiar urban tragedy of Gary. Gary is the city that makes Indiana essential reading for anyone interested in American abandonment: a steel city built from nothing in 1906 by US Steel, populated to 175,000 residents within 60 years, and then emptied almost as quickly when the steel mills closed and the middle class fled to the suburbs. The abandoned churches, theaters, schools, and civic buildings of Gary form the most concentrated surviving ensemble of early 20th-century American urban architecture left to the elements anywhere in the country.
Beyond Gary, abandoned places in Indianapolis tell a different story: the massive Central State Hospital campus (closed 1994 after 146 years of operation), crumbling factories along the White River corridor, and institutional ruins scattered across the capital's west side. The state's southern counties, bordering the Ohio River, were the first industrialized -- iron furnaces, salt works, and early manufacturing at the falls of the rivers -- and the first to decline when the railroads redirected commerce. From Charlestown's 19,000-acre WWII ammunition plant to the mineral springs ruins of Warren County, Indiana's abandonment stretches far beyond its steel cities. The Lake Michigan shoreline in the northwest is petrochemical and steel country, one of the most heavily industrialized coastal landscapes in the country and, consequently, one of the most abandoned.
This guide covers 10 of the most iconic abandoned places in Indiana, from the Gothic sanctuary of Gary's City Methodist Church to the military training city of Muscatatuck. Every spot has free GPS coordinates on the Urbex Maps interactive atlas, a YouTube video embed, historical context, and access notes. These are verified locations that represent Indiana's complex and underappreciated position in the American abandonment narrative.
Free urbex GPS: how Urbex Maps works
Every spot in this guide has a free GPS pin on the Urbex Maps interactive atlas. No paywall for these 10, no account required -- just coordinates on an interactive map with access notes that work on mobile. The full Indiana database has 423 locations and growing, covering everything from Gary's urban ruins to remote farmland resorts in the Wabash Valley.
1. City Methodist Church, Gary
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City Methodist Church is the most photographed abandoned building in Indiana and one of the most recognized urban ruins in the United States. The Gothic Revival church was completed in 1926 at a cost of $800,000 -- a sum that reflected both the ambitions of Gary's growing Methodist congregation and the extraordinary wealth that US Steel's Gary Works had generated in the two decades since the city's founding. The building was designed in a High Gothic style with a main sanctuary seating 1,800, a connected education building, and a tower that dominated the Gary skyline.
The congregation peaked in the 1950s as Gary's population approached its post-war high of 178,000. Deindustrialization and white flight began emptying the city and the congregation simultaneously in the 1960s. City Methodist closed in 1975, the year Gary's population had fallen below 160,000 on its way to under 70,000 by the 2010s. The building was left in place, and the subsequent four decades of uncontrolled deterioration -- water infiltration, the 2011 partial collapse of the sanctuary roof, decades of vandalism -- produced the ruin that makes it so visually extraordinary today. The roofless nave, with its intact Gothic stone tracery, the remnant of the clerestory windows, and natural light pouring down into the overgrown sanctuary floor, has become one of the defining images of American urban abandonment.
City Methodist achieved additional cultural reach when it was used as a filming location for Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011). The film crew's presence generated renewed public discussion about the building's future, and the City of Gary has periodically engaged with preservation proposals. The Indiana Landmarks Foundation has listed City Methodist among its most endangered properties. The building is on private property, currently in the custody of the city, and access is restricted -- though its exterior is visible from the street and the building's presence is inescapable in any tour of downtown Gary. City Methodist Church is also featured in our 50 States, 50 Iconic Urbex Spots guide.
2. Gary Union Station
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Gary Union Station is a Beaux-Arts passenger terminal on Broadway that opened in 1910, just four years after Gary's founding, as one of the first major civic buildings in a city that was still being built from the swamp up. The station served the multiple railroads passing through the Gary corridor -- a major east-west route connecting Chicago to the eastern seaboard -- and in its prime processed tens of thousands of passengers daily, including the steel workers who arrived from across Eastern and Southern Europe to work at the Gary Works.
The terminal's Beaux-Arts design, with its classical limestone facade and grand interior waiting hall, was an assertion of permanence and civic ambition in a city that had been prairie two decades earlier. It continued serving passengers through the postwar era, but the decline of intercity rail travel in the 1960s and the growing competition from automobiles and air travel progressively reduced its passenger volumes. The last scheduled train service through the station operated in 1971, and the building has been in various states of abandonment and deterioration since then.
Gary Union Station became a focal point of the city's preservation and revitalization discussions in the 2010s, and in 2023 a restoration project received funding support from federal infrastructure programs and state historic preservation grants. The project, which aims to rehabilitate the station as a multimodal transit hub and civic space, represents one of the more serious attempts to reverse the cycle of abandonment in Gary's downtown core. The building's structural condition is challenging but not terminal, and the Beaux-Arts facade retains much of its original character despite decades of neglect.
3. Palace Theater, Gary
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The Palace Theater in Gary was designed by John Eberson, the Austrian-born architect who invented the "atmospheric theater" concept -- a movie palace with an interior designed to suggest an outdoor Mediterranean or Spanish courtyard at night, complete with a ceiling painted as a sky, projected stars and moving clouds, and architectural details suggesting the walls of a Spanish villa or a Moorish castle. Eberson designed more than 100 atmospheric theaters across the United States between the mid-1920s and the late 1930s, and the Gary Palace, opened in 1925 with a seating capacity of 2,500, was among his largest and most ambitious.
The atmospheric theater concept was designed to transport moviegoers to a fantasy world the moment they entered, and the Palace succeeded: the ornate plasterwork, the painted sky ceiling with its motorized cloud machine and pin-spot stars, the arched niches with sculptural figures, and the overall scale of the auditorium created an experience that the film itself was almost incidental to. The Palace served Gary's diverse working-class population through the golden age of movie houses, hosting films, vaudeville acts, and live performances from the 1920s through the 1960s.
The theater closed in 1972 as suburban multiplex competition and Gary's population decline made the downtown movie palace economically unviable. The building has been in various states of abandonment since then, and the atmospheric theater interior -- one of the few surviving Eberson designs of this scale and completeness anywhere in the country -- has deteriorated severely from water infiltration and neglect. Efforts to preserve and rehabilitate the Palace have been ongoing for decades, constrained by the cost of restoring a 2,500-seat theater in a city struggling with disinvestment. Indiana Landmarks has listed it among the state's most endangered buildings.
4. Gary Post Office
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The Gary Post Office was built in 1936 as part of the New Deal federal construction program, which deployed federal funds to build post offices, courthouses, and other federal buildings across the country during the Depression, both to provide employment and to assert the continued presence and competence of the federal government during an economic crisis. The Gary building is in the Art Moderne style -- streamlined, horizontal, with limestone cladding, minimal ornament, and the kind of monumental simplicity that characterized federal architecture of the 1930s.
New Deal post offices hold a special place in American architectural history because many of them include murals commissioned by the Treasury Section of Fine Arts, a program that placed murals depicting local history and labor in federal buildings across the country. The Gary post office received murals depicting the steel industry and the multi-ethnic workforce that built the city -- a visual record of Gary's immigrant labor history painted at the height of the New Deal's cultural ambition.
The postal service relocated its Gary operations to a modern facility in the 1970s, and the historic building has been vacant since then. The 1936 structure retains its original architectural character, and the interior murals -- at last documentation -- remained in place. The building is one of several federal structures in downtown Gary that have been caught between potential federal preservation programs and the general disinvestment in Gary's urban core. Various adaptive reuse proposals have been floated, including conversion to a community center or arts facility.
5. Horace Mann High School, Gary
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Horace Mann High School was built in 1928 as one of the most progressive secondary school buildings in Indiana, a showcase for the "Gary Plan" or "platoon system" -- an educational philosophy developed by Gary Schools superintendent William Wirt that organized students into rotating platoons cycling through specialized classrooms, workshops, gymnasiums, swimming pools, and outdoor spaces to keep every facility in constant use. The plan attracted national attention in the 1910s and 1920s as a model of efficient and enriched public education, and the Horace Mann building was designed to embody it physically: an unusually large campus with indoor pools, multiple gymnasiums, a full auditorium, manual training workshops, and home economics facilities.
The school served Gary's students through the mid-20th century, but the population collapse that emptied Gary's downtown also emptied its public schools. Enrollment declined through the 1980s and 1990s, and Horace Mann was closed in 2004 as the Gary Community School Corporation consolidated facilities it could no longer afford to maintain. The building was left in place, and subsequent years of abandonment have produced severe deterioration: roof collapses, water damage, the progressive destruction of the 1928 facilities.
Horace Mann is particularly valued by photographers for its surviving institutional amenities: the indoor swimming pool, its tile work still intact but the water long since drained and replaced by debris, is one of the most frequently photographed spaces in Gary's abandonment canon. The gymnasiums, auditorium, and corridor system document the physical embodiment of an educational philosophy that was genuinely innovative for its time, now reduced to ruins by the same forces of urban abandonment that have hollowed out Gary's broader built environment.
6. Central State Hospital, Indianapolis
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Indiana Central State Hospital -- established in 1848 as the Indiana Hospital for the Insane -- was Indiana's first psychiatric institution and one of the earliest state mental hospitals in the Midwest. The original building, designed in the Kirkbride style on a 160-acre site west of Indianapolis, was intended to house a few hundred patients in therapeutic rural isolation. By the early 20th century, the campus had grown to include dozens of buildings holding thousands of patients, with its own farm, railroad connection, and industrial facilities that made it a small self-contained city.
The hospital's decline tracks the national trajectory of state psychiatric institutions. A 1984 lawsuit by the United States Department of Justice found that conditions at Central State violated patients' constitutional rights, documenting overcrowding, inadequate treatment, and physical abuse. The state began a structured closure process, and Central State accepted its last patient in 1994. The campus, greatly reduced from its 19th-century extent, passed to various state agencies and community organizations.
Most of the campus has been demolished or redeveloped over the intervening decades. What survives is the Pathological Department building, a National Historic Landmark that now houses the Indiana Medical History Museum -- one of the most remarkable small museums in the country, preserving the original 1895 pathology laboratory, autopsy rooms, and research facilities exactly as they were when the hospital operated. The museum is publicly accessible and offers guided tours of the intact late-Victorian medical infrastructure, including an operating autopsy table, original microscopes, and the laboratory where pathologists documented diseases across more than a century of institutional psychiatry.
7. Indiana Army Ammunition Plant, Charlestown
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The Indiana Army Ammunition Plant near Charlestown, Clark County, was built in 1940 as the United States began mobilizing for the war it had not yet entered. The facility was designed to produce smokeless powder -- the propellant used in small arms and artillery ammunition -- and at its World War II peak it was one of the largest ammunition plants in the United States: 19,000 acres, 1,700 individual buildings, and a workforce of over 20,000 people drawn from the small towns of southern Indiana and northern Kentucky.
The scale of the plant was driven by the requirements of industrial-scale warfare. Smokeless powder production requires the physical separation of production buildings to minimize the consequence of accidental explosions -- each production unit is isolated in its own earthen-bermed structure, with the buildings spread across the landscape rather than concentrated in a single industrial complex. This design constraint is why the IAAP covers such an enormous area: the buildings are spaced dozens or hundreds of yards apart across a landscape that was previously Ohio River bottomland farmland.
The IAAP was operated by various defense contractors through World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, with production levels spiking during active conflicts and declining during peacetime. The plant was decommissioned in 2000, and the Army transferred portions of the land to Indiana for a state recreation area -- now Charlestown State Park -- while retaining portions for environmental remediation. Visitors to Charlestown State Park encounter the surviving production buildings as elements of the landscape: berm-backed concrete and brick structures in various states of deterioration, overgrown by second-growth forest, their identities explained by interpretive signage. The combination of industrial archaeology and accessible outdoor recreation makes the former IAAP one of the more unusual state park environments in Indiana.
8. Hotel Mudlavia, Kramer
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Hotel Mudlavia was a mineral springs resort in the rural farmland of Benton County, built in 1890 to capitalize on the supposed therapeutic properties of the mineral-laden mud baths available at natural seeps in the local geology. At the height of the resort era, Mudlavia drew guests from across the Midwest who came to take the mud baths, drink the mineral water, and enjoy the resort amenities -- a hotel, dining facilities, a bowling alley, and the general ambiance of a fashionable cure retreat. The resort attracted notable visitors including boxers who trained at the baths and baseball teams who used the facilities for spring training.
The hotel burned to the ground in 1920 and was rebuilt. It burned again in 1968 and was rebuilt on a reduced scale. It burned a third time in 1974 and was not rebuilt. What remains in the Benton County farmland is a remarkable collection of ruins in a setting that is entirely incongruous with the grand resort that once stood here: concrete foundations, basement walls, a surviving brick outbuilding or two, and the mineral spring seeps that originally drew the resort to this particular piece of flat midwestern prairie. The rural isolation -- Kramer is a hamlet of a few dozen people, accessible by farm roads in the Wabash River flood plain -- makes Mudlavia one of the more surprising abandoned sites in Indiana.
The ruins are on private farmland, and access requires permission from the landowner. The site has been documented by Indiana history researchers, and the ruins are visible from the adjacent county road. The three fires that destroyed Mudlavia across 54 years give it the quality of a site that refused to survive, repeatedly rebuilding until a final fire ended the experiment for good.
9. Marktown, East Chicago
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Marktown is one of the strangest urbex landscapes in the United States -- not because the buildings are particularly dramatic, but because of the extraordinary spatial and historical collision between a pre-planned workers' village from 1917 and the industrial infrastructure that has completely surrounded it. The neighborhood was designed by Chicago architect Howard Van Doren Shaw for Clayton Mark, owner of the Mark Manufacturing Company, as a model industrial community for his pipe and fittings plant workers. Shaw designed a dense, picturesque English-influenced village of brick cottages, row houses, and modest bungalows arranged around internal courtyards and pedestrian lanes -- a planned community that deliberately rejected the grid street plan in favor of a more organic, human-scaled layout.
Marktown was built, but Mark's company was sold before the full vision was realized. The neighborhood became a standard working-class residential area, occupied by the workers of East Chicago's massive industrial complex. And that industrial complex -- refineries, steel mills, chemical plants -- grew up around Marktown on every side. Today, the neighborhood is literally surrounded by BP's Whiting Refinery on three sides and an industrial canal on the fourth. The cottages Shaw designed in 1917 sit in the shadow of refinery stacks and storage tanks, a pastoral village layout completely encircled by heavy industry.
BP has been acquiring Marktown properties since the 2000s as it expands its refinery footprint, and the neighborhood is in accelerating decline. Buildings are being demolished as they are acquired, and the remaining occupied and vacant structures represent a diminishing inventory of Shaw's original design. Preservation advocates have argued for Marktown's historical significance as a rare surviving example of early 20th-century planned industrial housing, but the economics of refinery expansion versus residential preservation in a post-industrial city create a difficult contest.
10. Muscatatuck State Developmental Center, Butlerville
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Muscatatuck State Developmental Center near Butlerville, Jennings County, was established in 1920 as an institution for people with intellectual disabilities. The campus, built on a generous scale of 1,500 acres with 120 institutional buildings, operated on the cottage plan: separate dormitory buildings for different resident populations, connected by a campus infrastructure of roads, utilities, and support facilities. Muscatatuck housed thousands of residents over its 85-year history, providing care that ranged from genuinely therapeutic at its best to institutionalized neglect and abuse at its worst.
The state closed Muscatatuck in 2005 as part of a national trend toward community-based care for people with intellectual disabilities that had been building since the Willowbrook expose of the early 1970s and the disability rights legislation of the 1980s and 1990s. Rather than demolishing or abandoning the 120 buildings, the state leased the campus to the Indiana National Guard and the Army Reserve, which converted it into a Military Operations on Urban Terrain (MOUT) training facility -- an urban warfare training environment where soldiers practice room-by-room clearing, vehicle operations, and combined arms tactics in a realistic built environment.
The result is a unique dual-history site: 120 original institutional buildings from the 1920s through the 1970s, now used as a military training area that is regularly occupied by active and reserve military units. The campus is not accessible to the public during training operations, but the Indiana National Guard has offered periodic open houses and media access that have documented the transition from care institution to military training ground. Muscatatuck is a rare case where an abandoned institution has found a second use that preserves the original buildings while repurposing them for an entirely different function.
FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions about Abandoned Places in Indiana
How many abandoned places are there in Indiana?
The Urbex Maps database currently lists 423 verified abandoned locations across Indiana, making it one of the most densely documented states in the Midwest. The concentration is particularly high in Lake County (Gary and East Chicago), Marion County (Indianapolis), and the Ohio River corridor of the southern tier.
Is urbex legal in Indiana?
Criminal trespass in Indiana is governed by I.C. 35-43-2-2 and is a Class A misdemeanor for first-time offenders on posted property. Many of the sites in this guide have specific access provisions: Charlestown State Park is publicly accessible and includes the ammunition plant grounds, the Indiana Medical History Museum at Central State offers public tours, and various state and county parks in Indiana provide access to documented abandoned sites. Private sites require owner permission.
What is the most famous abandoned place in Indiana?
City Methodist Church in Gary is the most internationally recognized, appearing in major urbex photography collections and as a Transformers film location. Among Indiana residents, Central State Hospital and its Medical History Museum occupy a more prominent place in the state's collective memory.
Can you visit the Indiana Medical History Museum?
Yes. The Indiana Medical History Museum at the former Central State Hospital campus in Indianapolis is open to the public on a limited schedule, with guided tours available. The museum preserves one of the most complete surviving 19th-century pathology laboratories in the United States. Advance reservations are recommended for guided tours.
What is happening to Gary, Indiana's abandoned buildings?
Gary has been in an extended process of selective demolition and stabilization for decades. City Methodist Church, the Palace Theater, and Gary Union Station are the three most prominent buildings around which preservation and redevelopment discussions continue. Gary Union Station received restoration funding in 2023. The city's combination of severe fiscal distress, an extremely low tax base, and significant national attention as a uniquely intact example of mid-20th-century urban abandonment creates an unusual preservation context.
Is the Indiana Army Ammunition Plant accessible to the public?
Portions of the former IAAP are now within Charlestown State Park, which is publicly accessible. The park trail system passes through and around some of the former production areas, with interpretive signage. Other portions of the former IAAP site remain under Army control for environmental remediation and are not open to the public. Check the Charlestown State Park website for current trail access.
Conclusion: Indiana's urban ruins and rural remnants
Indiana's abandoned places tell a concentrated version of the Midwest story. Gary's ensemble of early 20th-century civic and commercial architecture -- the church, the theater, the high school, the post office, the station -- represents the most intact surviving example of a complete American industrial city caught in suspended urban decay. The state hospital at Indianapolis and the developmental center at Muscatatuck document a century of Indiana's approach to its most vulnerable citizens. The ammunition plant at Charlestown and the mineral springs hotel at Mudlavia represent the industrial and commercial ambitions that shaped the state's rural counties. With 423 spots on the Urbex Maps atlas, Indiana's abandonment is deep, dense, and thoroughly underappreciated.
Explore more abandoned places in the United States
- ●Abandoned Places in Ohio: 10 Iconic Urbex Spots
- ●Abandoned Places in Georgia: 10 Iconic Urbex Spots
- ●Abandoned Places in New Jersey: 10 Iconic Urbex Spots
- ●Abandoned Places in Louisiana: 10 Iconic Urbex Spots
- ●Abandoned Places in Pennsylvania: 10 Iconic Urbex Spots
- ●Abandoned Places USA: 50 States, 50 Iconic Urbex Spots
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