The United States holds the most diverse catalogue of abandoned places on the planet. Fifty states, three centuries of expansion and collapse, every industrial revolution and every economic crash leaving fingerprints in concrete, brick, adobe, and rusted steel. Gold rushes that built ten thousand people towns in eighteen months and emptied them in five years. Tuberculosis sanatoriums turned mass graves. Cold War silos sealed forever the day after they went live. Disney parks swallowed by Florida swamp. Mining towns poisoned beyond habitation. Coal fires burning under highways since 1962. Urbex USA covers all of it.
This list is a state by state survey of fifty abandoned places that still qualify, today, as urbex in the strict sense: physical sites where decay is the dominant story, where you can stand among ruins, where the visit is not a guided museum tour with a gift shop. Some are protected ghost towns you can walk through legally. Some are trespassing destinations explorers reach at their own risk. Some are submerged, some are radioactive, some are slowly being reclaimed by forest or lava. Together they form the most representative map of urbex USA in 2026.
Famous names you might expect are missing. The first section explains why, then the list of abandoned places begins, ordered alphabetically by state, one spot per state plus a handful of multi spot regions where a single icon could not stand alone. Whether you are planning a single road trip or a multi year urbex USA project, these are the abandoned places to anchor it around.
Why some famous "abandoned places" do not make this list
A serious survey of abandoned places cannot include sites that are no longer abandoned. Michigan Central Station reopened in June 2024 after Ford spent 900 million dollars restoring it. The Packard Plant in Detroit was demolished in December 2024. Six Flags AstroWorld in Houston has been a parking lot since 2006, and Six Flags New Orleans completed demolition in March 2026. Belle Isle Zoo and Damen Silos in Chicago were torn down through 2024. Splendid China, Grossinger's, The Pines, Coco Palms, Henryton Asylum: gone or in active demolition, and no longer abandoned places in any meaningful urbex sense.
We also excluded sites that survive only as paying attractions. Eastern State Penitentiary, Mansfield Reformatory, Waverly Hills, Trans Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary, Sloss Furnaces, Carrie Blast Furnaces, Calico, Alcatraz, Bannack, and Kennecott (yes, the NPS managed sites count too when access is tour only) were considered. Some still appear below because the surrounding landscape remains genuine ruin; others were swapped for less monetized alternatives. The fifty abandoned places here are still spots where the wind moves through broken glass.
1. Alabama, Old Cahawba
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Among the abandoned places in Alabama, Old Cahawba stands out as the state's first capital from 1820 to 1825, carved out of wilderness at the confluence of the Alabama and Cahaba rivers. Seasonal flooding pushed the capital to Tuscaloosa in 1826, but the town kept growing into a cotton wealthy river port through the antebellum decades. The Civil War broke its economy. A catastrophic flood in 1865 finished it. The county seat moved to Selma the same year, and by 1900 most of Cahawba's buildings had burned, collapsed, or been dismantled for materials.
What remains is preserved as the Old Cahawba Archaeological Park: empty streets traced by oak alleys, brick chimneys standing alone in fields, the columns of vanished plantation homes, three cemeteries, the courthouse foundation, and the haunted reputation that comes with any antebellum site where Confederate prison camps once stood. The park is managed by the Alabama Historical Commission and free to walk, which keeps the experience closer to urbex than to museum tourism.
For an even denser cluster of southern ruins and other abandoned places, the Selma area sits twelve miles north.
2. Alaska, Kennecott Mines
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Deep inside Wrangell St. Elias National Park, at the end of a 60 mile gravel road, Kennecott headlines the abandoned places in Alaska and remains the most photographed industrial ruin in the state. The copper ore body was discovered in 1900, and the Kennecott Copper Corporation extracted 4.6 million tons of ore and 1.18 billion pounds of copper between 1909 and 1938. The last train left town on November 10, 1938. Everyone walked out and never came back.
The National Park Service took over in 1986, stabilized the iconic fourteen story red mill building, and reopened a few structures to guided tours, but the vast majority of the site remains exactly as the miners left it: collapsing bunkhouses, the power plant, the leaching plant, rail beds running into snow, ore cars rusted in place. Outside the small NPS footprint, the surrounding landscape is raw abandoned terrain.
Coordinates are roughly 61.4894 N, 142.8842 W. McCarthy, four miles away, is the only nearby settlement.
3. Arizona, Two Guns
Of all the abandoned places in Arizona, Two Guns is the one Route 66 photographers chase first. It sits on a forgotten loop of old Route 66 in Coconino County, between Flagstaff and Winslow. The site's history is dark before it ever became a tourist trap. In the early 1800s, Apache raiders were trapped in a deep cave here by Navajo warriors, who lit fires at the entrance and killed everyone inside. The cave became known as the Apache Death Cave. In the 1920s, a man named Harry Miller built a fake trading post, gas station, and concrete zoo over it, and the place did good business until Miller was shot dead by his business partner.
Two Guns peaked in the 1940s and burned in 1971. When Interstate 40 bypassed the old road, the town died for good. What remains is photogenic decay: empty stone arches reading TWO GUNS, the ruins of the zoo enclosures, faded MOUNTAIN LIONS signage, gas pumps, and the cave itself, which you can still climb into at your own risk. The land is private but unfenced and frequently visited.
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Pair the visit with a Route 66 photographic loop through Winslow and the Petrified Forest.
4. Arkansas, Dogpatch USA
Arkansas's abandoned places rarely make national lists, but Dogpatch USA is the exception. It opened in 1968 in the Newton County hills, themed around Al Capp's hillbilly comic strip Li'l Abner. At its peak the park drew 300,000 visitors annually, with a downtown set, log flume, train, and elaborate water slide complex built into the wooded valley. The park slid through bankruptcies in the 1980s and closed in 1993. For almost three decades, the rides, the downtown facade, the train depot, and the moss covered concrete slides sat exactly where they were left.
In 2020, Johnny Morris (founder of Bass Pro Shops) bought the entire 400 acre site for 1.12 million dollars with plans for a slow eco tourism restoration. As of 2026, most of Dogpatch remains in its abandoned state, which means the iconic shots photographers have been chasing for thirty years (the rusted slide tower above the creek, the empty saloons, the boarded shopfronts of the fake hillbilly town) are still available, though access has tightened.
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The site is technically private property; respect signage and the active restoration crews.
5. California, Bodie
Of all the abandoned places in California, Bodie is the one to see first; if you only visit one American ghost town in your life, make it this one. High in the Sierra Nevada at 8,375 feet, Bodie boomed from a gold strike in 1859 and peaked at around 10,000 residents in 1879. By the time the last mine closed in 1942, the town had been hollowing out for forty years. California State Parks took over in 1962 and froze the place in what curators call "arrested decay": about 110 buildings still stand, but no restoration happens. Roofs sag. Wallpaper peels. The bar still has bottles on its shelves.
Bodie sits at the end of a thirteen mile road, the last three unpaved, and snow closes the route most of winter. You walk around the houses, peer through wavy original window glass at frozen rooms, see the schoolhouse desks still arranged for class, the bank vault still locked. Photographers love the place at dawn and golden hour, when the dust and the wood take on a tone that no Western movie ever quite caught. Bodie was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1961.
If you also want abandoned places along coastal California, drive west to the Sutro Baths ruins in San Francisco or south to Bombay Beach on the Salton Sea.
6. Colorado, St. Elmo
St. Elmo tops the short list of abandoned places in Colorado, and it is widely considered the best preserved ghost town in the state. Founded in 1880 at 9,961 feet in Chaffee County, the town peaked near 2,000 residents during the silver and gold boom. A telegraph office, hotels, a dance hall, and a school served the miners working the Mary Murphy and other claims. Decline started when the Denver South Park and Pacific Railroad pulled out in 1922, and by mid century almost everyone was gone.
What survives is striking: forty three original wooden structures still line a single main street, leaning slightly but intact. A handful of permanent residents and seasonal cabin owners keep the place from being completely empty, which means it has neither the ticketed museum feel of Calico nor the total isolation of more remote sites. You park, you walk, you photograph. The general store is open in summer. The school sits exactly where it sat in 1881. Mount Princeton looms behind everything.
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Combine the visit with the abandoned Mary Murphy mine on the hill above.
7. Connecticut, Seaside Sanatorium
Among the abandoned places in Connecticut, Seaside Sanatorium) in Waterford is the rarest kind of urbex spot: a Tudor Revival complex on a public beach, designed by Cass Gilbert (architect of the Woolworth Building and the US Supreme Court). It opened in 1930 as the first heliotherapy facility for tuberculous children in the United States, the idea being that sunshine and salt air could cure the disease. The buildings became a home for the developmentally disabled in 1961, then closed in 1990 amid the same wave of deinstitutionalization that emptied Letchworth, Pennhurst, and Forest Haven.
Connecticut declared the site a State Park in 2014 but never restored the buildings. You can walk the grounds freely along the shoreline of Long Island Sound, climb on the seawalls, photograph the curved facades through chain link, and watch the place slowly lose its battle with salt corrosion. The interiors are sealed and patrolled, but the exterior approach is among the most photogenic in New England.
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The contrast between the bright public beach in summer and the boarded windows above is the spot's signature image.
8. Delaware, Fort Delaware
Delaware's abandoned places are few, but Fort Delaware stands on Pea Patch Island in the middle of the Delaware River and outranks the rest. Built in 1815 as a coastal defense, the pentagonal granite fortress became infamous during the Civil War as a Union prisoner of war camp, holding up to 10,048 Confederate soldiers in conditions that killed about 2,500 of them. The fort was largely abandoned by 1870, briefly reactivated during both World Wars, and finally left to crumble in 1944.
Delaware turned the island into a State Park in 1951, accessible only by ferry, but the fort itself reads more like Soviet decay than a polished tourist attraction. Long stone corridors, empty powder magazines, the original cannon emplacements, brick officer's quarters in various states of repair, and reputed ghost activity (the place is one of the most paranormal investigated forts on the East Coast). The ferry runs weekends in season; outside those hours the island is empty.
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Off season visits and aerial drone shots from the river bring out the most desolate version of the site.
9. Florida, Discovery Island
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The most famous of the abandoned places in Florida is also one of the most legally radioactive. Discovery Island) is an eleven acre island sitting in Bay Lake, the artificial lake behind Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World. Disney opened it in 1974 as Treasure Island, rebranded it in 1978, and closed it on July 9, 1999. Since then it has sat empty, jungle reclaiming the boardwalks, the aviaries, the visitor center, the bird hospital, the gift shop. You can see it from the Magic Kingdom monorail.
The island is strictly off limits Disney property, patrolled by lake security. Photographer Shane Perez famously swam there in 2009 and published images that went viral. Richard McGuire kayaked over in 2020, was arrested, banned from all Disney property for life, and his footage became the most viewed urbex Florida content of the decade. We are not recommending the trip; we are documenting it. The legal way to see it is by riding the monorail at sunrise.
For legal urbex in the USA's Florida coast, Stiltsville (seven abandoned stilt houses in Biscayne National Park) is a better choice.
10. Georgia, Central State Hospital
Among the abandoned places in Georgia, Central State Hospital) in Milledgeville is the heavyweight: in the 1960s it was the largest psychiatric institution in the world, with 12,000 patients, 6,000 employees, 8,000 acres, and around 200 buildings. The asylum opened in 1842 as the Georgia State Lunatic, Idiot, and Epileptic Asylum, and operated under that and several other names through the deinstitutionalization wave. About 200 patients still receive care on a tiny corner of the campus today. The other 198 buildings are largely abandoned.
The Powell Building, the iconic Greek Revival administration building from 1842, and the massive Jones Building dominate the visual identity of the site. Surrounding them: empty wards, the morgue, the patient run cemetery containing roughly 25,000 unmarked graves, and decades of broken infrastructure. The grounds are patrolled but partly accessible (driving the roads is legal; entering buildings is not). It is one of the most photographically rich abandoned campuses in the American South.
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If you want a smaller, more accessible abandoned place in Georgia, the Sweetwater Creek Mill ruins (used as District 12 in Catching Fire) sit in a state park outside Atlanta.
11. Hawaii, Kalapana
Among the abandoned places in Hawaii, Kalapana is unique: it is the only state on this list where the abandoned place is not built but unbuilt by geology. The fishing village on the Puna coast of the Big Island was destroyed in 1990 by lava flows from the Kupaianaha vent of Kilauea, which buried most of the town and the adjacent Royal Gardens and Kalapana Gardens subdivisions under fifty feet of basalt. The neighboring town of Kaimu and its black sand bay disappeared completely.
What remains is one of the most surreal abandoned places in the United States: a black, cracked, glassy plain stretching to the coast, with skeletal palms, ruined road signs sticking up out of solidified lava, and the foundations of houses surfacing here and there. A 2010 flow destroyed another home; the eruption that began in 2018 buried more of the Royal Gardens. Around seventy five new homes have been rebuilt by adventurous residents in Kalapana Gardens, but the original village is gone forever. The Painted Church and what's left of the road end form the photographic anchors.
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This is the rare site where you stand on top of the abandoned town rather than inside it.
12. Idaho, Bayhorse Ghost Town
Of the abandoned places in Idaho, Bayhorse is the standout: one of the most intact silver mining ghost towns west of the Mississippi, hidden in a narrow canyon in Custer County. Founded in 1877 and peaking in 1885 with around 300 residents, the town supported a stamp mill, five saloons, a hotel, and a small school. Silver mining shut down in 1915, the last permanent resident left in 1958, and Idaho added the site to the Land of the Yankee Fork State Park in 2006.
Today Bayhorse offers a rare combination: the wooden buildings still stand, the mill machinery is still in place, and you can walk through structures without the heavy infrastructure of a polished tourist attraction. The Bayhorse Mill, a multi story wood frame structure clinging to the canyon wall, is the iconic shot. The road in is dirt, the gate closes at sunset, and snow shuts the access most of winter.
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Bayhorse pairs naturally with a Galena Summit or Stanley Basin loop.
13. Illinois, Cairo
The abandoned places in Illinois are dominated by Cairo, pronounced KAY ro, sitting at the southern tip of the state where the Ohio and Mississippi rivers meet. In the 1920s the city had 15,000 residents and was one of the busiest steamboat hubs in the country. Decline came from multiple directions at once: the end of the steamboat economy, the construction of bridges that bypassed the river crossings, devastating racial violence and boycotts through the 1960s and 1970s that drove capital and people out, and finally suburban flight. By 2020, the population was under 1,700.
The downtown of Cairo is one of the most photographed examples of urban collapse in the Midwest. Entire blocks of commercial brick buildings stand empty, with collapsing roofs and trees growing through second floor windows. The Customs House (1872) still stands. The Magnolia Manor mansion (1869) is preserved. Everything between them is decay. It is genuinely sad to walk, which is part of why so few mainstream tour operators touch it. That same quality makes it the best urbex city in the state now that Damen Silos are gone, and one of the most photographed abandoned places in the lower Midwest.
Be respectful: people still live here, and the city has been the subject of decades of poverty tourism complaints.
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14. Indiana, City Methodist Church
The abandoned places in Indiana cluster around Gary, and City Methodist Church is the single most photographed Neo Gothic ruin in the American Midwest. Built between 1925 and 1926 at a cost of 800,000 dollars (US Steel contributed half), the nine story complex housed not only the sanctuary but a 1,000 seat Seaman's Hall theater, a gymnasium, classrooms, and offices. At its peak in the 1950s it counted around 3,000 parishioners. White flight and the collapse of Gary's steel economy drained the congregation; the church closed in 1975.
Forty nine years later, the building is roofless in places, its stone tracery and pointed arches open to the sky, ferns and saplings growing out of the choir loft. It has been used as a filming location for A Nightmare on Elm Street: Freddy vs. Jason and the original Transformers (the Decepticon battle scenes in Mission City). A partial demolition with potential tower preservation was announced in late 2024, so the window to see the full ruin may be closing.
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Gary itself contains roughly a dozen other abandoned places (the Palace Theater, Memorial Auditorium) for explorers who want to make a day of it.
15. Iowa, Buxton
Among the abandoned places in Iowa, Buxton is the most historically loaded; it is unusual on this list because almost nothing physical remains, yet the place matters enormously. Founded in 1895 by the Chicago and North Western Railway as a coal mining town in Monroe County, Buxton became one of the very few racially integrated communities in early twentieth century America. African American miners held leadership roles, lived in good housing, sent their children to schools alongside white children, used the YMCA pool, and made up the majority of the population. At its peak, Buxton had between 5,000 and 10,000 residents.
The coal seams played out by 1927. The town emptied. Today the site is open prairie crossed by faint road traces, the foundations of the YMCA, the brick remains of company buildings, and a stone monument that the Buxton Iowa Club placed in 1992. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1983. For a place that meant so much, the silence on the ground is overwhelming, which is exactly why historians and urbex photographers seek it out.
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Combine with a visit to the Iowa State Historical Society in Des Moines for original Buxton archives.
16. Kansas, Atlas F Missile Silo
The abandoned places in Kansas hide in plain sight, and the flat wheat belt hides one of the most accessible Cold War sites in the country. The Atlas F missile silo near Wilson, Kansas, was built between 1959 and 1961 as part of the first generation American intercontinental ballistic missile network. The site was operational from 1961 to 1965, sealed when the Titan replaced Atlas, and abandoned for decades after. Specifications: 176 feet deep, blast doors weighing 675 tons, nine feet of reinforced concrete.
Most of the twelve Atlas F silos around the Salina cluster have been privately purchased and either flooded or partially flooded. The one near Wilson has been converted into Atlas Ad Astra, a private space themed retreat and educational center, which means the underground complex (launch control center, equipment terminal, the silo itself) is the only Atlas F that you can legally descend into. The other silos in the network are sealed; some can be photographed externally from the surrounding farmland. The Kansas site is the cleanest example of a class of structures that defined the American twentieth century.
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For Cold War landscape continuity, drive north to the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex in North Dakota.
17. Kentucky, Old Crow Distillery
Kentucky's abandoned places lean on bourbon ruins, and the Old Crow Distillery on Glenns Creek in Woodford County, between Frankfort and Versailles, is a stone and brick complex from the early bourbon industry that closed in 1987 after Jim Beam absorbed the brand. Some warehouses are still actively aging spirit, but the production buildings (the original mash house, fermentation rooms, bottling line, the stone arches over Glenns Creek) have been sitting in a hauntingly photogenic state of neglect for almost forty years.
Across the road sits the equally abandoned Old Taylor Distillery (now partially revived as Castle and Key), and downstream the original Oscar Pepper site dates to 1817. This is the densest cluster of abandoned places tied to bourbon architecture in the country, and the stretch along Glenns Creek is sometimes called Bourbon Distillery Row of the dead. Old Crow itself is partially fenced; trespassing is illegal but the road approach is fully visible and several professional photographers (Sherman Cahal among them) have documented the interior under permission.
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A respectful daylight visit can be combined with a Castle and Key tasting across the creek.
18. Louisiana, Fort Macomb
With Six Flags New Orleans finally demolished in March 2026, the defining urbex spot among abandoned places in Louisiana is now Fort Macomb, a brick coastal defense fort built between 1822 and 1828 at the Chef Menteur Pass east of New Orleans. The fort was abandoned after the Civil War, briefly maintained as a fishing camp through the early twentieth century, and devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which left the structure as a half drowned brick ruin completely surrounded by water.
The fort sits on private property, sometimes accessible by boat or kayak through Lake Borgne, and gained a different kind of fame when it was used as a filming location for the True Detective Season 1 finale, doubling as the fictional Carcosa. The combination of subtropical decay, hurricane damage, dark Gothic interior architecture, and the cinematic association makes it one of the most atmospheric ruins in the Gulf South. Fort Pike, nine miles east, is a related and equally abandoned counterpart.
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Bring a kayak, bring insect repellent, and check tides.
19. Maine, Goddard Mansion
Among the abandoned places in Maine, Goddard Mansion is the easiest to reach: it sits inside Fort Williams Park in Cape Elizabeth, a short walk from the famous Portland Head Light. Built in 1858 as an Italianate residence for Colonel John Goddard, the stone manor became part of Fort Williams in 1900 and was used variously as officers' housing and storage. The Army stripped the lead roof and other valuable materials, and by 1981 the Cape Elizabeth fire department conducted controlled burns of the wooden interior to remove fire hazards. What remained is a roofless stone shell, dramatic against the Atlantic.
It is the most romantically photogenic abandoned place in northern New England, with empty window frames opening directly onto the ocean, ivy climbing the granite walls, and pine trees growing out of what was once the dining room. The mansion is fully accessible during the park's daylight hours, no fence, no ticket, no guided tour. The Portland Head Light is two minutes away on foot, which means you can shoot a five star lighthouse and a five star ruin in the same hour.
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Visit at golden hour from the ocean side for the best light.
20. Maryland, Forest Haven Asylum
Among the abandoned places in Maryland, Forest Haven, in Laurel, is the most disturbing institutional ruin on the East Coast. Opened in 1925 as the District Training School for the developmentally disabled, the facility was already collapsing into systemic abuse by the 1960s: physical and sexual assaults, children dying from improperly inserted feeding tubes, anonymous burials along the banks of the Patuxent River. Federal lawsuits forced it closed in October 1991. Most of the twenty two buildings still stand on a fenced, federally owned site that is regularly patrolled.
Forest Haven is genuinely dangerous to access (asbestos, collapsed floors, regular arrests) and the federal patrol is far more aggressive than the average state psychiatric site. That said, it is also one of the most heavily documented abandoned places in the mid Atlantic, with Matthew Christopher (Abandoned America) having produced the definitive photographic record. The exterior approach through the surrounding parkland is legal; entering buildings is not.
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If you want a less risky Maryland alternative, the Henryton State Hospital site is fully demolished, but Glenn Dale Hospital remains partially accessible from the road.
21. Massachusetts, Medfield State Hospital
The abandoned places in Massachusetts skew toward asylums, and Medfield State Hospital opened in 1892 as the first American psychiatric institution built on the Cottage Plan, an architectural model that broke up the single massive Kirkbride asylum building into dozens of smaller residential cottages spread across landscaped grounds. At its peak Medfield comprised roughly sixty buildings on 1.4 square miles. The hospital closed in April 2003, and the grounds were opened to the public as a town park, with the buildings sealed but their exteriors fully accessible.
The Cottage Plan layout makes Medfield uniquely photogenic: instead of one looming Gothic monster, you walk between dozens of medium sized brick buildings, each slightly different, each abandoned, set against open lawns and woodland. The site has hosted shoots for Shutter Island (2010), The Box, and Knives Out, which gives the campus a recognizable cinematic register even before you start exploring. Town residents walk dogs through the property. Photographers shoot dawn light against the brick facades.
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Massachusetts is unusually rich in abandoned psychiatric architecture; for a contrast, visit the demolished sites' photographic record at the Worcester State Hospital archives.
22. Michigan, Fisher Body Plant 21
With Michigan Central Station restored and the Packard Plant demolished, the defining icon among the abandoned places in Michigan is now Fisher Body Plant 21. Designed by Albert Kahn in 1919, the six story, 600,000 square foot factory built automobile bodies for Fisher Body and later General Motors until GM shuttered it in 1984. For forty years it sat above the I 75 and I 94 interchange as a billboard for industrial collapse, visible to millions of drivers per year.
A 134 million dollar rehabilitation project was announced in 2022 to convert the plant into mixed use housing, but as of 2026 the bulk of the building remains in its abandoned state. The signature shots are the empty production halls with their massive saw tooth windows admitting harsh north light, the spiral truck ramps that once carried unfinished bodies between floors, the freight elevators, and the rooftop view across the Detroit skyline. Access is officially restricted, and the redevelopment scaffolding is now appearing in parts of the building.
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Other abandoned places in Detroit worth pairing: Lee Plaza Hotel, the Grande Ballroom, St. Agnes Church.
23. Minnesota, Mill City Ruins
The abandoned places in Minnesota anchor on the Mississippi waterfront. The Washburn A Mill, built in 1874, is the structure that turned Minneapolis into the "Mill City" and the milling capital of the world. The mill exploded on May 2, 1878, killing eighteen workers in one of the deadliest industrial accidents in American history. Rebuilt the same year, it operated until 1965, then burned in 1991. What survived: massive limestone walls, the iron skeleton of the milling floors, grain elevators, train sheds, and the engine room.
The Mill City Museum and Mill Ruins Park opened in 2001, building a modern museum inside the stabilized ruins. The museum tour itself is curated, but the surrounding ruins along the Mississippi River are freely walkable, and the contrast between the industrial archaeology and the modern Minneapolis skyline across the river is unique among urbex USA landscapes. The Stone Arch Bridge, the only stone arch bridge spanning the Mississippi, frames every photograph.
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Best visited at dawn before the museum opens for ruin only photography.
24. Mississippi, Windsor Ruins
Of all the abandoned places in Mississippi, Windsor Ruins is the single most photographed antebellum ruin in the American South. Built between 1859 and 1861 for Smith Coffee Daniell II in Claiborne County, Mississippi, the mansion was the largest private residence in the state before the Civil War and famously survived Union occupation. Mark Twain mentions it in Life on the Mississippi. A house fire on February 17, 1890, started by a cigarette dropped in construction debris, destroyed the structure. What was left behind: twenty three complete Corinthian columns and five partial ones, standing in a field, supporting nothing.
The Mississippi Department of Archives and History stabilized the columns in 2023 and added an ADA accessible trail. The ruins are free, unfenced, and walkable in any weather, and they appear taller and more imposing in person than any photograph conveys. The site is rural, an hour southwest of Vicksburg, with no museum, no gift shop, no ticket booth, which is exactly what makes it qualify here.
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Pair with the Old Sheldon Church Ruins in South Carolina for the definitive Southern column ruins road trip.
25. Missouri, Times Beach
Among the abandoned places in Missouri, Times Beach carries the heaviest environmental story: the largest civilian dioxin exposure in American history. The small Route 66 town in St. Louis County hired contractor Russell Bliss to spray waste oil on its unpaved roads to control dust between 1972 and 1973. The oil was contaminated with TCDD dioxin. The Environmental Protection Agency confirmed catastrophic contamination in late 1982, the town was evacuated entirely in early 1983 (about 2,000 residents), Times Beach was disincorporated in 1985, and EPA decontamination ran from 1996 to 1997.
The site is now Route 66 State Park. The visitor center is a former roadhouse that survived the evacuation. The rest of the original town footprint is a flat, manicured grass plain with sidewalks leading nowhere, a remembered street grid traced by faint pavement, and interpretive signs marking where the school, the post office, and the bridge stood. It is the only town in the United States that was erased by an environmental disaster, then turned into a public park. The emptiness is the point.
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Combine with a Route 66 photographic loop south through Stanton and Cuba.
26. Montana, Garnet Ghost Town
Of the abandoned places in Montana, Garnet is widely considered the state's best preserved ghost town. The Bureau of Land Management took it over in 1971 and partnered with the nonprofit Garnet Preservation Association to stabilize but not over restore the buildings, which is a key distinction from Bannack State Park, which is more aggressively curated. About 1,000 gold miners lived here in the 1890s. The motherlode played out within twenty years, and the town was largely abandoned. It went onto the National Register of Historic Places in 2010.
Visitors can explore thirty original buildings, including the J.K. Wells Hotel, a saloon, several miners' cabins, a general store, and the schoolhouse. Garnet sits high in the Garnet Mountains east of Missoula, accessible by a steep dirt road that the BLM closes seasonally. The site sees around 16,000 visitors a year, which is enough for a small ranger presence but not enough to spoil the empty feel inside the buildings on a weekday morning. There is no entry fee for the buildings themselves.
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Stay at a Missoula cabin the night before; the drive in alone takes an hour from the highway.
27. Nebraska, Monowi
The abandoned places in Nebraska include the strangest entry on this list: Monowi, the only incorporated village in the United States with a population of one. Founded in 1902, the Boyd County town peaked at 150 residents in 1930 and emptied through the second half of the twentieth century as the rail line shrank and farms consolidated. The last two residents, Elsie and Rudy Eiler, ran the Monowi Tavern. When Rudy died in 2004, Elsie became the entire population. She acts as mayor, treasurer, clerk, librarian, and bartender. She files a municipal budget with the state every year.
The village contains abandoned buildings (a church, the old schoolhouse, a railway depot, several houses lost to time) standing beside Elsie's tavern, which is still open and serves cheeseburgers seven days a week. Around the tavern, the Rudy Eiler Memorial Library houses her late husband's 5,000 book collection in a small shed. This is the rare urbex listing where the most powerful image is the contrast: a single woman keeping a town legally alive while everything around her returns to prairie grass.
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Visit during tavern hours and order food; Elsie's entire income depends on travelers stopping in.
28. Nevada, Rhyolite
Among the abandoned places in Nevada, Rhyolite is the photogenic counterpart to Bodie: a gold rush ghost town on the edge of Death Valley with a much shorter and faster boom and bust cycle. The town exploded out of a 1905 gold strike, hit 3,500 to 5,000 residents by 1907, and was nearly empty by 1916 after the financial panic of 1907 wrecked Nevada mining. The signature ruin, the three story Cook Bank Building (1908, marble imported from Italy), is among the most photographed desert ruins in the American Southwest.
Nearby stands the Bottle House, built in 1906 from 50,000 beer bottles by Tom Kelly, and the iconic ghostly Tom Kelly stone facade with Death Valley framed behind it. The Goldwell Open Air Museum sits next door, with Albert Szukalski's plaster ghost sculptures arranged in the desert. The Bureau of Land Management manages the historic area, but access is free, the road is paved, and the site is open all hours, which means sunrise and sunset shots are unrestricted.
For a less visited alternative among abandoned places in Nevada, drive an hour to St. Thomas at the bottom of Lake Mead, where a flooded ghost town has been resurfacing since 2003.
29. New Hampshire, Madame Sherri's Castle
Of the abandoned places in New Hampshire, Madame Sherri's Castle is the single most romantic ruin in New England, a half collapsed stone stairway that climbs into empty air at the edge of a forest in Chesterfield. Antoinette Sherri, a New York theatrical costume designer, bought 600 acres here in 1929 and built a stone "castle" for her Parisian style parties, attracting a Manhattan cabaret crowd through the 1930s. She died poor in 1965. The castle burned to the ground on October 18, 1962. The fieldstone foundation, fireplaces, and the iconic curved exterior staircase remained standing.
In July 2021, part of the staircase collapsed, which only deepened the romantic ruin quality. The site sits inside the Madame Sherri Forest, a 488 acre preserve managed by the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests. Trails are free and unfenced. The staircase is reached by an easy half mile walk. Photographers shoot it with fog, with autumn foliage, with snow, and increasingly with elaborate wedding sessions, although the latter is technically discouraged.
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Pair with the nearby Bennington Triangle area in Vermont for a haunted New England weekend.
30. New Jersey, Ellis Island Hospital Complex
Among the abandoned places in New Jersey, the Ellis Island Hospital Complex is the largest abandoned hospital network most people have walked past without realizing. The 29 building south side of Ellis Island, built between 1910 and 1924, was the principal facility of the US Public Health Service, with 750 beds, isolation wards for tuberculosis and infectious disease, an autopsy theater, a morgue, and an entire children's ward. It closed in 1954 and sat in total decay for sixty years, visible from the immigration museum on the north side but completely off limits.
In October 2014, the nonprofit Save Ellis Island began offering "Hard Hat Tours" of the south side, the only legal way to enter. The tour winds through wards still containing original tile, rusted bed frames, peeling paint, and the photographs that French street artist JR pasted on the walls in 2014 (his "Unframed" installation, faces of former patients applied at life size to the buildings they died or recovered in). The art makes the ruin uniquely haunting.
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Book the Hard Hat Tour at least two weeks in advance; only one group per day enters.
31. New Mexico, Glenrio
The abandoned places in New Mexico include one with a foot in two states: Glenrio straddles the New Mexico and Texas state lines along old Route 66, which means it ran on two time zones simultaneously, peaked as a Mother Road service stop with diners, motels, and gas stations, and died when Interstate 40 bypassed it in the early 1970s. The State Line Motel still stands with its "First Motel in Texas, Last Motel in Texas" sign, the Little Juarez Diner shell remains, and gas pumps stand under empty canopies that have not pumped a gallon since the Nixon administration.
The town was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2007 as the Glenrio Historic District. About seventeen structures still stand. There are no fences and almost no residents. Photographers love it for the late afternoon shadows over Route 66 asphalt, the white painted signs against deep desert sky, and the absolute silence between cars. The wider Pixar movie Cars drew direct inspiration from this stretch of road.
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Drive the unpaved Route 66 alignment east from Glenrio into Texas for ten miles of pure abandoned roadway.
32. New York, Bannerman Castle
Among the abandoned places in New York, Bannerman Castle holds the most cinematic skyline: it sits on Pollepel Island, a 6.5 acre rock in the middle of the Hudson River fifty miles north of Manhattan. Frank Bannerman, a Scottish American military surplus dealer, bought the island in 1900 to store the thirty million rounds of ammunition his Brooklyn warehouse could no longer legally hold. He designed the buildings to look like a Scottish castle, and at its peak the arsenal housed one of the largest private munitions collections in the world. Massive explosions in 1920 caused structural damage. A 1969 fire gutted the interiors and brought down the roofs.
The ruin is now owned by New York State Parks and stabilized by the nonprofit Bannerman Castle Trust. The most evocative views come from the Amtrak Hudson Line, which passes the island at full speed, but the Trust runs walking tours and guided kayak trips from May through October. Tour numbers are tightly limited, which preserves the empty island feel even for visitors. Helicopter shots over the Hudson Highlands are spectacular.
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For a totally different abandoned place in New York, North Brother Island in the East River (where Typhoid Mary lived in isolation) is visible from the Bronx waterfront.
33. North Carolina, Henry River Mill Village
Of the abandoned places in North Carolina, Henry River Mill Village is the most cinematic: the abandoned cotton mill town in Burke County played District 12 in The Hunger Games (2012). Built between 1904 and 1907 to support a textile mill, the village housed mill workers and their families for seventy years. The mill burned in 1977. The village limped along, mostly empty, until local residents purchased the entire site in 2017 to preserve it from total ruin.
Twenty one original wooden mill houses still stand along a single main street, plus the company store and the foundation of the mill itself by the Henry Fork River. The owners now offer paid access during daylight hours, which puts the site into a borderline urbex category (still mostly raw, lightly managed, no museum infrastructure). The mill village rakes in attention from Hunger Games fans, but visit in mid week off season to get the abandoned company town atmosphere without the photo line at the Mellark Bakery house.
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Combine with a drive through Hickory, North Carolina, for additional abandoned textile mill architecture.
34. North Dakota, Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex
Among the abandoned places in North Dakota, the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex, better known as the Pyramid of North Dakota, is the most surreal Cold War ruin in the United States. Built near Nekoma, North Dakota at a cost of six billion dollars, the anti ballistic missile site was designed to intercept Soviet ICBMs aimed at Minuteman launch fields. The signature structure is a massive truncated concrete pyramid housing the Missile Site Radar, surrounded by silos for Spartan and Sprint nuclear interceptor missiles. The site became operational on October 1, 1975. Congress voted to deactivate it the next day. It cost six billion dollars and ran for one full day.
The complex sat abandoned from 1976 until 2022, when Bitzero Blockchain purchased it for a 500 million dollar data center conversion. The pyramid itself remains standing, visible from miles across the flat northern plains, sometimes compared to a Mayan or Egyptian monument dropped into the Great Plains. Access is restricted by the new owner but the road approach is fully visible and frequently photographed.
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For Cold War continuity, the missile silo fields of Minot Air Force Base lie just two hours west.
35. Ohio, Cincinnati Subway
Ohio's abandoned places include one of the strangest infrastructure ruins on the continent: the Cincinnati Subway, the largest abandoned subway system in the United States. Construction began in 1916 on top of the drained Miami and Erie Canal bed, intended to give Cincinnati a modern urban transit system. World War I, the Great Depression, and the automotive lobby killed the project before it ever opened. The city stopped work in 1928 with two miles of tunnel intact, four underground stations completed, and the bond debt still being paid off into the 1960s.
The tunnels run directly under Central Parkway, completely empty except for the occasional water main, dust, and graffiti from sanctioned access events. The Ohio Kentucky Indiana Regional Council of Governments and the Cincinnati Museum Center have offered occasional tours through the years, but most of the system sits in absolute silence, perfectly preserved 1920s subway architecture under one of the busiest streets in southern Ohio. Hopple Street station is the most accessible photographically.
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If you want above ground urbex in the USA's Ohio belt, Chippewa Lake Park (a century old amusement park that closed in 1978 and was swallowed by forest) is a counterpart.
36. Oklahoma, Picher
Of the abandoned places in Oklahoma, Picher is the most toxic ghost town in America. Lead and zinc were discovered in 1913 in Ottawa County, and by 1926 the town held 14,252 residents. The Tri State Mining District around Picher produced fifty percent of the lead and zinc the United States used during World War I. The price was contamination: massive mounds of "chat" (toxic metallic mining residue) ringed the town, ground water became dangerous, and a 1994 study found that 34 percent of Picher children had lead poisoning. The site became a Superfund priority in 1983 as part of the Tar Creek complex.
A federal buyout evacuated most residents through the 2000s. An EF 4 tornado on May 10, 2008 destroyed 160 houses and killed six people. Picher was officially unincorporated on November 26, 2013. The town now consists of abandoned streets winding between massive grey chat piles that look almost geological, a few unmovable holdouts in the few houses that remain occupied, and the EPA cleanup zone. Do not stay long, do not picnic, do not dig.
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The site is the closest thing in the United States to the abandoned exclusion zones of post Soviet Eastern Europe.
37. Oregon, Shaniko
Among the abandoned places in Oregon, Shaniko is the best preserved high desert town. It was the Wool Capital of the World in 1900. The Columbia Southern Railway terminus at the edge of the Oregon high desert made it the largest sheep wool transit point on the West Coast, with millions of pounds passing through annually. When the rail extension diverted the wool trade ten years later, the population emptied rapidly. Today around thirty residents remain in a town that once supported hotels, saloons, banks, schools, and railroad infrastructure.
The Shaniko Hotel (1900) is partially restored. The wooden water tower, the old fire station, the city hall, and the schoolhouse stand intact. Most other commercial buildings are empty or used as storage. The town sits on Route 97 and gets passing tourist traffic, but mid week and off season it functions as a ghost town in the true sense: you can walk the streets and hear nothing but wind through cracked window frames.
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Combine with the abandoned railway grade running south to Antelope for a half day photographic loop.
38. Pennsylvania, Centralia
Among the abandoned places in Pennsylvania, Centralia is the only town in the United States where the ground is literally on fire. An underground anthracite coal seam was ignited on May 27, 1962, almost certainly by burning trash dumped into an abandoned mine entrance during a Memorial Day cleanup. The fire has been burning continuously for sixty four years. It has consumed an estimated thousands of tons of coal and is expected to keep burning for another century.
Federal eminent domain claimed the town in 1992. The ZIP code was revoked in 2002. The population has dropped from 1,500 in 1981 to fewer than five residents today. The cemetery is still there. Roads buckle from the heat. Sulfur steam rises from cracks in the asphalt. The site directly inspired the Silent Hill video game and films. Walking the old Route 61 (the "Graffiti Highway," buried under fill in 2020 to discourage visitors) used to be the iconic experience; now the surface routes are the main attraction.
Park outside town and walk in. Avoid the smoke vents in summer when the ground heat is highest.
39. Rhode Island, Rocky Point Amusement Park
Of the abandoned places in Rhode Island, Rocky Point carries the longest pedigree: opened in the 1840s, it is one of the oldest amusement parks in American history. Through the twentieth century it ran the Cyclone roller coaster, the Russian Toboggan, the Corkscrew, and the famous Shore Dinner Hall, which served clam cakes to generations of New Englanders. Bankruptcy closed the park in 1996. For more than a decade, the rusting rides, the boardwalks, and the Shore Dinner Hall sat untouched, becoming the most photographed abandoned place in Rhode Island during the 2000s.
The state purchased the land, conducted controlled demolition, and reopened Rocky Point State Park on June 26, 2014. Most of the ride structures are gone, but the World's Fair Arch from the 1964 New York fair, the Skyliner gondola tower, and several concrete foundations were intentionally preserved. The site is now a free public coastal park, accessible all daylight hours, with the abandoned amusement park artifacts integrated into the trail system. It is the rare abandoned place you can take your grandmother to.
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For pre demolition imagery, search archived Killer Urbex coverage from 2010 to 2013.
40. South Carolina, Old Sheldon Church Ruins
Of the abandoned places in South Carolina, the Old Sheldon Church Ruins in Beaufort County are arguably the most photogenic single ruin on the American East Coast. Built between 1745 and 1753 as Prince William's Parish Church, the structure was one of the first conscious American attempts to imitate a Greek temple. British troops burned it in May 1779 during the Revolutionary War. The congregation rebuilt. In 1865, Sherman's troops (or, depending on the account, freed slaves searching for building materials) gutted it again. It was never rebuilt.
Four full Doric columns of the portico, the brick walls measuring three and a half feet thick, and the rectangular floor plan remain. Live oaks dripping Spanish moss frame everything. The site sits in deep coastal woods off Highway 17, north of Beaufort, with no fence, no admission fee, and only modest interpretive signage. It is open from dawn to dusk and is a popular wedding location, which means weekday mornings produce the most evocative empty shots.
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Combine with a drive to the Hunting Island Light and the abandoned Combahee plantations.
41. South Dakota, Black Hills Ordnance Depot
The abandoned places in South Dakota include one of the largest military ruins on the continent. The Black Hills Ordnance Depot, informally known as Igloo, is a 1942 World War II munitions depot in Fall River County. It supplied the US Army Pacific Theater with explosives. The complex consists of 802 reinforced concrete bunkers built in characteristic semi buried "igloo" shape, plus a residential community that supported 7,000 workers at peak and was the fifteenth largest city in South Dakota in the 1950s. Young Tom Brokaw grew up here. The depot closed on June 30, 1967.
The igloos still stand in their hundreds, lined up across miles of prairie like a science fiction landscape. The Vivos Group purchased a portion in 2017 to convert 575 of the bunkers into a private survivalist community called xPoint, which means roughly a third of the site is now occupied or being renovated. The other two thirds remain in abandoned condition, fenced but visible from miles in every direction. Drone photography reveals the scale better than any ground level shot.
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The town site of Igloo itself, west of the depot, has been mostly demolished but foundations and street grids remain.
42. Tennessee, Elkmont
Among the abandoned places in Tennessee, Elkmont is the only one set inside a national park: an abandoned resort village inside Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The Little River Lumber Company logged the area heavily through the early twentieth century. Around 1910, the company sold some of the land to wealthy Knoxville families who built the Appalachian Clubhouse and a small village of summer cottages. When the park service acquired the land in the 1930s, residents were given long term leases. The last leases expired in 1992, and the village emptied.
For about twenty five years the cabins sat exactly as their last occupants had left them. Curtains in windows. Kitchen tables set. A complete abandoned place in the form of an American vacation village inside a national park. In 2018, the park service demolished most of the buildings but preserved nineteen, including the Appalachian Clubhouse and Spence Cabin, which they have stabilized. The remaining cabins line the Little River Trail and are fully walkable. In June, synchronous fireflies make Elkmont one of the most magical urbex USA experiences in the country.
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The trail to the abandoned village runs from the Elkmont Campground; bring insect repellent in summer.
43. Texas, Baker Hotel
Among the abandoned places in Texas, the Baker Hotel) in Mineral Wells towers above the rest: a 1929 fourteen story Spanish Colonial Revival hotel that was the most luxurious thermal spa west of the Mississippi River. T.B. Baker built it to capitalize on the famous "Crazy Water" wells of Mineral Wells, then drawing celebrities, oilmen, and Texas politicians for the supposed health benefits. The hotel had 450 rooms and the first hotel swimming pool in Texas. Clark Gable, Judy Garland, and Lyndon B. Johnson all stayed here. Declining health tourism in the 1950s killed business. The Baker closed in 1972.
The hotel sat empty for forty seven years, with locals describing the dark fourteen story silhouette over Mineral Wells as the most haunted building in north Texas (multiple suicide stories from the 1930s). In 2019 a development partnership purchased the property and began a 65 million dollar restoration, scheduled to reopen the hotel in 2028. As of 2026, the building remains in its abandoned state, with active construction crews on site. Several photographers have documented the interior under permission. The exterior is fully visible from the public street.
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For rawer abandoned places in Texas, combine with the mercury mining ghost town of Terlingua near Big Bend.
44. Utah, Grafton
Among the abandoned places in Utah, Grafton is the most photographed ghost town in the American West. The Mormon pioneer settlement was founded in 1859 along the Virgin River, in the cotton growing region Brigham Young called "Utah's Dixie." Repeated floods (1862, 1864), conflicts with the Paiute during the Black Hawk War in 1866, and the impossibility of farming the silt heavy bottom land slowly drained the population. The last permanent resident left in 1944. The town was used as the location for the bicycle scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969).
The Grafton Heritage Partnership has stabilized the surviving structures: the schoolhouse / church, the Russell house, the Wood house, and the cemetery, all set against the red sandstone cliffs of Zion National Park. The site is reached by a five mile gravel road from Rockville, accessible all hours, no admission fee. The cemetery, with the simple sandstone markers of Mormon settlers, is the most powerful single image of the visit. Sunrise here is unmatched.
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Combine with the empty road to Cane Beds and the Pipe Spring National Monument.
45. Vermont, Glastenbury
The abandoned places in Vermont include one paranormal centerpiece: Glastenbury is the only fully unincorporated ghost town in the state, and the center of the so called Bennington Triangle, an area of southern Vermont where five people vanished without trace between 1945 and 1950. The original logging and charcoal community peaked at 241 residents in 1880, was undone by two unsolved murders (1892 and 1897) and major floods in 1898, and was officially disincorporated by the state legislature in 1937. Around five people live in the surrounding area today.
The site itself is mostly forest now. Foundations of the resort hotel, a stone cellar from the boarding house, traces of the old narrow gauge railroad bed, the granite remains of the school. The Bennington Triangle disappearances (Joseph Citro coined the term in 1992) added a layer of paranormal interest, and the surrounding Glastenbury Wilderness is one of the wildest stretches of the Long Trail. Hike the Bald Mountain trail to reach the most evocative ruins. The combination of New England forest reclaiming a town, plus genuinely unsolved missing persons cases, makes it singular.
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Pair with the abandoned Hoosac Tunnel further south in Massachusetts for a paranormal weekend.
46. Virginia, DeJarnette Sanitarium
Among the abandoned places in Virginia, the DeJarnette Sanitarium outside Staunton is the most disturbing abandoned hospital on the American East Coast, not because of the architecture but because of what happened inside. Dr. Joseph DeJarnette, director of the Western State Hospital next door, opened the sanitarium in 1932 as a semi private facility for Virginia's elites. He was also the most aggressive proponent of eugenic sterilization in twentieth century America, performing thousands of forced procedures on patients designated "defective." He famously declared in the 1930s that "Nazi Germany is beating us at our own game."
The building closed in 1996 and has decayed since, with reinforced anti trespassing measures added in 2025 after years of urbex break ins. The structure itself is a typical period brick institutional building, but the historical weight makes it incomparable. The exterior approach from the adjacent road is legal. Anything else is not, and Virginia authorities have grown notably less tolerant of trespassers in 2025 and 2026.
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The nearby Western State Hospital was partially redeveloped into apartments; the DeJarnette site remains an active research target for medical historians.
47. Washington, Northern State Hospital
Of the abandoned places in Washington, Northern State Hospital in Sedro Woolley has the most distinctive architecture. It opened in 1912 and was designed by John Charles Olmsted, son of the man who designed Central Park. The campus is built in Spanish Colonial Revival, which is unexpected in the wet conifer forest of Skagit Valley but creates one of the most architecturally distinctive abandoned hospital complexes in the American West. The facility functioned as a self contained city of around 2,700 patients at its peak, with a 700 acre farm, dairy, bakery, gym, library, and theater.
The hospital closed on August 16, 1973. The grounds were converted into the Northern State Recreation Area, which means the surrounding farmland and the trails are open to the public, but the main hospital buildings are sealed and posted. Several auxiliary buildings have collapsed or been demolished. The cemetery contains the remains of around 1,500 unmarked patient graves. The exterior approach is fully legal and photographically rich, with mosses and ferns growing on the orange tile roofs and white stucco walls.
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The Skagit Tulip Festival in April brings additional visitors to the area, but the hospital grounds remain quiet year round.
48. West Virginia, Thurmond
Among the abandoned places in West Virginia, Thurmond is the ghost town that hosted more annual coal tonnage than Cincinnati at its peak. Captain William Thurmond founded the town in the 1880s along the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway in the New River Gorge, and by 1910 the rail hub generated 4.8 million dollars in annual freight revenue, making Thurmond's banks among the wealthiest in the state. The town once hosted the world's longest poker game (fourteen years, in the Dunglen Hotel). Two devastating fires and the shift from steam to diesel locomotives killed the place by the 1940s.
The National Park Service took over the town in 2003 and has stabilized about twenty buildings, including the iconic 1904 depot, which now serves as a small park visitor center. Five permanent residents technically remain, but the empty rail tracks, abandoned coaling station, and silent storefronts dominate the experience. Thurmond appeared in the film Matewan (1987) and is the central location of the New River Gorge National Park's industrial history. It is the rare abandoned place where the access is paved and family safe.
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Combine with a hike to the New River Gorge Bridge overlook for context.
49. Wisconsin, Maribel Caves Hotel
Of the abandoned places in Wisconsin, the Maribel Caves Hotel, also known as Hotel Hell, sits in Cooperstown and is one of the most legendary abandoned hotels in the Midwest. Built in 1900 over a natural mineral spring, the three story sandstone hotel attracted health tourists who drank the famously cold spring water for therapeutic purposes. By the 1930s the place had become a quieter haunt, with persistent rumors that Al Capone hid here during raids on Chicago speakeasies. A fire in 1984 gutted the interior. A tornado on August 7, 2013, brought down another section of the structure.
What remains is a stone shell sitting at the edge of the Maribel Caves County Park, surrounded by forest and the mineral spring caves the hotel was built to exploit. Local legend holds that the well behind the hotel is a "portal to hell," reinforced by the unusually cold air that vents from the cave system in winter. The property is technically private, owned by the Lyman family, but fully visible from the adjacent county park.
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Halloween and snow conditions transform the site into one of the most cinematic urbex USA shoots in Wisconsin.
50. Wyoming, South Pass City
Among the abandoned places in Wyoming, South Pass City in Fremont County is the ghost town where American women won the vote. Mormon prospectors found gold in the Wind River Range in the summer of 1867, and the boom town that followed peaked at around 2,000 residents in the 1870s. The town gave the world two firsts in 1869 and 1870: William Bright, a South Pass City legislator, drafted and pushed through the bill that made Wyoming the first government anywhere in the world to grant women the right to vote (December 1869); and Esther Hobart Morris, a South Pass City resident, became the first woman in the United States to hold a public office (February 1870, as Justice of the Peace).
The gold played out fast. The town emptied. Wyoming designated South Pass City a State Historic Site in 1966 and has preserved or stabilized twenty three original structures, with around 30,000 original artifacts on display. The town is closed in winter and lightly staffed in summer, which means that at sunrise on a weekday in June you can have the entire ghost town to yourself. The Smith Sherlock General Store, the saloon, the bank, the Wells Fargo office, and Esther Hobart Morris's cabin all still stand.
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Combine with the abandoned mining town of Atlantic City three miles away for a fuller picture of the abandoned places in Wyoming's gold country.
FAQ
Is urban exploration legal in the USA?
Legal urbex USA varies entirely with the site and the state. Federally managed sites (NPS ghost towns like Thurmond, Kennecott, or Times Beach) are legal to walk during posted hours, but entering structures or going off trail can carry federal charges. State parks containing abandoned structures (Bodie, Rocky Point, Bannack) usually allow exterior access only. Private property abandoned sites (Discovery Island, Forest Haven, Fisher Body 21) are trespassing without exception. Penalties range from a 250 dollar citation to felony charges in states like Florida and Virginia where 2024 to 2026 anti urbex enforcement has hardened. Always check current rules before each visit, never break locks, never tag, never take artifacts.
What state has the most active urbex scene?
Michigan and Pennsylvania remain the densest urbex USA states by community size and documented sites. Detroit produced an entire generation of urbex photography in the 2000s and 2010s, and despite the Packard Plant demolition and Michigan Central restoration, the city still holds Fisher Body 21, Lee Plaza, the Grande Ballroom, and around sixty churches. Pennsylvania combines Centralia, Pennhurst, the Carrie Furnaces, and a dense network of coal patch towns. New York is third by site count, with Bannerman Castle, North Brother Island, Letchworth, and Kings Park.
Are these spots safe to visit?
The legal sites in this list are mostly safe, with normal precautions for ruined buildings (loose stone, broken glass, asbestos in pre 1980 institutional buildings). Picher, Oklahoma is genuinely dangerous due to ongoing lead and zinc contamination; do not drink water, do not handle chat pile material, do not stay overnight. Centralia has live carbon monoxide and methane vents; avoid steam holes. Discovery Island and Forest Haven are not legal to enter and active law enforcement will arrest visitors. Kalapana sits on cooled but unstable lava with deep crevasses. Always carry water, a flashlight, and let someone know your route.
Where can I find verified GPS coordinates?
The coordinates in this article are accurate to roughly 100 meters, which is enough to find the site by car. For exact entry points and current access conditions, we recommend the Urbex Maps interactive map, which combines verified community submitted points with current access status (open, restricted, demolished, restored). For protected sites (Forest Haven, DeJarnette, Maribel Caves) coordinates are deliberately approximate to discourage trespassing.
What gear do I need?
For accessible sites (Goddard Mansion, Old Sheldon Church, Mill City Ruins, Rocky Point, Windsor Ruins) standard hiking gear is enough. For dirt road ghost towns (Garnet, Bayhorse, Grafton, St. Elmo) a high clearance vehicle is recommended and four wheel drive is required for several. For Kalapana, sturdy boots and water are mandatory; the lava cuts unprotected shoes within minutes. For any institutional building approach (Medfield, Northern State, Central State) an N95 mask, gloves, and headlamp are basic, plus a buddy. Never explore alone.
Has urbex changed in 2026?
Yes, significantly. The combination of high profile demolitions through 2024 to 2026 (Packard, Six Flags New Orleans, Belle Isle Zoo, Damen Silos), high profile restorations (Michigan Central), and aggressive new anti trespassing legislation in Florida, Virginia, and Tennessee has shifted the urbex USA landscape more in the past three years than in the previous twenty. Several iconic sites are gone or about to be. The fifty spots in this list were selected to be still real in 2026, but a follow up audit will be needed in 2027 as Baker Hotel, Lee Plaza, and Fisher Body Plant 21 enter active rehabilitation.
Conclusion
Fifty states, fifty sites that still qualify as abandoned places in 2026, ranging from a single woman holding a Nebraska town together to a Cold War pyramid in the empty plains of North Dakota. The urbex USA map is unlike anywhere else on Earth: vast, varied, and constantly disappearing. Centralia keeps burning. Kalapana keeps sinking under fresh lava. Picher keeps poisoning the groundwater. Bodie sits in arrested decay above the Sierra Nevada. Forest Haven crumbles under federal patrol. Each of these places asks a different question about American history (about race, about labor, about industry, about war, about disease, about ambition) and each one answers in the same medium: empty rooms, empty streets, cracked concrete, and silence.
Use this guide as a starting point. Always check current access status. Respect remaining residents (Monowi, St. Elmo, Cairo, Centralia, Picher). Never break locks, never tag, never take artifacts. The most valuable thing you can leave behind is your light footprint and your photographs.
For the complete interactive map of verified abandoned places across the United States, with current access status, GPS coordinates, and community comments, visit the Urbex Maps platform. And if you discover an abandoned place missing from our database, submit it here to keep this urbex USA living archive of American decay current.
See also
- ●Abandoned Haunted Places in the USA: 16 Paranormal Urbex Sites
- ●Ghost Towns USA: 20 Iconic Places Where Time Stopped
- ●Centralia, Pennsylvania: Inside America's Burning Ghost Town
- ●North Brother Island: Typhoid Mary's Prison and NYC's Forbidden Ruin
- ●Picher, Oklahoma: America's Most Toxic Superfund Ghost Town
- ●
