• Tagged abandoned, abandoned asylum, abandoned DC, abandoned Forest Haven asylum, abandoned schools, Forest Haven, urban exploration, urban explorers, urbex

Once upon a time, the story of Forest Haven was happy and hopeful because the state-of-the-art D.C. Training School would help developmentally and mentally handicapped children and adults learn skills to help them survive in the real world instead of being institutionalized. That was 1925; the Forest Haven facilities grew to a compound with over 22 buildings spread over 250 acres. By 1991, the story of Forest Haven was a heartbreaking horror story as hundreds of residents died of abuse and neglect before the U.S. Justice Department forced the District of Columbia institution closed. “What we have here are quiet little murders,” explained a Justice Department expert witness in a 1994 article. “They’re killed one day at a time because people don’t pay attention and then no one finds out the real cause of death.” Before everything was said and done, Forest Haven ended up being one of the worst cases of criminal institutional abuse that the U.S. has ever seen. Oh the sickeningly sad stories the walls would tell you if only they could. Now, over 20 years later, this is the abandoned Forest Haven asylum. [44 Photos]

• Tagged abandoned, abandoned Sanatorium, abandoned tuberculosis hospital, haunted Waverly, Kentucky, Louisville, paranormal, paranormal phenomena, Waverly Hills Sanatorium

This former tuberculosis hospital has been called one of the most terrifying, most haunted, places in America. At least 6,000 people died there, many taken out through a ‘death chute’ tunnel, and Waverly Hills reached urban legend ghost status. Built in 1926, the massive Gothic architecture housed TB patients suffering from the “White Plague” with no antibiotic cure on the horizon. It closed in 1962, then became a facility for the elderly, but was shut down for patient abuse by Kentucky state officials in 1982. Here’s a ‘spooky USA’ armchair visit to a place of history and mystery, Waverly Hills Sanatorium. [66 Photos, 6 Videos]

• Tagged abandoned, abandoned Varosha, Cyprus, Famagusta, ghost town

Imagine yourself on an island in the Mediterranean with beautiful white sand beaches, warm weather, fantastic places to shop, fine dining, and modern luxurious hotels that are frequented by the vacationing rich and famous. Then boom, the island is invaded and you must flee for your life from that slice of paradise. From tourist hotspot to ghost town, it’s a No Man’s Land with ruins that are rotting away. This happened: the island is Cyprus, the year was 1974, and the area was known as Varosha, a section of Famagusta. The crumbling vacation resort is a “forbidden zone” that has been stuck in time and slowly decaying for nearly 40 years. Sure, you could cross the “Buffer Zone” to see what that moment in time looked like when people fled and Varosha was abandoned, but if caught . . . trespassers will be shot on the spot. [36 Photos]

• Tagged abandoned, abandoned schools, defunct schools, derelict schools, haunted schools, salute to graduates, school's out

Summer is almost here. For those of you who are graduating, we salute you. Congratulations! For everyone else, school’s out for summer break. School is out forever for these abandoned schools, reform schools, boys’ schools, girls’ schools, vocational schools, college’s and universities. [46 Photos, 2 Videos]

• Tagged A Good Day to Die Hard, abandoned amusement park, abandoned ghost town, adrenaline rush, Chernobyl, Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant., disaster, ghost town, nuclear power plant disaster, Pripyat, Red Forest, reverse ecotourism, Ukraine, urban exploration, urbex

The Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster happened 27 years ago on April 26, 1986. After the explosion, a radius of 18.6 miles (30 km) was setup as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. That “zone of alienation” is becoming more frequently seen in popular culture; it was seen in the 2013 film A Good Day to Die Hard, in the 2012 Chernobyl Diaries and also in the 2011 movie Transformers: Dark of the Moon. The area is featured in hundreds of documentaries and even early on in the 1998 film Godzilla as a researcher studies the mutational effects of radiation on native earthworms. It’s the nightmare setting for several video games. Although urban explorers have been coming to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone for years, Ukrainian officials opened the zone for tourists with “special permission” in 2011. Whether you call it reverse eco-tourism, terror tourism, or an adrenaline rush urban exploration, it would undoubtedly be surreal to experience. Some claim it’s haunted, while others think it’s a dream setting for playing a zombie apocalypse-like paintball gun war. Thanks to those that were brave enough to take up their cameras and Geiger counters, we can take a virtual tour of the Exclusion Zone. It includes Prypiat, Prypiat amusement park, Polissya hotel, the Red Forest and more places stuck in time as everyone was evacuated with no time to pack. This is what visiting the Chernobyl disaster after almost 27 years looks like, since criteria for this photo essay included being creative commons photos taken as recently as possible with as many different radioactive areas as possible. Enjoy!
[69 Photos, 8 Videos]

• Tagged abandoned, Battleship Island, Ghost Island, Gunkanjima, hacking headquarters of a 007 villain, Hashima, Hashima Island, James Bond, lost city, Skyfall, urban exploration, urbex

This abandoned island with crumbling concrete buildings was the inspiration for the evil dude’s hacking headquarters in the latest James Bond movie Skyfall. Yes, hacking, cyberwar and an abandoned island city are all parts of ‘Skyfall. It was too dangerous here to truly film the secret lair of a 007 villain, so it was reproduced to “make everything real.” Hashima Island, also called Gunkanjima meaning Battleship Island, is Japan’s ultimate industrial ruins ghost town. The island was bought by Mitsubishi in 1890 to mine undersea coal. It was the first place that Japan built large concrete buildings up to 9 stories high, and was constructed to withstand the destructive forces of a typhoon. The island at one point had a population of 5,259, but that did not last. 39 years after it was abandoned virtually overnight, time and nature are winning the battle. Considered creepy by some with all the trappings of home but no people, some folks started to call the abandoned island, ‘Ghost Island.’ Folks interested in history or legal urbex are pleased that portions of Hashima reopened to tourists in 2009. This is the first ‘lost city’ in modern times and with the James Bond movie Skyfall, the infamous island has become even more famous. [35 Photos, 3 Videos]

• Tagged Angkor, archaeological, Cambodia, Indiana Jones, Laura Croft, rock-cut architecture, Ta Prohm, Temple of Doom, Tomb Raider, UNESCO World Heritage Site

Once upon a time, or around 1580, while cutting a path through the thick Cambodian jungle, Portuguese missionaries came upon huge towers carved into rocks that were in ruins and covered in roots and vines. Continuing on, they discovered an ancient lost city that was twice as large as Manhattan and that nature was trying to swallow. The missionaries had discovered abandoned Angkor Wat—the 500-acre site is one of the world’s largest religious monuments and the most elaborate of the Angkor’s temples. There are more than 1,000 Temples of Angkor which were built from the 9th to 13th centuries during a time when the Kingdom of Cambodia was one of the most powerful civilizations on the planet. There were rarely any inscriptions found in later centuries after 1431, when Angkor was seized by the Thai army. During its prime, as many as 750,000 – one million people lived in Angkor, making it one of the greatest vanishing acts of all time. Archaeologists now know that Angkor Wat and many of its surrounding structures were built to appease “devas” and “asuras” which are angelic demi-Gods of the Hindu religion. Thousands upon thousands of these demi-god beings are carved into every single rock temple at the site. Both Tomb Raider and Indiana Jones Temple of Doom were filmed here. Angkor Archaeological Park was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1992. New research claims to have solved the mystery of how the huge stones of Angkor Wats were moved. “The massive sandstone bricks used to construct the 12th-century temple of Angkor Wat were brought to the site via a network of hundreds of canals. The findings shed light on how the site’s 5 million to 10 million bricks, some weighing up to 3,300 pounds, made it to the temple from quarries at the base of a nearby mountain.” The mystique of Angkor may cry out to the adventurer in us all, but the roots and trees are now being cut back as Angkor is being restored. So many people come here, about 2 – 3 million a year; all that walking and climbing on the (mostly) sandstone monuments caused additional damage to the archaeological sites at Angkor. These photos hearken to ancient Angkor as the Temples of Doom for a Tomb Raider to explore. [41 Photos, 4 Videos]

• Tagged abandoned, abandoned amusement park, abandoned asylum, abandoned hospital, abandoned manor house, abandoned prison, abandoned sanitorium, abandoned theme park, adrenaline junkies, adrenaline rush, Andre Govia, art, creepy, creepy dolls, Europe, feature, Halloween, haunted, haunted house, holiday, scary, spooky, urban exploration, urban explorers, urbex, urbexing photography

Urbex guru Andre Govia has an uncanny ability to take the most amazingly beautiful photos of creepy abandoned places. If you like abandoned, creepy, spooky, scary or haunted, then you could disappear for hours into Andre’s photostream. He’s a master of capturing hauntingly beautiful shots of abandoned mansions, hospitals, asylums, industrial complexes, hotels and about anything else you can imagine that might be abandoned across Europe. Andre Govia is on an urbex European madness tour; the fear factor is off the charts and some of the photos could scare the snot out of you. He’s been urbexing all over the globe and in 22 different countries. He and his adrenaline junkie buddies have Fright Night down to a fine art, exploring places caught in a time-warp, locations where history is frozen in time, and capturing ghosts of the past. Interesting at any time, it’s downright spooky to view his artistic photos around Halloween. Be ready to take a trip through some of the creepy, haunted locations. Andre granted Love These Pics an interview and offers tips for urban explorers and secrets to get the killer shots. His photos offer something for everyone, from elegant and hauntingly beautiful, to a scare factor that is the stuff of nightmares. Meet Andre Govia. We love these pics! [47 Photos, 1 Video]

• Tagged abandoned, abandoned boats, ancient shipwrecks, decay, destruction, disaster, relic, rusty and crusty, sea, seaside, shipwreck, shipwrecks, transportation, wrecks

We expect to see ships from land as they sail away, but there is something eerily intriguing about ships that you see from land because they are above-water wrecks. Some are rusty and crusty shipwrecks that didn’t sink completely underwater, while others crashed, collided, or ran aground on the sandy beach or rocky reef. Yet other wrecks were perfectly fine ships that nature picked up and tossed on land via a hurricane, typhoon or tsunami. Even though these abandoned boats litter nature, the shores or shallow waters, there is still a haunting beauty to wrecks and to seascapes with relic ribs where ghostly wreckage remains. It makes us ponder what the story is behind these shipwrecks visible from land and what the sailors endured. The United Nations estimates more than 3 million shipwrecks litter the ocean floor, but we could find no estimate to the number of boats that are abandoned, derelict or beached worldwide. Here are 48 fabulous photos showing eerily intriguing shipwrecks in varying states of destruction and decay. [48 Photos]

• Tagged abandoned, archaeological, architecture, coastal fortress, coral reefs, diving, DRTO, Dry Tortugas, Dry Tortugas National Park, ecosystem, environment, Florida, fort, Fort Jefferson, Garden Key, ghost town, island, islands, Key West, lighthouse, Loggerhead Key, marine life, National Park, nature, sea, shipwreck, shipwreck diving, snorkel, sunken treasure, treasure hunting, wreck diving

About 70 miles west of Key West, Florida, lies Dry Tortugas National Park which is world-renowned for picturesque blue sea waters, white sands, brightly colorful coral reefs, abundant marine life, and legends of shipwrecks and sunken treasures. There are seven small islands in the 100-square mile park, but it is mostly open water that is accessible only by boat or seaplane. Dry Tortugas is also famous as the home of magnificent and historic Fort Jefferson, the largest masonry building in the Western Hemisphere. Though it was not finished, the fort has more than 16 million bricks that make up the massive 45-foot-high, three-level hexagon, coastal fortress that has 2,000 architecturally beautiful arches. [44 Fabulous Photos]

• Tagged abandoned, abandoned Emge Food Processing Plant, abandoned Indiana, abandoned slaughterhouse, adrenaline rush, decay, demolition, Emge Foods, Fort Branch, urban exploration, urbex, urbex Emge

Emge Foods Plant in Fort Branch, Indiana, is listed as “Emge Foods Plant: Tourists’ most wanted hotspots on Google Maps …” on Wikimapia. I was looking for urban decay, but discovered a previously burned and partially demolished Emge Food Processing Plant where an adventure included a little climbing and even a bit of caving . . . urban exploration is after-all a type of ‘extreme sport‘ and adrenaline rush. On Memorial Day, when it seemed most unlikely anyone would pay double-time for a security guard, a trip for an urbex adventure sounded fun. Once I got there, come to find out, it’s in the midst of being demolished. Just the same, I’d made the trip so little things like ‘no trespassing,’ security cameras and danger zone weren’t going to stop me. I spent the next three hours inside the place, armed with my camera, probably the very last urban explorer to go inside. I’ve done a lot of adrenaline rush adventures and urban explorations, but nothing abandoned, burned, flooded, and a pile of wreckage being demolished. It caught fire yet again a few short days after this trip. It smelled terrible in spots, old burned asbestos, and then stagnate flooded areas down below. Fairly treacherous. Good times. Had fun and wanted to share the abandoned slaughterhouse tour. [72 Photos]

• Tagged archaeological, China, dive, diving, lake, Lion City, lost city, photography, Qiandao Lake, Shi Cheng, Thousand Island Lake, underwater

Once upon a time, an ancient city in China was named Lion City because Five Lion Mountain loomed large behind it. The city, also known as Shi Cheng, has been buried beneath the water for 53 years. Like the lost Incan City of Machu Picchu was ‘rediscovered,’ so was this lost underwater city that had been founded about 1,300 years ago. Lion City is now located about 85 – 131 feet (26-40 meters) beneath the gorgeous Thousand Island Lake (Qiandao Lake). This valley was submerged when a dam was constructed and a lake was needed. The lake and thousands of islands were man-made. Shi Cheng ‘defied’ the Chinese norm since 5 gates and 5 towers were built into the city instead of 4. Lion City is about the size of 62 football fields. International archaeologists and a film crew recorded the amazing perservation of the lost ‘ruins.’ [23 Photos, 2 Videos]