Ghost Towns Map: 21 Maps of Abandoned Towns and Lost Villages

American ghost town maps tend to count post offices and the years they closed; European ones record why a village died. The 2,684 lost places of the Sudetenland were emptied after 1945 or razed for the border zone, the Rhineland’s villages were dug away for lignite, and one map of Spain’s uninhabited villages runs to more than 4,700 names. Between them lie medieval villages that survive only as crop marks, church towers rising from reservoirs in a drought, and what the people of a Catalan village said on their last day before the water came.

1. World Ghost Towns Map: 1,934 Places and Their Finders

   The town sign of Nothing, Arizona, is quoted in full: its staunch citizens “had faith in Nothing, hoped for Nothing, worked at Nothing, for Nothing.” This map gathers 1,934 ghost towns and abandoned places in 68 countries, sorted by type (“Dammed”, “Abandoned Due To Disaster”, “Unbuilt Development”), and many entries end with a thank-you: Michael Novak found the British Columbia mining towns of Phoenix, Kitsault and Tashme, Brock Regnier found Lorraine in Pennsylvania. The notes keep their humour. Ludlow, California, was a Route 66 stop, and when I-40 replaced the road, “so was the town”; it has 10 residents. Homer is “yet another town that had its fortunes” on Route 66, “D’oh!”, and Gold Town comes with an apology for rhyming a third time. Kaskaskia, the first capital of Illinois, is no longer on the Illinois side of the Mississippi.

   

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2. Abandoned Villages Map: 204 Empty Villages of Huesca

   The people of tiny Bolás used to sing “Asún, Isín, Asqués y Bolás, veinte casas y cuatro lugars”: four villages, twenty houses between them. The photographer Cristian Laglera gives each of the 204 abandoned villages and hamlets of the province of Huesca a few lines of history, with its population peak and the decade it emptied. Many died for want of a road, water or electricity; others went under reservoirs, Barasona in 1926, Acín de Garzipollera in the early 1960s, when the Yesa dam was built and its fields were planted with pines. L’Estall’s last inhabitant, Santiago, lived there alone from 1974 to 2003. Burgasé is occupied today by a group of neorurales, and Bastarás was bought by a company and turned into a private hunting ground.

   

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3. Oklahoma Ghost Towns Map: From Slapout to Moral

   Slapout is named after a store owner who, asked for anything out of stock, said he was “slapout” of it. This map of Oklahoma’s ghost towns sorts them into six regions, marks the ones its makers have visited and keeps a separate layer of all-Black towns such as Bookertee and Wybark. Most notes give the years a post office ran, but some go further: Moral got its name because Brooks Walker kept saloons out, Bathsheba between Enid and Perry admitted no males, “including male animals”, and Alluwe was bought up for the Oologah Dam in the 1950s and now lies under water. At Anvil the directions are exact: three tenths of a mile down road 3480 to a rock that an earthquake cracked in half, and if you reach the two small wooden bridges, you have gone too far.

   

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4. Drowned Village Map: Castellnou de Bassella's Last Day

   “Today, Saturday, is the last day to leave.” On 22 April 2000 the Rialb reservoir in Lleida was already filling, and the pins of this map hold what the last people of Castellnou de Bassella said, unsigned. “Yes, they paid us well, but that is not enough; some things cannot be paid for with money.” A 73-year-old says the young cannot understand being forced out of one’s home. Laundry still hangs on the balconies to make the village look lived in, “but it is always the same laundry”. The cemetery has been moved uphill, where the water will not reach, and an old woman is remembered for saying that what she minded about dying here was being buried under water. Around these lines the map collects photographs of Tiurana’s Festa Major of 1932, roads that now end in the lake, and returns to the shore in 2009 and 2011.

   

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5. Lost Villages Map of the Sudetenland: 2,684 Places

   Of Fukov (Fugau), destroyed for the border zone around 1960, an overgrown cemetery and a railway overpass still in use remain. This map lists 2,684 villages, hamlets, mills, inns, chapels and factories that vanished from the Czech borderlands, each with its German name, the reason it died, the decade and what is left. The reasons repeat: gradually emptied after 1945, when the German population was moved out, the border zone of the Iron Curtain, military training areas, brown coal, which took Dělouš in 1967. Severní (Hilgersdorf), the northernmost settlement of the Czech Republic, is partly gone; the Luž hut burned down mysteriously after the war; at Zadní Jetřichovice tall chestnut trees still show where the garden seating was.

   

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6. Oregon Ghost Towns Map: 286 Towns With a Class Code

   Idiotville was a timber camp so far from anything that, the note says, only an idiot would work there. This list of Oregon’s ghost towns gives each of its 286 places a class code from A1 to H6 and a few lines of history, often with a book or a photo blog to read next. Booneville died when the river’s main channel moved in 1875; Kinzua, a company town named after Kinzua in Pennsylvania, was destroyed by arson when the mill closed in 1978; Ellendale, site of the first grist mill west of the Willamette, was abandoned and rebuilt three times. The mapper checks old reports against the satellite: Sanger is said to have several cabins left, “but the satellite maps say otherwise”.

   

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7. Lignite Villages Map: The Rhineland's Dug-Away Villages

   Aldenrath, first mentioned in 898, was resettled in 1936 and demolished in 1952, its moated castle with it. This map of the Rhenish lignite district lists 67 villages dug away by the open-cast mines and 11 partly dug away, each with its population, the years of resettlement and demolition and its first mention, beside 37 new villages built for the resettled, the power stations and the pits themselves. Garzweiler I alone resettled about 8,500 people, Garzweiler II another 7,600. Knapsack, once the largest rural municipality in Europe, was emptied in the 1970s for environmental reasons and later settled again. Keyenberg and Kuckum, still standing when the map was made, carry their planned demolition years, 2023 and 2027.

   

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8. Chernobyl Exclusion Zone Map: Pripyat, Duga and the Zone

   Pripyat’s fairground, Hospital No. 126, the Polissya Hotel and the music school are traced as outlines on the abandoned city’s plan, and around them an urban explorer has pinned 123 sites of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, each linked to a report on urbanxphotography.co.uk. They run from the Dytyatki and Leliv checkpoints to the robots used at Reactor 4, the Kopachi kindergarten, the Duga radar with its control room and garages, and the diner, zoo and synagogue of Chernobyl town. One report, “Resettlers 2012”, is a meeting with people who came back to live in the zone; two pins record rooftopping on Pripyat’s high-rises, naked. A second layer marks 62 more places, mostly villages, from Buda to Varovychi.

   

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9. Deserted Medieval Villages Map: 268 Lost Villages of Norfolk

   The church tower of Eccles stood on the beach as recently as 1900, before a storm brought it down; until the mid-1990s its stump showed in the sand, and scouring tides uncovered the walls of houses. This map pins 268 deserted medieval villages and lonely churches of Norfolk and says what is left to see: crop marks from the air, hollow ways, a moat, a church ruin on private land. Shipden was lost to the sea before Domesday; Tottington went to the Ministry of Defence in 1942, and its church stands in the middle of the training ground; Bawsey was excavated live over three days by Time Team in 1999. Where a landlord emparked or enclosed the land, the note says so, as at Gunton, where a house was built on the site of the village.

   

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10. Western Australia Ghost Towns Map: Gold, Pearls and Sidings

    Cuddingwarra was first called Dead Finish. This map of 192 abandoned towns, mining camps, timber mills and railway sidings in Western Australia notes where each name came from and when the town was gazetted: Balla Balla, once a port for the Whim Creek copper mines, means “lots of mud”, and gold at Barrambie was found in 1904 by two men working on the No. 1 Rabbit Proof Fence. Condon had a pearling fleet from 1871. In 1952 the whole town of Chandler was put up for sale, and by October 1953 virtually everything was sold. At Agnew the map grumbles that the pub was abandoned and then demolished “by a very backward thinking shire”.

    

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11. Vanished Villages Map of Russia: Histories by Librarians

    Prybelinka in the Novosibirsk region got its name by chance, the old people say: in 1908 its first settlers chose the spot and said “Vot i pribyli”, here we have arrived. By 1970 it was gone. The 93 village histories on this map were written for the “Roads of Vanished Villages” campaign of April to June 2018, and most end with who added the pin, often a village or children’s librarian. Uspenka in the Izhmorsky district had 223 inhabitants in 1968 and two in 1989; Luzhki in the Kursk region, home to more than 150 Old Believers, disappeared at the end of the 20th century as the Mikhailovsky ore plant grew; the regional parliament has approved a bill to abolish Berezovsky, where nobody has lived for a long time.

    

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12. Cerro Gordo Ghost Town Map: 240 Tailings and a Hotel

    Lola’s Girls’ Crib stands a few steps from the church and the American Hotel in this survey of Cerro Gordo, the abandoned mining town in California. It pins 58 structures, among them the China Cook Shack, the ice house, the Belshaw and Beaudry furnaces and William “Billy” Crapo’s house, now the antique shop, then follows the mines out into the hills: 240 tailing piles, the Morning Star tramway and a salt tram with its Summit Station. Where the mapper is unsure of a mine’s name, it gets a question mark: San Lucas Mines?, Ignacio Mine?, Newsboy Mine?.

    

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13. Drowned Towns Map: Church Towers Rising From Lakes

    The people of Graun had three years to move uphill before their village was flooded in 1950; the 14th-century tower of St Katharina is all that shows above the lake. Taken from a German feature on “ghost towns in the lake”, the 13 pins of this map go round the world: the 400-year-old church of Quechula in Chiapas rises from the Malpaso reservoir in extreme drought, Kalyazin’s bell tower stands in the Uglich reservoir on the Volga, and the salt water of Lake Epecuén in Argentina has bleached the ruins of the resort it flooded in 1985. Geamăna in Romania has lain under toxic sludge from a copper mine since the late 1970s, and the cells of Rummu prison in Estonia are now a diving spot. The list ends with Rungholt, the “Atlantis of the North Sea”, and Atlantis itself.

    

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14. Abandoned Villages Map of the Gaspé: Lifespans and Holdouts

    Lac-au-Diable lived four years, from 1933 to 1937. Each of the 29 villages and hamlets on this map of Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula carries its lifespan in its name, and most tell the same story: founded in the 1930s, closed around 1970. A few entries count the people who refused to go: one holdout stayed at Robidoux until 1994, two at Saint-Conrad, where the last one left in 1981, one at Saint-Étienne-de-Ristigouche until 1980. The oldest dates belong to the coast, Grande-Grave from 1798 to 1970 and Île Bonaventure from the late 18th century to 1971.

    

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15. Uninhabited Villages of Spain Map: 4,700 Names

    Under the heading “general map of lifeless villages”, each pin is named province first, from ALBACETE - Corral de los Losares and SORIA - Armejún to ZARAGOZA - Belchite Viejo, and then the map keeps going: a pin in Madrid marked “IMPORTANTE” explains that empty towns of other countries follow after Zaragoza, Pripyat and Hashima among them. With more than 4,700 places it is the longest list on this page, and its description asks for corrections. Most entries are names only; one in Almería explains that Midián is a film village, part of the set built for Exodus.

    

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16. Lost Medieval Villages Map of Sardinia: 266 Sites

    Often a country church is all that is left. This map draws each vanished medieval village of Sardinia as an area, sorted by the four giudicati, the island’s medieval kingdoms, and the curatoria it belonged to, and pins beside it the church that served it: Sebera in the Trexenta, now within Ortacesus, kept San Bartolomeo as a restored ruin; Fraus kept Sant’Anastasia near Guasila. Of the churches, 52 are marked as ruins, and lost ones are placed only approximately. Every village links to a data sheet on the site villaggiscomparsi.

    

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17. Abandoned Villages Map of Japan: Haison and Mine Towns

    Kitanomata in Akita is pinned as the home of Tsurikichi Sanpei, the fishing manga hero. This map of 32 abandoned villages, mountain hamlets and ruins in Japan sends each pin to a longer report on yourmap.jp: haison, abandoned villages, in Shiga, Chichibu and Okutama, a hamlet in Gifu that is empty only in winter, and Ōdaira-juku in Nagano, an abandoned village where you can stay the night. The ghost towns of Japan’s mines are here too, the Matsuo mine in Iwate, the coal-mine housing blocks of Ikeshima and the island of Hashima, along with Ōkunoshima, the “poison gas island”, and a mysterious giant underground vault in Yamanashi.

    

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18. Ghost Villages of Europe Map: A Traveller's Visits

    Papaglionti in Calabria was lived in until the 1980s; now there are only lizards, frogs and swallows. This small map, written in Dutch and linked to the blog spookdorpen.nl, places 15 ghost villages visited between 2005 and 2015, each with the reason it emptied: Bardowiek, cleared and razed on the GDR’s orders between 1977 and 1989; Doel in Belgium, threatened by the expansion of the port of Antwerp; Consonno, where the dream of an Italian Las Vegas burst quickly. Bedepuszta in Hungary is turning into a place for creative people to stay, and San Felices de Agüero in Spain is only “almost” a ghost village, because someone still lives there.

    

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19. Deserted Medieval Village Map: Gainsthorpe House by House

    Legend says Gainsthorpe was a den of thieves pulled down by its angry neighbours; English Heritage, quoted on this map, says the real reason it was abandoned remains uncertain. The map draws the deserted village near Scunthorpe in detail: 31 buildings as outlines, 61 boundaries, six streets, the ridge and furrow and the old quarry pits, with English Heritage’s notes on the dovecotes, the manor house and the farm, which shows that the village “has never quite been deserted”. The mapper’s own notes are in capitals: one house has different shapes on the two oblique sketches, and a barn, the mapper points out, is marked as a modern spoil heap on the 1980s survey.

    

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20. Western Ghost Towns Map: Five States by What Remains

    Each ghost town of Colorado, Texas, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming on this map carries a one-line status, and together they read as a scale of decay: “Little remains”, “Foundations remain”, “Some structures remain”, “Summer cabins”, “Some residents remain”. A few have an afterlife: the power plant at Ames is still in operation, Bonanza’s town government was reactivated, Camp Hale is now a national monument. The Texas layer sorts its towns as semi-abandoned or neglected sites, each with its Wikipedia page, and a route runs from Boulder to Summitville.

    

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21. Flooded Villages Map of the Upper Volga: Mologa and Korcheva

    Mologa, the town drowned by the Rybinsk reservoir, comes with a link that lays an old map over today’s water. Nikita Solodovnikov’s map marks 34 flooded villages, towns and estates of the upper Volga, Korcheva among them, with its map of 1934 before the flooding; a cemetery remains at its site, and “alas, it is 5 kilometres to walk”. A second layer is a trip plan: a liturgy in Kalyazin and lunch in a café, a tour of Kimry with a schoolboy, a visit to the flooded lands around Breytovo with the priest or a local historian, and the library there, which has held local-history readings every year since 1992.

    

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