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Buzz Feed
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Buzz Feed
55 Super Creepy Pictures Of Abandoned Places That Are Giving Me The Chills
Have you ever driven past an abandoned house or mall and wondered what's left? Urban explorers are people who actually venture inside. And while you may be too afraid to actually enter an abandoned place yourself, the photos are utterly fascinating. Here are 55 creepy pictures from abanonded places: 1. This decaying kindergarten in Kopachi, a ghost town near Chernobyl: 2. The deserted swim hall at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Village: 3. A cabinet of autopsy results in Ospedale al Mare, an abandoned hospital in Venice: 4. This abandoned home in New Orleans: 5. This abandoned Hollywood Hills mansion, which once belonged to John Powers Middleton (whose billionaire father owns the Phillies): 6. This strange graffiti inside a deserted school: 7. The abandoned Galaxy Ghost Ship Hotel, from the Koh Chang Laguna resort in Thailand: 8. And here's the Galaxy after it caught on fire in 2024: 9. And here's a close-up: 10. These abandoned homes that have been reclaimed by nature in China: 11. These forlorn UFO-shaped houses in Taiwan: 12. And a closer look inside one of the UFOs: 13. This hallway in the old hospital wing on Ellis Island: 14. Inside the allegedly haunted Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Louisville: 15. This forgotten chateau in France: 16. And inside the chateau's dining room: 17. Decaying decor from the shutdown theme park Wonderland Eurasia in Turkey: 18. And more ruins from Wonderland Eurasia: 19. This abandoned Range Rover in the woods of England: 20. And here's a look inside the car: 21. This crumbling Alpenhaus at Beelitz-Heilstätten, an old lung sanatorium in Germany: 22. The derelict dining room inside the Alpenhaus: 23. Vela Gialla, a skyscraper that was reportedly the Neapolitan mafia's stronghold in Italy: 24. Savaşan village, a sunken city in Turkey that's underwater because of a dam that was built: 25. This field of forsaken electric cars in China: 26. This forlorn factory in Germany: 27. These derelict phonebooths in London: 28. This forgotten bike-sharing yard in China: 29. This deserted house on Sazan Island in Albania: 30. This deserted motel along Route 66 in California: 31. This empty pool inside an abandoned Soviet mining settlement: Picture Alliance / dpa/picture alliance via Getty Images 32. This sailboat in Panama that the fish have reclaimed: MARTIN BERNETTI / AFP via Getty Images 33. This abandoned playboy mansion: Thomas Weakley / Via 34. The decaying Fort Wayne Hotel ballroom in Detroit: Timothy Fadek / Corbis via Getty Images 35. This vacant village in in Germany: Picture Alliance / dpa/picture alliance via Getty Images 36. This empty pool at a mansion that used to belong to a police chief in Mexico: Univision Noticias / Via 37. This deserted pub in London: Carl Court / Getty Images 38. This waterlogged mall in Bangkok: Nurphoto / NurPhoto via Getty Images 39. This forsaken train station in Spain: VW Pics / VW Pics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images 40. This room filled with gas masks at Chernobyl: Bildagentur-online / Universal Images Group via Getty Images 41. Inside the auditorium of an abandoned high school in Detroit: Timothy Fadek / Corbis via Getty Images 42. A derelict doctor's office in the ghost town of Humberstone, Chile: VW Pics / VW Pics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images 43. And this old church in Humberstone: Anadolu / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images 44. These abandoned mascots from the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games: GREG BAKER / AFP via Getty Images 45. This deserted mall in North Macedonia: Pierre Crom / Getty Images 46. This preschool that was left behind in Pripyat after Chernobyl: Daniel Berehulak / Getty Images 47. This decaying swing ride at an abandoned amusement park in Cyprus: AMIR MAKAR / AFP via Getty Images 48. These old Soviet space shuttles that were left inside an old launch site in Kazakhstan: Scott Peterson / Getty Images 49. This crumbling church in England: Heritage Images / Getty Images 50. This pool in a deserted mansion: Strange Places / Via 51. The shopping carts rusting inside an abandoned supermarket in the ghost town of Pripyat, Ukraine: Sean Gallup / Getty Images 52. This decaying motel in the California desert: David McNew / Getty Images 53. This abandoned power station in London: Jim Dyson / Getty Images Jim Dyson / Getty Images 54. The desolate restaurant in the Plimhimmon Hotel in Maryland: Aladdin Color Inc / Getty Images 55. And finally, this abandoned admin office in Norway: OLIVIER MORIN / AFP via Getty Images Have you ever been urban exploring? What did you find? Share your experiences in the comments!
Yahoo
21-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
During a Housing Crisis, Graffitied Buildings Expose the Cruelty of Excess
In Los Angeles, artistic takeovers of abandoned high rises and mansions force us to ask a crucial question: why aren't empty buildings being used? The Oceanwide Plaza complex, a $1.2 billion ultraluxury development in Los Angeles, if built to completion would have included three towers—a hotel with residences, and two 40-story residential towers containing nearly 500 condominiums—located right across the street from the city's downtown convention center. In 2019, when the Beijing-based developer Oceanwide Holdings Co. axed their involvement, the construction site went dormant, save for a few guests in the spring 2024: as the site's three towers languished, graffiti artists ("taggers") took to making it their own. Across all three of the 40-plus-story buildings, they scrawled their tags, some as tall as 12 stories. But it didn't stop there: In September, three single-family mansions across the city's wealthy enclaves were reported to be covered in graffiti—some with similar tags. The first two, both located about five miles apart in the Hollywood Hills, are owned by film producer John Powers Middleton. On Mulholland Drive, neighbors told CBS that the house had been vacant for years and was hosting squatters; NBC reported that the second Middleton home on Sunset Plaza Drive, which was for sale at $21.5 million, had been cited for vacancy and abandonment eight times since 2022 before media outlets took notice of the vandalism. Shortly after, reads another CBS story, a third mansion in Lower Bel Air partially owned by Osama bin Laden's half-brother was "nearly covered in spray paint at every square inch." These are two different scenarios: both are financial failures, yet at first glance, one might reveal the problems of offshore investors, and the other simply a local nuisance. Maybe it was some type of schadenfreude but, especially in the case of the Oceanwide towers, the internet took great delight. The glitzy Oceanwide project that critic and Dwell contributor Mimi Zeiger called "another entry in the junkspace haze of supermodernism"—a reference to Rem Koolhaas's tirade about the death of architecture—became "a collective resistance to the banal aesthetics of market-rate capitalism" after being graffiti bombed. Yet as graffiti pops up in neighborhoods where highly desirable single-family homes sit empty during a massive housing crisis, graffiti, so often depicted as evidence of decay, points to our country's limited access to basic human dignity through housing. Vacancy becomes about excess, not deprivation. It's nothing particularly novel; graffiti has historically contested the idea of ownership and belonging. Ismael Illescas, a scholar and professor of Ethnic Studies at Chabot College, documented Southern California's history of "street writing" in his dissertation, "Between Art and Crime: Graffiti and Street Art in Neoliberal Los Angeles," noting that some of the earliest street writing in the 20th century came from predominantly Mexican American youth; in the 1930s, those working as shoe shiners "marked their territory by drawing their names on the walls where they worked in East Los Angeles." Through his ethnographic and historical research, his work asserts that graffiti became a way for young Black and Latinx artists—those he says are, "marginalized, ostracized, and invisibilized"—to "assert their dignity" when upward social mobility is limited. Dignity has also been a critical point when addressing housing shortages. In L.A., reports that the median home price is currently $1.2 million; a 2023 report by The Angeleno Project shows that the city is short 270,000 affordable units. Perhaps the anticipated 500-plus Oceanwide condos—a project that came with zero affordable units—called attention to the dignity gap inherent in housing today. L.A. critic Carolina Miranda told Scripps News that the subsequent tagging "draw[s] attention not just to the fact that the building is abandoned, but everything in the system that led it to be abandoned." Here, I assume that she's not just addressing the developer's financial woes, but the development ecosystem at large. Building more housing is a net good, until that housing is inaccessible for even those with a median income, which in L.A. was clocked at $79,700 in 2023. At Oceanwide, not even a jaded trickle-down ethos could yield confidence in a bloated project. So when the graffiti bombs spread months later to L.A.'s wealthy, residential neighborhoods, it was surprising—only insofar as that vacancy took on new meaning. For those who occupy neighborhoods that have histories of urban renewal property razing or postindustrial neglect, vacancy is a residue of disinvestment, the result of resource extraction and systematized impoverishment. In these places, blight, which has been characterized as everything from trash overflows to graffiti to buildings in bad shape, becomes a moniker for racialized poverty. But the problem of vacancy looks different in these L.A. neighborhoods. The Vacancy Report, assembled by the Alliance for Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), reports that there were 93,000 units sitting vacant in 2017; 46,400 vacant units are not on the market and are being used as investment properties, vacation homes, or are otherwise being held off the market while owners wait for property values to rise. Real policy solutions for the problem of speculative investments exist, like vacancy taxes which can collect funds for affordable housing by taxing such vacation and investment properties. But unlike vacancy under disinvestment that yields large-scale dilapidation, vacancy created by excess wealth flies under the radar, hiding amongst maintained mansions and glassy towers. For these three private mansions, excess is the blight—the graffiti just pointed it out. It's an exciting evolution for graffiti itself as the art form morphs from claiming the right to space to asserting the right to housing, teasing out the ironies and injustices of our current market. These private homes will surely someday sell—the Oceanwide towers are for sale (for an undisclosed amount)—but whoever picks up the properties might do so with an understanding that wealth can create its own problems. Perhaps less fan-crazed than Luigi Mangione's one-trick move for class warfare (and far less violent), the art of tagging is in this moment symbolizes the widening gap between the rich and poor, the need for dignified housing, and the problems of speculation, all with style. Top photo of an abandoned mansion in Hollywood covered in graffiti byRelated Reading: Well-Designed Low-Income Housing Is Possible Yarn Bombing Uses Knitting as a Public Art Form
