From a forgotten military battery to a creepy Scottish village,
and even the mystery behind the abandonment of a Mesoamerican settlement thousands of years ago!
10: The Landsort Artillery Battery During the infamous extended conflict known
as the Cold War, countries near the Soviet Union had to have outposts to give them early warnings
in case of a surprise attack. That’s what’s here in the now abandoned Landsort Artillery Battery
on the southern Swedish island of Oja, originally designed to defend the shoreline against possible
naval activity from the Soviet Union. This was a strategic location the country could use to
defend the shore from Baltic Sea attacks, and it was necessary because they feared
an invasion by the Russians was imminent. Many of the old defenses were replaced by
new artillery batteries like this one, which also happens to be the only one still standing today.
Back when it was built, it was one of the most advanced artillery systems on the globe. The
cannon could fire with outstanding precision, with the gun itself protected by a huge dome and the
operating facility hidden inside of a rock. The artillery battery was designed to withstand all
attacks, including chemical, nuclear, and even biological. In the event of World War Three,
this artillery battery might have become one of the most critical lines of defense
in one of the most important naval passages in the world. Fortunately, it was never used,
but you can still see the remnants today. The artillery battery guarded Sweden until the
turn of the century, at which time these stations were decommissioned and dismantled except for one.
It's now an overgrown ruin and a reminder of just how cold the Cold War really was.
9: Chapel of Our Lady of Victories The Chapel of Our Lady of Victories in Portugal
is one of the creepiest abandoned churches in the world, and yet it has a rather romantic
story behind its desertion. It was built by a wealthy farmer and botanist named Jose do Canto
in honor of his wife after she died. Why does it always have to be about dead spouses? Something
about that idea, building a massive memorial to a deceased partner, is really unsettling, although
it was a really magnificent structure. The chapel was built in the Neo-Gothic style with stone and
brick, stained glass windows, and it was erected right next to a beautiful lake. It was the perfect
place for Jose to bury his wife after the chapel was consecrated in 1886. But there were no actual
services held inside of the chapel. Instead, Jose used it as a mausoleum where his wife was buried.
He then left orders for himself to be entombed beside his wife and for the church to be left
alone. Ever since his death in 1898, the Chapel of Our Lady of Victories has been abandoned. It's
still standing, but the lack of maintenance is clearly visible. What began as a romantic
chapel for a man’s dead wife has turned into a spooky and forgotten piece of Gothic architecture
next to a serene lake, one of the most alluring and intimidating relics in all of Europe.
8: Allentown State Hospital This bizarre building was not a
place you wanted to be when it was operational, and certainly not a place you want to visit
now that it’s been abandoned! It first opened in 1912, and at the time, it was called the Allentown
Homeopathic Hospital for the Insane. That doesn't really sound like the kind of place anyone would
want to spend any amount of time. At least, not voluntarily. The Allentown State Hospital
closed in December of 2010 after being in operation for 98 years. The buildings here
date back to the 1920s, and in 1954, the hospital had over 2000 patients from the nearby county.
That's a lot of crazy people. But it was also around this time that doctors began changing
their tune about mental illness, suggesting that many people afflicted by diseases of the mind
could still live in the community and be treated at home. And since pulling pieces of people's
brains out of their noses and lobotomizing them wasn't really working out as a solution to mental
illness, the hospital was slowly emptied and ultimately shut down and abandoned.
But it remained abandoned for no more than a decade. The building was supposed to be placed
on the National Register of Historic Places, but then the Pennsylvania Department of General
Services decided to clear the building to allow a new development – and this was just in 2020!
What could have been a spooky insane asylum haunting teenagers and adventure-seekers for
generations to come has now been bulldozed to make room for some boring apartment buildings.
Do you support the decision to demolish the old buildings? They were historically valuable,
but they were also abandoned and creepy, and possibly haunted! Tell me what you think in
the comments below. Then, if you’re enjoying this video, you should hit
that subscribe button to stay connected with American Eye and get more awesome content!
7: The Lost Village of Haywood The lost village of Haywood in Scotland was
once prosperous and full of life, but like many ghost towns, something unexpected came and drained
the town of its residents, one by one. It was once a thriving community of miners but is today a ruin
so forgotten that the people who live only 15 miles (25km) away don't even know it's there.
The community here started in the 1800s, with the population being about 1200 by the town’s peak
in 1890. The townsfolk built their homes out of bricks that were produced in a nearby
brick factory, though that factory has long since been torn down. The village developed,
roads were installed, more people moved to the town, and they had all the normal amenities of
a modern village. Official records show that the village even had a soccer team that was
undefeated in local leagues for 11 years. Haywood ended up being a producer of coal,
and we all know that turned out for everyone. The coal business began to dry up at the end of
the 20th century and since the area was unsuited for agriculture and there was no other industry,
the population began to decline. By 1951, only 15 houses were left. Shortly after,
Haywood was completely deserted. A few of the houses still remain today,
as well as a small memorial commemorating the handful of inhabitants who died during both the
First and Second World War. It’s a total ghost town now, like many places in the world that
rose and fell with the Industrial Revolution. Do you know of others? Let me know in the comments.
6: The Living Hell Prison Croatia has a prison on an island that
has been described as a living hell. The prison is just two miles (3km) from the coast, once used
as a dumping ground for prisoners of war, then for political dissenters. It’s called Goli Otok.
The misery on the island prison began in 1948 when Cold War tensions in Europe began to rise. Josip
Broz Tito, the communist leader of Yugoslavia, separated himself from the Soviet Union and then
used Goli Otok as a labor camp. Those who still supported Soviet leadership or spoke positively
about Joseph Stalin were sent to the prison. According to National Geographic, the prison
was active mostly between 1948 and 1955. By the beginning of 1956, over 15,000 people had been
sent to the prison island and at least 600 had been killed or simply allowed to die.
The CIA described Goli Otok as “Devil’s Island.” It didn't close its doors until the 1980s when
the Iron Curtain crumbled, the Soviet Union fell apart, and Eastern Europe was finally
able to reunite with the rest of the world. But history hasn’t been erased here. The walls
of the prison are still present, with the island completely deserted and largely ignored by Croatia
because of its brutal past. It seems like they want to just brush it under the rug,
but haven’t gotten around to bulldozing the whole place and turning it into something else yet.
5: Ukrainian Churches in the Prairies Imagine an empty, cold flatland with
scattered abandoned churches sitting just over the horizon no matter which way you turn. No, it’s
not in Siberia, it’s in Canada! From between the fall of 1891 and the summer of 1914, an estimated
170,000 Ukrainians immigrated to Canada from what was then the Austro-Hungarian empire. They
moved primarily to the Canadian prairies, a vast landscape comprising three flat and mostly empty
provinces of farmland: Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Manitoba. They brought with them their beliefs,
with most of them being Greek Orthodox Christians. One of the first churches to be built was St.
Michael’s Orthodox church in Manitoba in the year 1897. Then there was another in Alberta,
then another, and then another. But through the years, as society progressed,
the Greek Orthodox religion fell out of style and many of the churches were abandoned
as some people moved to cities and others stopped practicing their religion. Today,
the Canadian prairies are dotted with rotting Ukrainian churches,
many of them being of a strange design mix of Byzantine and Western styles. There are in fact
hundreds of them, with only a handful left functioning. Rural Alberta in particular has
dozens of disused Orthodox churches, just waiting until they fall apart completely.
4: Turkish Castle Town There is a castle village
in Turkey unlike anything you’ve ever seen, except maybe in a Disney movie.
It’s something that no one would ever expect to exist in real life,
but it’s true, and it’s totally abandoned. Imagine a strange theme park, but one that
didn’t quite get finished! The village is literally filled with castles that look like
they should be lived in by a king and queen. It’s called Burj Al Babas, and it was constructed as
a luxury community for foreigners back in 2014 – but when the Turkish economy fell into disrepair,
the project was stopped. Approximately 530 huge castles were left unfinished and completely empty.
The only people interested in the ruined castle village now are tourists. The place is creepy,
unbelievably massive, and looks like Disney World if it ran out of visitors and was abandoned!
3: The Chatterley Whitfield Mine The Chatterley Whitfield Mine is an old,
disused coal mine outside of Trent in the United Kingdom. Back in 1937, it was the
biggest mine in the area and the first in the UK to produce a million tons of coal in a year. But,
like with other mines around the world, its coal production came to a screeching halt in 1977.
Just two years later in 1979, the mine was turned into an underground museum. The rundown buildings
were renovated and the rusty old machines were restored to their original condition.
But the museum didn’t last forever. The issue was that the Chatterley Whitfield Mine was connected
to the Wolstanton Colliery pits, and they stopped producing coal in 1981. The pumps were turned off
and water levels began to rise, and because the fans inside the Wolstanton pits were turned off,
methane began to build-up. There was no way the museum could afford the upkeep of the pits,
and so the gas levels became extremely dangerous. Visitors were banned from entering the Chatterley
Whitfield Mine in 1986 when it became too hazardous, the possibility of an explosion
or accidental suffocation too great. It’s still abandoned today, only it’s been sealed to prevent
people from sneaking in. If you tried to enter, you would almost certainly never come out again!
2: German U-Boat Bunker There is a U-boat bunker in Bremen, Germany –
codenamed Valentin. This amazing bunker was used to produce German submarines back in World War
2 but has since been abandoned and left a ruin. Bizarrely, not a single U-boat was actually built
here. The problem was that in 1943, the Allied Forces had gained air superiority. The Germans
were having a very tough time building their own boats in shipyards because the Allies would find
out. So, they built the Valentin bunker to build them in secret. Construction went on from 1943
to 1945, growing to be the biggest free-standing bunker in the whole country. It had 13 assembly
bays, with the walls and ceilings up to 23 feet (7m) thick to protect the workers and assemblies.
Unfortunately for the Germans, who used prisoners of war and prisoners from concentration camps to
build the bunker, resulting in an estimated 1750 fatalities, they lost the war before
the bunker was finished. It was then left abandoned and is still empty to this very day.
1: The Olmec Civilization One of the most interesting abandoned places
in all of the Americas goes back to around 1600 BC. It’s the ancient settlement of San Lorenzo,
capital of the long-forgotten Olmecs, a group of people whose origins still mystify scientists!
The name Olmec comes from the Aztec language. It means “rubber people.” Because of this,
archaeologists believe the Olmecs participated in rubber processing. But what’s really strange
is that archaeologists haven’t found a single skeleton of an Olmec person. It’s as if they
literally disintegrated or all floated away. The Olmecs crafted giant heads, some of them
weighing up to 20 tons. But nobody knows why they built them, or how, and nobody knows why
they abandoned their capital around the year 400 BC. The Olmecs came seemingly from nowhere,
constructed a great city in what is now Veracruz, Mexico, and then faded like ghosts, leaving behind
their abandoned temples and monuments and not a single trace of skeleton. Strange, isn’t it!
What’s your favorite abandoned place in your part of the world? Let me know in the comments
and thanks for watching. Be sure to hit the subscribe button if you enjoyed the video,
and come back again for more!