America has a complicated relationship with its ruins. There is something deeply magnetic about a building that time simply walked away from – peeling walls, hollow corridors, and the faint echo of what used to be. It is not just nostalgia. It is something heavier, stranger. Honestly, I think it taps into a fear most of us share: that what we build, and who we are, can be entirely forgotten.
There are an estimated 3,800 ghost towns scattered across America’s vast landscape, each with a story of boom and bust. Within cities especially, the abandoned places carry even more weight – because these are not forgotten frontier outposts. They are places that once sat at the center of urban life. Let’s dive in.
1. Eastern State Penitentiary – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Designed by John Haviland and opened on October 25, 1829, Eastern State is considered to be the world’s first true penitentiary, with seven corridors of heated and sky-lighted cells capable of holding 500 convicts in isolation. At its completion, the building was the largest and most expensive public structure ever erected in the United States, and quickly became a model for more than 300 prisons worldwide.
Notorious criminals such as Al Capone and bank robber Willie Sutton were held inside its innovative wagon wheel design. In 1970, faced with costly repairs and deteriorating conditions, Pennsylvania ceased the operation of Eastern State Penitentiary. After being used briefly as a city jail in 1971, the building stood empty and at risk of demolition until 1988, when, at the urging of a task force of concerned architects, preservationists, and historians, Philadelphia Mayor Wilson Goode halted the process of selling the site.
After closing its doors in 1971, Eastern State sat abandoned for twenty years. In that time, a forest grew inside the prison walls and the building fell into a state of ruin. After 142 years, the Eastern State Penitentiary closed its doors in 1971, but it was added to the National Register of Historic Places on October 15, 1966. Dark energy is rumored to be locked in the prison, which has been named one of America’s most haunted places and now operates as a museum.
2. Waverly Hills Sanatorium – Louisville, Kentucky
The Waverly Hills Sanatorium is a former sanatorium located in the Waverly Hills neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky. In the early 1900s, Jefferson County was ravaged by an outbreak of tuberculosis – known as the “White Plague” – which prompted the construction of a new hospital. The Sanatorium opened in 1910 as a two-story facility able to accommodate between 40 and 50 tuberculosis patients.
At the beginning of the 20th century Louisville, Kentucky had one of the highest rates of tuberculosis deaths in the United States. Due to the constant need for repairs on the wooden structures and the need for more beds so that people would not be turned away due to lack of space, construction of a five-story building that could hold more than 400 patients began in March 1924. The new building opened on October 17, 1926, but after the introduction of streptomycin in 1943, the number of tuberculosis cases gradually lowered until there was no longer need for such a large hospital.
Hospital administrators began secretly transporting the deceased through a subterranean supply tunnel that connected Waverly Hills to a nearby railroad, which kept the patient population oblivious to the mounting deaths. That passageway still exists today and bears the macabre moniker “the body chute.” Some claim that as many as 68,000 people died on the property, but the real number is believed to be closer to 8,000. Still, this is a staggering number of deaths to occur in one place.
3. Ohio State Reformatory – Mansfield, Ohio
The Ohio State Reformatory is a historic prison in Mansfield, Ohio. Construction on the facility began around 1886 and, after much delay, it officially opened in 1896 before shuttering in 1990 on federal orders. Also known as the Mansfield Reformatory, this historic prison was open from 1896 to 1990, when it was shut down as the result of a prisoners’ class action suit claiming overcrowding and inhumane conditions.
The imposing Ohio State Reformatory was in operation for a century, and, at the prison’s peak, its inmates numbered in their thousands. Stories of poor sanitation and serious overcrowding plagued the place. The reformatory’s Gothic Victorian architecture looms like a castle from another century – all stone towers and iron gates, frozen in a kind of permanent menace.
It has served as the setting for Frank Darabont’s prison epic, The Shawshank Redemption, and a whole host of themed tours are available, based around everything from Hollywood history to the electric chair. Visitors to the abandoned Ohio State Reformatory receive a hefty dose of the paranormal on their tours. It once touted state-of-the-art conditions for reforming the criminally insane, but failed to deliver on that promise. Instead, inmates suffered in dark corners like “the Hole” within the castle-like fortress, and the warden’s ghostly wife is said to make the rounds, her perfume lingering around residential rooms and offices.
4. LaLaurie Mansion – New Orleans, Louisiana
Fans of American Horror Story know the story of Madame Delphine LaLaurie, a New Orleans socialite accused of torturing and killing slaves at her mansion on Royal Street in the city’s French Quarter. When a fire broke out at the home in 1834, many of LaLaurie’s slaves were trapped. When the townspeople heard of the woman’s crimes against them, they stormed the mansion in retaliation, forcing LaLaurie to retreat to France. Immediately, the house was abandoned.
The LaLaurie Mansion is one of those places that sits at a crossroads of historical horror and urban legend. It is genuinely difficult to separate what is documented fact from what has grown in the telling – but the documented facts alone are deeply disturbing enough. While it has had several owners throughout the years, it currently sits vacant. The mansion is rumored to be one of the most haunted residences in the French Quarter and is a stop on several ghost tours.
5. Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum – Weston, West Virginia
The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum is the largest hand-cut stone masonry building in North America, and supposedly the second largest in the world after the Kremlin in Moscow. That fact alone is stunning. This is not some modest ruin tucked into a side street – it is a colossal structure with a history that matches its size.
The asylum opened in 1864 and was designed to house 250 patients. By the mid-20th century, it was wildly overcrowded with more than 2,400 patients crammed into a space built for a fraction of that number. Reports of mistreatment, experimental procedures, and preventable deaths followed the institution throughout its operational history.
The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum offers historical day tours Tuesday through Sunday. Visit during October to participate in ghost hunts, paranormal tours and flashlight tours, or attend the annual Asylum Haunted House. It closed in 1994 and has since been recognized as one of the most chilling abandoned structures in the eastern United States.
6. Centralia – Pennsylvania
Centralia, once a bustling coal mining town, became uninhabitable due to an underground mine fire that has been burning since 1962. Let that sink in for a moment. The ground beneath this city has been on fire for over six decades. Not metaphorically. Literally burning underground, releasing toxic gases, cracking open roads, and making the soil unstable.
While many associate ghost towns with the Old West, the phenomenon of community abandonment continues into the modern era. Economic shifts, environmental disasters, and changing societal needs have led to the decline of once-thriving towns across the United States. Centralia is perhaps the most dramatic modern example of all.
At its peak, Centralia had roughly a thousand residents. Today, the official population sits in the single digits. The cracked, weed-split roads, abandoned foundations, and perpetual wisps of smoke rising from vents in the earth make it feel like a post-apocalyptic set piece. It directly inspired the video game and film series Silent Hill – which says everything you need to know about the atmosphere of this place.
7. Dock Street Theatre – Charleston, South Carolina
The Dock Street Theatre was America’s first theater, opening in 1736. After being destroyed by Charleston’s Great Fire in 1740, the building was erected again in 1809 and reopened as Plantar’s Hotel. It has passed through fires, abandonment, and reinvention more times than almost any other structure in the country.
A spirit with far more claim to the building is Nettie Dickerson, an impoverished girl who frequented Plantar’s Hotel looking for love in the early 1800s. Even after spending her savings on a stunning red dress, she was never accepted by the upper crust of Charleston. She was last seen on the second-floor balcony before she was struck and killed by a bolt of lightning. Guests and workers today say they see Nettie walking the hotel, still wearing her red dress.
The Dock Street Theater is the last surviving antebellum hotel in Charleston. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 19, 1973. It’s hard to say for sure where history ends and legend begins with a building this old – but the story of Nettie Dickerson feels like the kind of haunting that a city earns through genuine tragedy.
8. The Shanghai Tunnels – Portland, Oregon
There is a labyrinth of creepy tunnels sprawling out beneath the City of Roses. Known as the Shanghai Tunnels, they were historically designed to transport goods from docking ships quickly and efficiently. However, they were also apparently used for the abhorrent practice of “shanghaiing:” that is, capturing and enslaving men and selling them off as sailors.
The tunnels wind beneath Portland’s Old Town neighborhood, connecting basements of former saloons and hotels to the waterfront. Men would be drugged, dropped through trapdoors into the tunnels below, and wake up aboard ships bound for distant ports with no memory of how they got there. The practice reportedly continued well into the early 20th century.
Unsurprisingly, it is said that these deserted tunnels are haunted today. Guided tours of the Shanghai Tunnels are available, and many visitors report intense unease, temperature drops, and unexplained sounds deep in the passages. Whether you believe in ghosts or not, the documented history of forced labor and abduction down here is chilling enough on its own terms.
9. Kings Park Psychiatric Center – Kings Park, New York
Kings Park Psychiatric Center in Kings Park was a psychiatric hospital that opened in 1885 and closed in 1996. Many buildings, including Building 93, are reportedly haunted by its former patients. The complex once housed thousands of patients and sprawled across hundreds of acres of Long Island landscape.
At its peak in the 1950s, the facility held over 9,000 patients – a number that, by any modern reckoning, represents catastrophic overcrowding. The methods used during much of its operation were deeply controversial, including insulin shock therapy and lobotomies. Deinstitutionalization policies in the latter half of the 20th century eventually led to its closure.
Today, the massive brick buildings still stand in various states of decay within Nissequogue River State Park. Building 93, a towering 13-story structure, looms over the surrounding landscape. Urban explorers and historians have long documented the facility’s eerie interiors – peeling paint, crumbling ceilings, and medical equipment left exactly where it was when the last staff walked out in 1996.
10. Bodie – California
When the riches dried up, Bodie’s residents caught the train elsewhere, leaving the town abandoned. Now, it is protected as Bodie State Historic Park, and visitors can roam its dusty streets, spotting burnt-out cars and ramshackle homes. The ghost town sits at over 8,000 feet elevation in the Eastern Sierra Nevada, and the climate there is brutal – which, ironically, is part of why so much of it still stands.
Bodie boomed in the late 1870s after a significant gold discovery, swelling to a population of roughly 10,000 people at its height. It was a notoriously lawless place – shootings, robberies, and bar fights were reportedly a near-daily occurrence. By the early 1940s, however, it was essentially deserted.
The California State Parks system now maintains Bodie in a state of “arrested decay” – meaning they stabilize what is there without restoring it to a former appearance. What you see when you walk through Bodie is almost exactly what the last residents left behind: furniture, dishes, bottles, and personal effects frozen in time. It is, honestly, one of the most affecting places I can imagine visiting.