Do you like to explore? I do and I love nothing more than making my way through abandoned buildings, as a matter of fact, I think that I explored almost every abandoned building at Fort Hancock, New Jersey, even those that were off limits at the time. Many of those buildings are gone now, but there are still some very interesting ones left. Some were actually built into a hillside for protection from enemy shelling in World War Two. There is a fort like building that housed big guns that would raise and fire and then lower back down and many odd block like buildings that housed ammo and shells for different armaments around the fort. I have been back there a couple of times, since I got out of the army. This was the place that I spent almost three years at. I mentioned this before, but for those that are new to this site I will again. Fort Hancock was a missile base and had Nike Hercules missiles stationed in a double sized battery during the 1960s. For more on the fort you can click Fort Hancock or Fort Hancock Revisited.

Could there be anything better than exploring an abandoned building? Well yeah, exploring an abandoned city. Did you know that there are abandoned cities all over the world? They were abandoned for all sorts of reasons. If we look at the western part of the United States we find some old ghost towns. While they are smaller than cities, they are still quite interesting. Most of them became abandoned because they were mining towns and the ore ran out. Once the ore was gone, there was no source of income for the town's folk. Other ghost towns got that way because the railroad passed them up and no one came to them anymore. One of the major problems with the ghost towns of the old west, is that tourists keep taking pieces of them as souvenirs. If you get enough tourists doing this, the town disappears. It is like ants eating a piece of food. It slowly gets smaller and smaller until it is all gone. A very good example of a ghost town is not even in the old west, it is in California and the name of the town is Bodie. Bodie was a booming mining town in Eastern California. There was a gold mine there and when the mine got played out, the people left. I always find it amazing when you see that many people just left all sorts of objects rather than have to move them. You can find different pieces of furniture in some of the abandoned houses.

Throughout time there have been many reasons for cities being abandoned. The city of Ubar was abandoned in ancient times when it sank into a sink hole. The sink hole also destroyed it's water source. There was just no way that the population could stay there any longer. While the colony of Roanoke was not a city, it still is a mystery to us why it vanished somewhere around 1590. This mystery is still being analyzed today. Just look at all those deserted Maya and Inca cities that are scattered throughout the jungles of Central and South America. I wonder how many of us realize that North America contains lost Maya cities? Palenque, Mexico is one of the Maya's greatest cities. The city is located in the Mexican state of Chiapas. It is said to contain some of the finest works of any Mayan city. It is believed that the city was built around 100 B.C. There was a rival city called Tonina and it attacked Palenque in 730 A.D. and the city declined. Archaeologists believe that the city was abandoned around the 10^th century A.D. Another old city that was abandoned was Vijayanagar. It was the capital of the largest Hindu empire. It was founded in 1336 B.C. and it's population was said to have reached one half million people, but it was attacked in 1565 A.D. and was abandoned. You can still go to India and see the beautiful ruins of this city.

In more recent times the City of Chornobyl was abandoned. I think that we all know about that. There will be no exploring there. When a reactor blew up at the nuclear power plant in the city, the city had to be abandoned and unfortunately will be a no man's land for thousands of years unless someone discovers a way to dissipate radiation. During World War Two the village of Oradour-su-Glane in France was the site of German atrocities. The 642 residents of the village were massacred. The village was destroyed when the Germans mistakenly thought it was Oradour-sur-Vayres. The male residents were not killed outright, but shot in the legs and left to die slowly. The women and children were machine gunned to death. The remains of the abandoned village still stand today as a reminder of what happened.

Palenque, Mexico
Photo Source: Public Domain

The town of Humberstone in Chile was a boom town. It experienced over twenty years of explosive growth from the 1920s to the 1940s. The reason for this success was the nitrate mines in the area. Not only was it mined here, but it was also processed. A scientific discovery was responsible for the demise of this town. When scientists discovered synthetic saltpeter that was the end of the town. There was no more need for mining nitrate, since this became an expensive and unnecessary alternative to the synthetic material. By 1961 there was not even one resident left in the town. Like many of the ghost towns in our west, the town of Humberstone lay there abandoned.

The city of Kennett, California had to be abandoned due to the construction of the Shasta Dam and now lays under 400 feet of water. The same is true for Pattenville, New Hampshire, Kane, Wyoming, due to the construction of the Yellowtail Dam, Dana, Enfield, Greenwich and Prescott Massachusetts which are now under the water due to the construction of the Quabbin Reservoir in 1938. I guess that the construction of dams and reservoirs are responsible for many towns and small cities being put under water. Some day in the future, archaeologists may decide to swim down to them to see how people lived in our time. In a way, we may have inadvertently created a time capsule for future generations.

Sometimes we find abandoned cities on islands. It does make one wonder how some of these ancient people got around and how they were able to leave their homeland. There are several other reasons that might apply to their disappearances however. They could have all died from a disease, been captured and taken away, or just built boats and traveled to some other place. It could also be that they managed to get out on the ocean, but were destroyed by a storm before ever making it to anywhere else. The island of Thera contained a flourishing city that had been settled by the Minoans and was the most famous Minoan city outside of Crete. The Minoans were very advanced for their time and had multi-storied buildings, running water and much of what we consider modern conveniences. That did not help them when the volcano on the island erupted and buried their city, killing everyone and sealing the city in a tomb of ash. We are talking about a city that was settled about 3,000 B.C. making it a wonder of the world. Can you imagine people back then living in such an advanced society? Textile factories were found suggesting that cloth was exported at the time. Some homes were three stories high. Sewers were used and much fine artwork was found. The citizens of this city were truly very sophisticated for this time.

It is just amazing how many places on this earth were occupied at one time and just abandoned. The human race has been occupying and abandoning settlements, towns and cities since the beginning of time. As I stated above, there are many reasons for this and sometimes it is due to natural events. You just never know if any of the places we live in now will be occupied in the distant future, or even in the near future for that matter. If a natural disaster struck a small town now and destroyed all the buildings, would the people rebuild, or would they find it easier to just move somewhere else, leaving the remains of their town? Who can answer such a question? For all we know, some of our biggest cities could become uninhabitable.