Abandoned places are captivating, as they often give us a direct glimpse of what life must have been like in the past. There are some locations that seem as if they are places that time forgot, as if life has ceased to exist.

10Tkvarcheli, Georgia

This Soviet ghost town is technically located within a country called The Autonomous Republic of Abkhazia, which is only officially recognized by five other countries. To the rest of the world, these are just the remains of another Georgian town that supplied the Soviet industrial machine.

The town was constructed back in the 1940s to supply coal to the Soviets. As such, it was built to last long into the future. However, during the war of independence in the early 1990s, the town fell to Georgian forces. Tkvarcheli was occupied by the Georgians for more than a year, until Abkhaz forces reclaimed the town with the help of the Russians.

Sadly for the town, it was too late, as the Soviet era was already in decline. The population of the town steadily dwindled until it was eventually abandoned for good. Nowadays, it serves as a creepy reminder of life at the height of the Soviet Union.

9Hashima Island, Japan

At first glance, it’s not hard to see why this island was nicknamed “Battleship Island.” Approached from the water, it really does look like a giant concrete battleship, thanks to its high sea walls. But the history behind this small island isn’t nearly as pretty as its panoramic views.

Hashima was a coal mining town from 1887–1974, which aided in the industrialization of Japan. Naturally, mining is back-breaking work, so the demand for workers was high. By 1959, there were 5,259 miners living on the island, crammed into just 16 acres of land. As one of the most densely populated areas in the world, living conditions soon declined to prison-like levels.

In the 1960s, petroleum started to replace coal. Many mines throughout Japan were shut down shortly thereafter, including Hashima in 1974. Within a matter of weeks, one of the most densely populated places on Earth was deserted, and the island was left to rot and weather the elements.

8Kitsault, Canada

The town of Kitsault sits in the province of British Columbia, Canada. It featured more than 100 homes, 200 apartments, a hospital, a shopping mall, a movie theater, a sports center, and a bank. What more could you ask for this far up north? The only missing thing is the people.

The town formed in 1979 around the steel production industry after a molybdenum source was found nearby. For a while, all was well, but the town’s fate was sealed when the price of molybdenum crashed. As a result, the mine was shut down, and by 1983, Kitsault had turned into a ghost town almost overnight.

The town may possibly have found a saving grace, however, in the form of an entrepreneur who bought the place for $5 million in 2004. He hopes to resurrect the town from its slumber, but only time will tell if the plan is successful.

7The Parisian Time Capsule Apartment

Time capsules are always fascinating, as they provide a direct, unobstructed view into the past. Although most time capsules found nowadays are intentional, it’s exciting to stumble upon accidental ones like this amazing apartment in Paris.

In the 1940s, the apartment was owned by a Mrs. De Florian, who fled south just before World War II broke out. She left her apartment locked, never to return again, which is how it remained for 70 years. After De Florian passed away, the apartment was finally opened for her heirs to take inventory. Underneath layers of cobwebs and dust, everything was found just as De Florian had left it, including a stunning painting of a woman dressed in pink.

Along with this painting, the inventory team also found a couple of old love letters, which were neatly wrapped in ribbon. Most love letters are only interesting to the people who sent or received them, but these ones were much more than pretty words on paper—they were confirmed to have been written by Giovanni Boldini, who was one of the most influential painters of the Belle Epoque. He was the artist behind the painting, which depicted De Florian’s grandmother, a high-society French actress and courtesan. The painting was later sold for a staggering 2.1 million Euros ($2.85 million USD).

6The Buzludzha Monument, Bulgaria

Although at first glance, this structure looks like a giant concrete saucer on top of a mountain, Buzludzha is actually a monument dedicated to communism. The story behind its inception goes all the way back to 1891, when Bulgaria’s socialist faction met on this exact spot to discuss Bulgaria’s future. Construction began in 1974, and the building was richly decorated with an abundance of Bulgarian and Soviet symbols, including a series of colorful mosaic frescoes on the walls. Perhaps the most impressive feature of the Buzludzha Monument is the colossal hammer and sickle in the middle of the dome ceiling.

Sadly, this beautiful building eventually fell to squalor, as the Bulgarian communist party disbanded following a revolution in 1989. Ownership of the monument was transferred to the government, which simply sealed off the main entrance and left it to be ravaged by vandalism and the elements.

5Doel, Belgium

The town of Doel is 700 years old, but in an effort to expand the nearby harbor, the Belgian government scheduled the town for demolition and forced its residents to move. Subsequently, Doel turned into a ghost town, silently awaiting its demolition. The few citizens who refused to leave took an unusual stand against their predicament, bringing in street artists from all over Europe and encouraging them to turn Doel into their personal canvas as a form of protest.

The end result was spectacular, as the walls of the all-but-abandoned town transformed into a life-size living art gallery. The contrast between the old, historic buildings and the layers of modern graffiti that adorn them is breathtaking. Only 25 residents remain in this post-apocalyptic artistic paradise, and their future in Doel looks bleak. Demolition is still on the horizon, and they’ll all have to leave once the wrecking ball comes.

4Coco Palms, Hawaii

Known as the setting for the classic film Blue Hawaii, the island resort of Coco Palms is anything but a tropical paradise. The resort opened in 1953, and thanks to some marketing for the film Miss Sadie Thompson by MGM, business did not take long to pick up. However, once Elvis Presley arrived to film the instant hit Blue Hawaii, the resort became a runaway success. Couples from all over the globe, including A-list celebrities, wanted to spend their vacations and honeymoons on Elvis’s island nirvana.

For a few decades, it appeared that Coco Palms was here to stay, but in 1992, it fell victim to Hurricane Iniki. Most of the island was badly hit, and the resort couldn’t escape the colossal repair bills. Many insurance companies went bankrupt in the aftermath of the storm, so many repairs could not even be performed. This sent the whole island into a recession, from which the resort would never recover.

Still in tatters from the storm, the property was soon overtaken by vandals and thieves. Cottage 56, the suite where Elvis stayed, was an especially popular target. Although many redevelopment and restoration plans have been proposed, the resort is still a long way from recapturing its glory days.

3Two Guns, Arizona

The story behind Two Guns, originally called Canyon Lodge, is a sad one. It all started in the 1920s, when the infamous Route 66 gained massive traffic from adventurous travelers. Many of these travelers stopped for supplies at Canyon Lodge, which was just a small trading post run by Earle and Louise Cundiff at the time. The town’s success quickly caught the attention of the entrepreneur Harry “Two Guns” Miller, who recognized the the vast amounts of wealth to be gained there. He convinced the Cundiffs to lease him the site for 10 years and renamed the town. Under Miller’s command, the town was transformed into a full-blown tourist trap, complete with its own zoo and attractions.

One of these so called “attractions” was a nearby canyon, which was the site of a battle between the Apaches and the Navajos. Inside the canyon was a cave called the Apache Death Cave, which served as a tomb for 42 Apache men. Although the cave’s backstory is fascinating in its own right, Miller decided that it wasn’t intriguing enough for his tourists. He renamed it “Mystery Cave,” built fake ruins, sold the Apache skulls as souvenirs, and perhaps most egregiously, added a soda stand.

The town soon fell victim to a major robbery, which made relations between Miller and the Cundiffs very tense, culminating in a heated argument during which Miller shot Earle Cundiff dead. Incredibly, Miller was acquitted at trial, but shortly thereafter, he was attacked twice by mountain lions and bitten by a Gila monster. This trail of bad luck finally reached a tipping point in 1929, when a fire burned down the whole town. After losing a court battle with Louise Cundiff to keep the land, Miller left. Route 66 was rerouted to the opposite canyon, and Two Guns slowly faded into obscurity, its golden days long behind it.

2The Cinema At The End Of The World

In the middle of the Sinai desert lies a mysterious cinema that never saw an audience. Information about this place is very scarce, and it leaves us with more questions than answers.

The oddly situated setup was built by a French film buff named Diynn Eadel in the 1990s. Somehow, Eadel managed to secure the necessary building permits and convinced Parisian investors to buy seats and projectors from the old theaters of Cairo. The resulting arrangement, which would seat 700 people, sadly never saw an opening night, and no one seems to know why. The theater might have gone unnoticed for years had it not gathered attention from the media recently after it was vandalized and destroyed, most likely for scrap metal.

1Salton Riviera, California

Looking as if it came straight out of a post-apocalyptic world, the Salton Riviera is one of the most awe-inspiring locations on Earth. It was built around the Salton Sea, the largest body of water in California, which was amazingly created by accident when a flood poured in from the Colorado River over the course of two years at the turn of the century.

Many thought that the floodwater would eventually dry out, but years went by seemingly without a drop of evaporation. Developers soon recognized the opportunity the lake presented and built a full-fledged resort upon it, advertised as the “Miracle in the Desert.” The Salton Sea, as it had been named, became the French Riviera of California. Tourists flocked to the resort from all over the country, and many even settled down in a place that had once been uninhabitable desert.

However, this paradise would not last forever. Since the lake was only fed by agricultural runoff, the water became increasingly saltier over the years. Millions of dead fish floated to the surface of the lake, whose white sandy beaches were soon covered in their bones. All the tourists fled from the town, which had become overpowered by the stench of rotten fish. Almost overnight, the Salton Riviera was abandoned, left to become the toxic wasteland that it is today.

I’ve decided to take the plunge and start writing my own lists. You can send your comments and suggestions here.

In Victorian times, people would stop a house’s clocks at the time of an occupant’s death. Although this tradition continues somewhat today, there are some death clocks that weren’t stopped on purpose. Instead, they were broken by terrible circumstance, frozen forever to mark the last moments of disaster. These clocks are chilling mementos of past tragedies.

10 The Pirate’s Pocket Watch

On June 7, 1692, the town of Port Royal, Jamaica, was destroyed by a major earthquake. Shortly before noon, residents heard a thunderous cracking noise before feeling the earth shake violently and watching half their city slip into the sea. Three centuries later, historians began to explore the underwater ruins.

The most famous artifact recovered from the ruins was a pocket watch manufactured in the Netherlands around 1686. The hands on the watch were stopped at 11:43 AM, the exact time of the earthquake and the watch’s entrance into the sea. Although other records noting the time of the quake do exist, the discovery of the pocket watch was the first time that a stopped clock was used by archaeologists to date a disaster down to the minute.

9 Casey Jones’s Pocket Watch

Railroad enthusiasts know the story of John Luther “Casey” Jones, a train engineer who heroically died saving his passengers during a collision near Vaughn, Mississippi. While approaching the station at Vaughn, Jones and his signalman noticed something on the track ahead. They realized too late that it was the tail end of another train that was too long to fit its siding. The signalman leaped from the cab (on Jones’s orders), leaving Casey to his fate. A few seconds later, Jones’s train collided head-on with the other cars.

When Jones’s badly mangled body was pulled from the wreckage later that day, it was found that his pocket watch had stopped at 3:52 AM, the exact time of the impact. Although Jones died as a result of the crash, his actions ensured that he was the only fatality. No one else involved with either train suffered more than minor injuries.

8 The Titanic’s Mantel Clock

The story of the Titanic—the so-called “unsinkable” luxury ocean liner—is well-known. On the night of April 14, 1912, the ship struck an iceberg and ultimately sank into the North Atlantic during the early morning hours of April 15, taking approximately 1,500 people with it. Although there were many pocket watches and clocks retrieved from both victims and the ship itself, the most interesting one remains with the wreck.

This clock was located on the fireplace of the Straus suite, used by Macy’s founder Isidor Straus and his wife. Upon the dilapidated mantel, surrounded by sand and debris, sits a golden clock looking almost as new as it did the day it was made. Old pictures of the suite in its heyday show that the sinking did not affect the clock’s position at all. Its face, however, has seen some damage and is hard to read. The documentary Tony Robinson’s Titanic Adventure hypothesizes that the hands stopped either at 2:04 AM, when the last lifeboat was released, or 2:20 AM, the very minute the ship plunged beneath the waves.

7 John Taylor’s Pocket Watch

Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, was killed on June 27, 1844, by a group of angry Illinois townspeople. After a long legal debacle that began with the destruction of an anti-Mormon newspaper’s printing press, Smith and a few other men waited in the Carthage, Illinois, jail for a trail. There, they saw a mob of around 200 men marching toward the building.

Although Smith was killed in the attack, his friend, John Taylor, miraculously survived. In the melee, Taylor tried to escape by jumping from the jail window but was pushed backward by the force of a gunshot from below. The shooter had been aiming for Taylor’s heart but instead hit his watch, which he kept in his left vest pocket. The hands of the watch were stopped at 5:16 PM, approximately the time that Joseph Smith breathed his last. Taylor later took his miracle watch to Salt Lake City, where he eventually became president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The watch remains in the church’s archives to this day.

6 The Chernobyl Clock

In early morning hours of April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant experienced a meltdown after a safety test went catastrophically wrong. In the ensuing hours, the power plant and nearby areas were blasted with radioactive energy, heat, and fire. In 2005, intrepid photographer Gerd Ludwig ventured into the radioactive ruins of the power plant for a 15-minute photography trip. Although all the photographs of ghostly control rooms and empty hallways are stunning, there was only one scene that Ludwig truly risked his life to capture.

Deep in the heart of the reactor, where the radiation is strongest, Ludwig ventured into a room hidden behind a steel door. In the few seconds allowed to him, he saw an old clock hanging on a wall, its hands stopped at 1:23:58 AM, the exact time at which the reactor exploded. The image of the clock spoke so much to Ludwig that he begged to be allowed a few brief seconds to photograph, in his words, “the time when on 26 April, 1986, in the building that housed Energy Block #4, time stood forever still.”

5 The Train Workers’ Clock

The entire world knows the story of September 11, 2001, in which the United States suffered the worst terrorist attack in its history. Although the US has largely rebounded from the tragedy, 9/11 hasn’t been forgotten. Each plane crash site was made into a memorial, with the largest and most elaborate filling the footprint of the Twin Towers in New York City.

In 2005, the Ground Zero Museum Workshop opened in New York to honor the dead and remind the living of that terrible day. One of the featured items in the museum is a clock found in the wreckage, its hands pointing to 10:02:14 AM, when the south tower collapsed. The clock was discovered in a break room used by local train workers alongside the remnants of their weight lifting bench.

4 The Photographer’s Pocket Watch

On August 6, 1945, the future of warfare was changed forever. Whether truly merited or not, US military leaders decided to destroy the city of Hiroshima, Japan, with the ace they’d secretly been building: the atomic bomb. Roughly 100,000 people were killed in the attack, and everything within a 1.6-kilometer (1 mi) radius was completely turned to rubble.

In the aftermath of the bombing, 19-year-old Shinji Mikamo returned to Hiroshima to dig through the ruins of his family home. There, he found his grandfather’s golden pocket watch, which had originally been given as payment for serving as an imperial photographer. Even though the watch’s hands had been blown off, the heat of the blast had seared the time of the bombing onto the metal below, leaving the clock to always read 8:15 AM. Shinji donated the watch to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in 1955 and then to a museum in the United Nations Headquarters in New York. Unfortunately, the watch disappeared in 1989 and has not been seen since.

3 The Murrah Building Clock

Masterminded by two criminals who were disgruntled with the government, the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, was the deadliest terrorist attack in the US before 9/11. On the morning of April 19, 1995, a moving truck loaded with explosives detonated outside the building, killing 168 people (19 of whom were children under the age of six) and injuring more than 650 others. Three months later, the remains of the Murrah building were demolished so that a memorial and museum could be built on the grounds.

The idea of stopped time is heavily integrated into both the memorial and the museum. Two large structures known as the Gates of Time flank the entrances of the outdoor memorial, each inscribed with a time stamp of significance. The eastern gate reads “9:01,” which represents “the last moments of peace” before the blast. Its parallel, the western gate, reads “9:03,” called “the first moments of recovery.” Enshrined in the museum, however, is a memento that marks the exact time of the blast: a clock poised at 9:02 AM.

2 Oppau Church Clocks

Oppau (now incorporated into the city of Ludwigshafen) was a small town located in Southwestern Germany. Oppau’s BASF chemical plant was responsible for the production of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, which it stored in a large silo alongside another chemical. Unfortunately, these two chemicals had a habit of getting stuck together, a situation that was remedied with the use of dynamite charges. While this operation was dangerous, it was also commonplace.

However, Oppau’s luck ran out on September 21, 1921, when the fertilizer exploded. The huge blast left both the factory and town destroyed. What did survive were several clocks belonging to nearby churches. Every single one was found to have stopped at 7:33 AM, the exact time of the explosion.

1 The Tsunami Clock

While the Hawaiian islands are seen as a paradise by many, they still face the wrath of nature on occasion. The city of Hilo, located on the Big Island, has itself faced two major tsunamis in the last century, the second of which was on May 23, 1960. One of the area’s famous landmarks, a green clock located in the low-lying suburb of Waiakea Town, survived the first tsunami but was heavily damaged by the second. Its hands are stopped at 1:04 AM, the time at which the first massive waves hit the island.

The clock has been kept in this condition as a memorial to those who lost their lives and homes and still stands today. Waiakea Town no longer exists, its former lands having been replaced with public parks and green spaces.

The author is a Ph.D. student in agriculture who lives to read and learn.