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Abandoned Places in the USA

Former buildings and sites with abandoned histories and reported paranormal stories; check access before visiting.

44 haunted places26 states44 cities & towns

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Searching abandoned places in the USA

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Showing 24 of 44 places

Editorial basis: cards use each listing's short description and are ordered by haunting level, then views. Approved community reports are counted separately.

Abandoned Places

Vulture City Ghost Town

Wickenburg, AZ

A former gold mining settlement founded in 1863, remembered for its boomtown history, frontier justice and reports of paranormal activity.

0 approved community reports

No approved photo available

Editorial rating (not community score) Extreme

Abandoned Places

Waverly Hills Sanatorium

Louisville, KY

A 1926 tuberculosis sanatorium with an estimated 8,000 deaths — the underground body-removal tunnel is its most infamous feature.

0 approved community reports

No approved photo available

Editorial rating (not community score) Extreme

Abandoned Places

Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum

Weston, WV

America's largest hand-cut stone building — a Civil War-era asylum that housed 2,400 patients in a facility built for 250.

0 approved community reports

No approved photo available

Editorial rating (not community score) Extreme

Abandoned Places

Ohio State Reformatory

Mansfield, OH

The filming location for The Shawshank Redemption — the warden's quarters where his wife was accidentally killed are the most reported area.

0 approved community reports

No approved photo available

Editorial rating (not community score) Extreme

Abandoned Places

Rolling Hills Asylum

East Bethany, NY

An 1827 poor farm turned paranormal investigation destination — the shadow of a seven-foot-tall resident is its signature phenomenon.

0 approved community reports

No approved photo available

Editorial rating (not community score) Extreme

Abandoned Places

Goldfield Ghost Town

Apache Junction, AZ

A restored 1890s mining town in the Superstition Mountains, famed for its Wild West history and reported paranormal activity.

0 approved community reports

No approved photo available

Editorial rating (not community score) High

Abandoned Places

Alcatraz Island

San Francisco, CA

The island federal penitentiary in San Francisco Bay — closed in 1963, now one of the most visited historic sites in the American West.

0 approved community reports

No approved photo available

Editorial rating (not community score) High

Abandoned Places

Preston Castle

Ione, CA

An 1894 Romanesque reform school where a cook was murdered in 1950 — a case that was never solved and an apparition that reportedly remained.

0 approved community reports

No approved photo available

Editorial rating (not community score) High

Abandoned Places

Sloss Furnaces

Birmingham, AL

A National Historic Landmark iron works where a foreman died in 1906 — his reported apparition still pushes at workers near the furnaces.

0 approved community reports

No approved photo available

Editorial rating (not community score) High

Abandoned Places

Annie Lytle — Public School Number Four — has decayed beside Jacksonville's expressways since closing decades ago, its columned porch earning the nickname 'Devil's School' and a bodyguard of invented legends. The 1917 landmark is a sealed ruin: viewable, storied, and strictly off-limits.

0 approved community reports

No approved photo available

Editorial rating (not community score) Moderate

Abandoned Places

Tennessee State Prison

Nashville, TN

The Tennessee State Prison's castle-like gatehouse has loomed west of Nashville since 1898, closed since 1992 and known worldwide from 'The Green Mile' and music videos. Its cellblocks, riots and executions left a hard history — and a reputation that filming crews repeat. No public entry.

0 approved community reports

No approved photo available

Editorial rating (not community score) Moderate

Abandoned Places

Summerwind

Land O' Lakes, WI

Summerwind — the Lamont mansion on Wisconsin's West Bay Lake — was the Midwest's most argued-over haunted house: a 1900s lodge whose 1970s owners' accounts of apparitions and a moving corpse legend made national fame before fire destroyed it in 1988. Only ruins remain, on private land.

0 approved community reports

No approved photo available

Editorial rating (not community score) Moderate

Abandoned Places

Central Unit

Sugar Land, TX

The Central Unit was a Texas state prison at Sugar Land, opened in 1909 on land worked since the convict-leasing era and closed in 2011. Its ground holds hard history — beside it in 2018 were found the graves of the 'Sugar Land 95', Black prisoners of the leasing years — and that truth outweighs any ghost story.

0 approved community reports

No approved photo available

Editorial rating (not community score) Moderate

Abandoned Places

Harrisburg State Hospital

Harrisburg, PA

Harrisburg State Hospital, Pennsylvania's first public asylum, opened in 1851 and closed in 2006, its Kirkbride-era lawns and brick wards preserved as a film-famous campus. Its telling — figures at ward windows, voices in the tunnels — stays secondary to its patients' real lives.

0 approved community reports

No approved photo available

Editorial rating (not community score) Moderate

Abandoned Places

Pennhurst State School and Hospital

Spring City, PA

Pennhurst State School near Spring City, Pennsylvania, held thousands of disabled residents from 1908 until courts closed it in 1987 — its documented neglect helped ignite the disability-rights movement. The vast campus now hosts tours and a controversial haunted attraction; its history demands dignity first.

0 approved community reports

No approved photo available

Editorial rating (not community score) Moderate

Abandoned Places

Eloise

Westland, MI

Eloise, the vast Wayne County complex at Westland, Michigan, grew from an 1839 poorhouse into a city-sized asylum and hospital of 10,000 souls. Its surviving buildings — and the potter's field of numbered graves — anchor Detroit's institutional memory and its most storied hauntings.

0 approved community reports

No approved photo available

Editorial rating (not community score) Moderate

Abandoned Places

St. Ignatius Hospital

Colfax, WA

St. Ignatius Hospital rises over Colfax in Washington's Palouse — a brick 1893 hospital run by the Sisters of Charity until 1964, later care apartments, then abandonment. Sanctioned tours now fund its preservation, and its wards are the region's most investigated rooms.

0 approved community reports

No approved photo available

Editorial rating (not community score) Moderate

Abandoned Places

The Ladd School

Exeter, RI

The Ladd School at Exeter, Rhode Island, confined disabled residents from 1908 until 1993, its later-condemned practices part of the state's reckoning with institutional care. Largely demolished now, the site is remembered soberly — its telling secondary to its residents' lives.

0 approved community reports

No approved photo available

Editorial rating (not community score) Moderate

Abandoned Places

Hales Bar Dam

Guild, TN

Hales Bar Dam stands abandoned on the Tennessee River near Guild, Tennessee — a 1913 hydroelectric dam built, in legend, on ground cursed during the Cherokee removals, and plagued in fact by leaks until its 1968 closure. Ghost tours now run through its cavernous powerhouse.

0 approved community reports

No approved photo available

Editorial rating (not community score) Moderate

Abandoned Places

Dudleytown

Cornwall, CT

Dudleytown is a vanished 18th-century settlement in the wooded hills of Cornwall, Connecticut, long nicknamed a 'village of the damned' in New England folklore. Stories tell of misfortune among its settlers and strange silence in the woods, but the site is private property and strictly closed to visitors.

0 approved community reports

No approved photo available

Editorial rating (not community score) Moderate

Abandoned Places

Lincoln Heights Jail

Los Angeles, CA

Lincoln Heights Jail is a hulking former city jail beside the Los Angeles River, operating from 1931 to 1965 and infamous for the 'Bloody Christmas' beatings of 1951. Long used as a film location, the closed building has a hard reputation for reported voices, slamming doors and shadow figures.

0 approved community reports

No approved photo available

Editorial rating (not community score) Moderate

Abandoned Places

Terrence Building

Rochester, NY

The Terrence Building towers sealed over Rochester, New York — a sixteen-storey 1959 psychiatric high-rise, emptied since 1995 and visible for miles. Its thousands of patients' history is told here with dignity first; the explorer-era telling stays firmly behind the fence with the sealed building itself.

0 approved community reports

No approved photo available

Editorial rating (not community score) Moderate

Abandoned Places

Bomoseen State Park

Castleton, VT

West Castleton's slate-era ruins line Lake Bomoseen in Vermont's Bomoseen State Park — quarry holes, mill walls and Irish workers' cellar holes on the Slate History Trail. The lake adds its own famous phantom: a rowboat that crosses with no rower.

0 approved community reports

No approved photo available

Editorial rating (not community score) Moderate

Abandoned Places

Elko Tract

Richmond, VA

The Elko Tract east of Richmond, Virginia, is the city's 'lost city': a WWII decoy airfield turned half-built 1950s development whose empty streets, kerbs and fire hydrants ran through forest for decades — a grid without houses that bred a generation of legends.

0 approved community reports

No approved photo available

Editorial rating (not community score) Moderate

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About abandoned places in the USA

This page gathers abandoned places reported across the United States — drawn from local history, published folklore and visitor reports. Many are open to the public, and several offer tours or overnight stays.

Stories are recorded as accounts rather than established fact. Browse by state above, or open the full map to explore everything near you.