Awesome Abandoned

There are tens of thousands of miles of abandoned railroad tracks in the U.S. Ryan Randomness explores these defunct rails using a gas-powered, two-seat go-kart that rolls on custom-made polyurethane wheels, and he shares videos of his journeys on his Instagram and YouTube channels, like this trip to the Goat Canyon Trestle.

Mountain bike athlete Jono Jones and his pal Olly Wilkins followed Mountain Bike Nomad along one of the craziest trails we’ve ever seen. Donning headlamps for illumination, the trio took their bikes through the dark and narrow passageways of an abandoned Slovenian lead mine. Jono says this was just a short section of the ride.

The guys from car care company AMMO NYC heard about a 1991 Volvo 240 wagon that’s been sitting in the woods since 2007. Its exterior was covered in a thick coating of lichen and mud, and its interior was a smelly, rodent-infested disaster. With the help of Rebuild Rescue, can they bring the car back to its former glory?

Built in the early 1970s, the 900+ room Carolando Motor Inn was, for a time, the largest hotel near Disney World. It was part of a larger development that never came to fruition, and after a successful run as a Hyatt, and a failed reopening, it saw its final guests in 2012. Bright Sun Films takes us on a tour of its water-logged ruins.

The 65,000 square foot Peter Grant Mansion sits along the lakefront in Haileybury, Ontario, Canada. The enormous, custom-built home was never completed after a financial collapse in 2008. Bright Sun Films takes us on a tour of the now-abandoned monument to excess.

While walking through the woods, the ActionAdventureTwins came across a pipe in the middle of the ground with no idea of where it led to. So they attached a GoPro and a light down into it to see where it might end. The camera reached the end of their 125-foot tether and emerged into what may have been an abandoned mine.

With the help of Tac Gas, drone pilot NURK FPV had the rare opportunity to visit an abandoned gas and oil platform. There, he zigged and zagged his aerial camera through the rusted out facility, capturing some fascinating and truly unique visuals. The over-water footage had us hanging on for dear life.

Around the globe, there are numerous decommissioned nuclear power plants. In the case of this plant that never opened along the German-Dutch border, it’s now home to an amusement park that includes a vertical swing ride inside of its cooling tower. A scenic mural on its outside helps it blend into its surroundings.

Most of the time a movie production films on location, they try to return it to the way they found it. But once in a while they just up and leave their set pieces behind, like at this surreal location in Iceland, where Mobile Instinct visited an “ancient” village was built for a movie back in 2009 or so.

Explorer Legend of Micah takes a trip to one of the creepier locations we’ve seen in a while – an abandoned Wild West theme park in Japan. The place is littered with relics of a fake western town, an old 1980s arcade, and even has a disturbing animatronic cowboy, straight out of the original Westworld.

Sudbury, Canada’s Old St. Joseph’s Hospital has been dormant for more than a decade, and may eventually be demolished. But before its bricks hits the ground, West Coast graffiti artist Kelly “RISK” Graval and a team of artists splashed the exterior of the 74,000 sq.ft. building into a bright and colorful work of abstract street art.

Urban explorers The Proper People, Broken Window Theory, and Tobi Urbex take us deep inside a defunct textile factory in Italy. Along the way, they encountered all manner of items just left to rot, from countless vintage computers, to company records, to numerous articles of clothing… and huge mounds of pigeon droppings.

Photographer Andrew Walker captured eye-popping footage of a structure that humans rarely see the inside of – the cooling tower of a nuclear power plant. This particular tower was part of a never-completed plant located in Satsop, Washington.

Bright Sun Films looks at one of the strangest abandoned places – a floating restaurant McDonald’s commissioned for the 1986 World’s Fair in Vancouver. After it closed, the Friendship 500 aka the “McBarge” sat forsaken for 28-years. But might it rise from the ashes?

The Burj al Babas project planned to create a subdivision in Turkey filled with personal castles for the wealthy. However, economic woes caused the project to fail. Now, hundreds of these odd little castle McMansions remain as the world’s strangest ghost town.

(PG-13: Language) Renegade explorer shiey and his pals snuck their way into an abandoned factory somewhere in Eastern Europe, where they came across a big old industrial overhead crane. To their surprise, the machine wasn’t just connected to power, but it still works.

Get a unique perspective on a rusted out shipwreck, as a kayaker takes us on a slow float through the submerged innards of the Evangelia Shipwreck, which rests on Romania’s Black Sea coast. It’s surprisingly relaxing, but we can only imagine how creepy it would be in the dark.

Photographer George Ivanoff used a DJI Phantom 3 drone to provide us with a unique perspective on the numerous defunct and rusted out ships which call New York’s Arthur Kill their final resting place.

Pontiac, Michigan’s Silverdome was once home to the Detroit Lions. With the stadium in ruins, Red Bull let loose BMX rider Tyler Fernengal in the abandoned stadium where he pulled some epic tricks in the eerie locale. (Thanks Mike!)

The Sheffield Ski Village once was home to the UK’s largest man-made ski slope. The facility was destroyed by fire in 2012. A group of freeskiers recently returned to the abandoned slope to drum up support for bringing the park back to life.

Claire & Max shot footage of abandoned locations (no, that’s NOT the real Eiffel Tower) with their drone, then flipped it on its head to make for a truly surreal viewing experience. The Danny Elfman-esque music really sets the mood.

A creepy old psychiatric hospital in New York serves as the backdrop for JENKEM’s skateboarding video. We were waiting for them to bump into the crew from one of those ghost hunters’ TV shows. Some great still photos here.

Bangkok’s New World shopping mall was abandoned back in 1999. Later, an unknown person started populating its flooded basement with koi and catfish. Jesse Rockwell captured these amazing photos of its unusual residents.