The eerie abandoned towns across the globe that are now hotspots for ghost hunters and tourists
One village attracted miners in the California gold rush and another was built for the British Army to train against German soldiers
IN an over-populated world of seven billion people, it's hard to imagine that ghost towns exist, but there are plenty of settlements across the globe that time has forgotten.
Whether it's a village that once attracts thousands of gold miners in California or a fake town built by the British Army to train against German soldiers in the late 1900s, the deserted hamlets these days only entice ghost hunters and urban ruin photographers.
Read on to find out where some of the most deserted towns can be found and why they came to be empty...
Bodie, California
Bodie is a town east of the Sierra Nevada mountain range in Mono County that is described as “a town frozen in time in a state of arrested decay.”
Bodie was established in 1859 and people came for the gold, but when they didn’t find as much as they were hoping for, people left.
The town is now a State Historic Park and most of the ghost town has remained untouched.
Tourists who walk down the deserted streets now feel as if they’re in an episode of "Westworld."
Copehill Down, Wiltshire, England
Copehill Down is a mock village built by the British army as a copy of a German town at the end of the Cold War.
It was created so that that the army could practice their urban warfare skills and close quarters fighting.
Called a “FIBUA” (Fighting In Built-Up Areas) village, Copehill Down is just one of the handful of such villages scattered around the country.
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Kolmanskop, Namibia
Often referred to as Namibia’s Ghost Town, Kolmanskop was once the site of a diamond rush and a bustling city for German miners.
Eventually, it peaked and saw its decline after World War I, when inhabitants left in search of new diamond deposits.
Many of the buildings still stand, but much of the city has been claimed by sand.
Nowadays it is known to attract ghost hunters from all over the world.
Oradour-sur-Glane, France
Oradour-sur-Glane was a small French farming village that ended up in the German-occupied zone of France during World War Two.
On June 10, 1944, German troops killed 642 people, almost the entire population of the town, and then destroyed the village.
After the war, a new village was built nearby but the president Charles De Gaulles ordered that the ruins of Oradour-sur-Glane remained as a memorial and museum to the atrocities that occurred there.
Novi Cidade de Kilamba (Kilamba New City), Angola
Kilamba is the largest of several “satellite cities” being built by Chinese firms in Angola.
But it has no residents, even though it was designed to house more than 500,000 people.
Located in an isolated spot about 18 miles outside Angola’s capital, Luanda, Nova Cidade de Kilamba is a mixed residential development of 750 apartment buildings, several schools and more than 100 retail units.
Building the city cost an estimated $3.5 billion (£2.72 billion).
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