Factors leading to the abandonment of towns include depleted
natural resources, economic activity shifting elsewhere, railroads and roads bypassing or no longer accessing the town, human intervention, disasters, massacres, wars, the shifting of politics or fall of empires, and volcanic eruptions. A town can also be abandoned if it is located within an
exclusion zone due to natural or human-made causes.
Armed conflicts (2010) , destroyed (2025) Some towns became deserted when their populations were
massacred, deported, or expelled. Examples include
Kayaköy, an ancient Greek city abandoned in 1923 as a result of the
population exchange between Greece and Turkey, and the original French village at
Oradour-sur-Glane which was destroyed on
10 June 1944 when 642 of its 663 inhabitants were killed by a German
Waffen-SS company. A new village was built after the war on a nearby site, and the ruins of the original have been maintained as a memorial. The century-old
Israeli–Palestinian conflict and
Arab-Israeli conflict have caused a lot of ghost towns as well. In
Palestine, the
Old City of Hebron has been divided into H1, under Palestinian control, and H2, under
Israeli military control since 1997. As a result of this division and the presence of
Israeli settlers, the H2 area is subject to strict restrictions, shop closures, and checkpoints that have emptied the historic city centre. As for the
Gaza Strip, following the
Gaza war, most of its cities have been devastated by the
Israeli military,
Rafah and
Khan Yunis in particular. Another Middle Eastern example is
Quneitra, located in the
Golan Heights: the city has been occupied by Israeli forces in 1967 and entirely destroyed before Israeli withdrawal in June 1974. The
United Nations has condemned Israel for Quneitra's destruction, while Israel blamed
Syria for not rebuilding the city. Another example is
Aghdam, a city in
Azerbaijan. Armenian forces occupied Aghdam in July 1993 during the
First Nagorno-Karabakh War. The heavy fighting forced the entire population to flee. Upon seizing the city, Armenian forces destroyed much of the town to discourage Azerbaijanis from returning. More damage occurred in the following decades when locals looted the abandoned town for building materials. Azerbaijan recaptured the district in November 2020 under a Russian-brokered ceasefire agreement.
Economic decline , smaller farms are no longer economically viable, leading to rural decay. Ghost towns may result when the single activity or resource that created a
boomtown (e.g., nearby mine, mill or resort) is depleted or the resource economy undergoes a "bust" (e.g., catastrophic resource price collapse). A
gold rush often brought intensive but short-lived economic activity to a remote village, only to leave a ghost town once the resource was depleted. Boomtowns can often decrease in size as quickly as they grew. Sometimes all, or nearly all, of the population can desert the town, resulting in a ghost town. The dismantling of a boomtown can often occur on a planned basis. Mining companies nowadays will create a temporary
company town to service a mine site, building all the accommodations, shops and services required, and then remove them once the resource has been extracted. Modular buildings can be used to facilitate the process. In some cases, multiple factors may remove the economic basis for a community; some former
mining towns on
U.S. Route 66 suffered both mine closures when the resources were depleted and loss of highway traffic as US 66 was diverted from places like
Oatman, Arizona, onto a more direct path. Mine and
pulp mill closures have led to many ghost towns in British Columbia, Canada, including several relatively recent ones:
Ocean Falls, which closed in 1973 after the pulp mill was decommissioned;
Kitsault, whose
molybdenum mine shut down after only 18 months in 1982; and
Cassiar, whose
asbestos mine operated from 1952 to 1992. In other cases, the reason for abandonment can arise from a town's intended economic function shifting to another, nearby place. This happened to
Collingwood, Queensland, in
Outback Australia when nearby
Winton outperformed Collingwood as a regional centre for the livestock-raising industry. The railway reached Winton in 1899, linking it with the rest of
Queensland, and Collingwood was a ghost town by the following year. More broadly across Australia, there has been a shift towards
fly-in fly-out arrangements over building a
company town in order to avoid the development of ghost towns once a mining resource has been fully extracted. The Middle East (Southwest Asia) has many ghost towns and ruins that were created when the shifting of politics or the fall of empires caused capital cities to be socially or economically unviable, such as
Ctesiphon. The rise of real-estate speculation and the resulting possibility of
real-estate bubbles (sometimes due to outright overbuilding by land developers) may also trigger the appearance of certain elements of a ghost town, as real-estate prices initially rise (whereupon affordable housing becomes less available) and then later fall for a variety of reasons that are often tied to economic cycles and/or marketing hubris. This has been observed in various countries, including Spain, China, the United States, and Canada, where housing is often used as an investment rather than for habitation.
Human intervention and infrastructure in 1974,
Varosha, now falling into ruin, was a modern tourist area. Railroads and roads bypassing or no longer reaching a town can also create a ghost town. This was the case in many of the ghost towns along Ontario's historic
Opeongo Line and along
U.S. Route 66 after motorists bypassed the latter on the faster-moving highways
I-44 and
I-40. Some ghost towns were founded along railways where
steam trains would stop at periodic intervals for repairs or to take on water, but
dieselisation or
electrification negated the need for the trains to stop.
Amboy, California, was part of one such series of villages along the
Atlantic and Pacific Railroad across the
Mojave Desert. In other cases, railroads replaced rivers or
canals as the primary means of overland transport, causing the decline of towns that depended on river or canal traffic; one such town was
Granville, Indiana, located on the
Wabash and Erie Canal. River rerouting is another factor, one example being the towns along the
Aral Sea. Ghost towns may be created when land is
expropriated by a government, and residents are required to relocate. One example is the village of
Tyneham in Dorset, England, acquired during World War II to build an artillery range. A similar situation occurred in the U.S. when
NASA acquired land to construct the
John C. Stennis Space Center (SSC), a rocket testing facility in
Hancock County, Mississippi (on the Mississippi side of the
Pearl River, which is the
Mississippi–
Louisiana state line). This required NASA to acquire a large (approximately )
buffer zone because of the loud noise and potential dangers associated with testing such rockets. Five thinly populated rural Mississippi communities (Gainesville, Logtown, Napoleon, Santa Rosa, and Westonia), plus the northern portion of a sixth (
Pearlington), along with 700 families in residence, had to be completely relocated away from the facility. , a
mining town in Abkhazia/Georgia, was abandoned in the early 1990s due to the
War in Abkhazia. Sometimes the town might cease to officially exist, but the physical infrastructure remains. For instance, the facility itself still contains remnants of the five Mississippi communities abandoned for the construction of SSC. These include city streets, now overgrown with forest flora and fauna, and a one-room schoolhouse. Another example of infrastructure remaining is the former town of
Weston, Illinois, that voted itself out of existence and turned the land over for construction of the
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Many houses and even a few barns remain, used for housing visiting scientists and storing maintenance equipment, while roads that used to cross through the site have been blocked off at the edges of the property with gatehouses or barricades to prevent unsupervised access.
Flooding by dams The construction of dams has left ghost towns submerged. Examples include: •
Kensico, New York was replaced by the
Kensico Reservoir. •
Loyston, Tennessee, U.S., was inundated by the creation of
Norris Dam and reconstructed on nearby higher ground. •
St. Thomas, Nevada, U.S., flooded by up to 70 feet of water by
Lake Mead following construction of the
Hoover Dam. •
Stiltner, West Virginia, inundated by the creation of
East Lynn Lake in 1969. •
The Lost Villages of
Ontario, flooded by
Saint Lawrence Seaway construction in 1958. •
Nether Hambleton and
Middle Hambleton in Rutland, England, which were flooded to create
Rutland Water. •
Ashopton and
Derwent, England, flooded during the construction of the
Ladybower Reservoir. • The
Tignes Dam flooded the village of Tignes in France, displacing 78 families. •
Mologa in Russia was flooded by the creation of
Rybinsk reservoir between 1941 and 1947. • Many ancient villages were abandoned during construction of the
Three Gorges Dam in China, leading to the displacement of many rural people. • In
Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica, inhabitants of Arenal and Tronadora were forced to relocate in 1978 to make room for the human-made
Lake Arenal. •
Old Adaminaby in New South Wales, Australia, was flooded by a dam of the
Snowy River Scheme. • Construction of the
Aswan High Dam on the
Nile River in Egypt submerged archaeological sites and ancient settlements, such as
Buhen under
Lake Nasser. •
Tehri was drowned after the construction of the
Tehri Dam in the Indian state of
Uttarakhand. •
Aceredo and five other villages in the region of
Galicia, Spain, drowned by the construction of
Alto Lindoso Dam downstream in Portugal in 1992 (later exposed after extreme drought conditions in early 2022). •
Capel Celyn, Gwynedd, Wales, was lost to the
Trywern Flooding of 1965. This was to create a reservoir,
Llyn Celyn, in order to supply the English areas of
Liverpool and
Wirral with water for industry. •
Dana,
Enfield,
Greenwich, and
Prescott, Massachusetts; four towns in the
Swift River Valley that were flooded in 1938 to create the
Quabbin Reservoir, a water supply for the growing city of
Boston and the surrounding suburbs.
Disasters, actual and anticipated , Italy, was abandoned due to a landslide in 1963. It has since become a popular film set. Both natural and man-made disasters can lead to the creation of ghost towns. For example, after being flooded more than 30 times since their town was founded in 1845, residents of
Pattonsburg, Missouri, decided to relocate after two floods in 1993. With government help, the whole town was rebuilt away.
Craco, a medieval village in the Italian region of
Basilicata, was evacuated after a landslide in 1963. Nowadays it is a filming location for many movies, including
The Passion of The Christ by
Mel Gibson,
Christ Stopped at Eboli by
Francesco Rosi,
The Nativity Story by
Catherine Hardwicke and
Quantum of Solace by
Marc Forster. In 1984,
Centralia, Pennsylvania, was abandoned due to an uncontainable
mine fire, which began in 1962 and still rages to this day; eventually the fire reached an abandoned mine underneath the nearby town of
Byrnesville, which caused that mine to catch on fire too and forced the evacuation of that town as well. , Ukraine, was abandoned after the
Chernobyl disaster. Ghost towns may also occasionally come into being due to an
anticipated natural disaster – for example, the Canadian town of
Lemieux, Ontario, was abandoned in 1991 after soil testing revealed that the community was built on an unstable bed of
Leda clay. Two years after the last building in Lemieux was demolished, a landslide swept part of the former townsite into the
South Nation River. Two decades earlier, the Canadian town of
Saint-Jean-Vianney, Québec, also constructed on a Leda clay base, had been abandoned after a landslide on 4 May 1971, which swept away 41 homes, killing 31 people. Following the
Chernobyl disaster of 1986, dangerously high levels of nuclear contamination escaped into the surrounding area, and nearly 200 towns and villages in Ukraine and neighbouring
Belarus were evacuated, including the cities of
Pripyat and
Chernobyl. The area was so contaminated that many of the evacuees were never permitted to return to their homes. Pripyat is the most famous of these abandoned towns; it was built for the workers of the
Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and had a population of almost 50,000 at the time of the disaster.
Human health , Germany. Turned into a restricted area after 1992 due to ammunition contamination from a nearby abandoned
Soviet Army barracks. Significant fatality rates from epidemics have produced ghost towns. Multiple hamlets in England were depopulated in the wake of the
Black Death in the mid-14th century. Some places in eastern
Arkansas were abandoned after more than 7,000 Arkansans died during the
Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 and 1919. Several communities in Ireland, particularly in the west of the country, were wiped out due to the
Great Famine in the latter half of the 19th century and the years of economic decline that followed. Catastrophic environmental damage caused by long-term contamination can also create a ghost town. Some notable examples are
Times Beach, Missouri, whose residents were exposed to a high level of
dioxins, and
Wittenoom, Western Australia, which was once Australia's largest source of
blue asbestos, but was shut down in 1966 due to health concerns.
Treece and
Picher, twin communities straddling the
Kansas–
Oklahoma border, were once one of the United States' largest sources of
zinc and
lead, but over a century of unregulated disposal of
mine tailings led to groundwater contamination and
lead poisoning in the town's children, eventually resulting in a mandatory
Environmental Protection Agency buyout and evacuation. Contamination due to
ammunition caused by military use may also lead to the development of ghost towns.
Tyneham, in
Dorset, was requisitioned for military exercises during the
Second World War, and remains unpopulated, being littered with unexploded munitions from regular shelling. ==Ghost town repopulation==