Castle Miranda has stood in Celles since 1866, Belgium, but has long been abandoned to decay and rot. When the French Revolution heated up, the politically active Liedekerke-Beaufort family were forced to abandon their castle in the Walloon region of southern Belgium. The castle is also known as Chateau Noisy after the children’s home it was turned into – following the Second World War – by the National Railway Company of Belgium for the children of employees. It stayed a children’s home until 1980. After becoming too expensive to maintain, Miranda Castle was abandoned in 1991. A fire in 1995 destroyed part of the roof, and dry rot has set into the wood. The building is still owned by Liedekerke-Beaufort family, who, following the fire, stripped the castle of its more valuable components.

credit: _foam

Kolmanskop is located in the Namib Desert in Namibia, Africa. The desert ghost town was named after transport driver Johnny Coleman, which Kolmanskop means Coleman’s Hill in Afrikaans. It is an abandoned diamond mining town in the Namib desert, a few kilometres inland from the port town of Lüderitz. Founded in 1908 when a rail worker named Zacharias Lewala in the area discovered a diamond, the town enjoyed nearly fifty years of history until it was abandoned in 1954 when the diamond mines finally dried up.

credit: coda

Paint your design onto your pumpkin with any tools you like to paint: paintbrushes, cotton swabs, sponges, or cotton balls. A painted pumpkin also won’t rot as fast as a carved one. No need to wield a giant knife, risking injury to yourself or your kids.

credit: torbakhopper

credit: torbakhopper

credit: torbakhopper

credit: torbakhopper

credit: torbakhopper

credit: mendolus shank

credit: mendolus shank

credit: mendolus shank

Bodie was named after Waterman S. Body, who discovered gold here in 1859. It is an original mining town from the late 1800’s. Bodie had the reputation of being one of the most furious, vehement, violent and lawless towns. It once had a population of 10,000 people and some $75million in gold was taken from Bodie Butte. It is located on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada mountain range in Mono County, California, about 75 miles southeast of Lake Tahoe, at an elevation of 8369 feet. Visitors can walk down the deserted streets of a town that is one of the most authentic abandoned gold mining towns of the Old West.

credit: jodastephen

Perhaps the most haunting and downright weird tourist attraction on Cyprus, the abandoned Maras district (known in Greek as the \’Varosia\’) really is a sight worth seeing. The Varosia is a lingering reminder of the relatively recent year of 1974, when the Turkish invasion took place and this whole area was barricaded off with barbed wire, becoming something of a no-man\’s land. The beach and crumbing high-rise tower blocks remain unused and make the Varosia area of Famagusta appear rather like a ghost town, with just a tiny portion of this former leading beach resort being still occupied.