Inside the Castle in the Middle of the Death Valley Desert

On my first California road trip a few years ago, one of our stops I was looking forward to the most was Death Valley’s mysterious Scotty’s Castle, a sprawling Spanish style manor built in the middle of nowhere in the roaring twenties. We were dangerously low on gas but determined to find this isolated oasis, and to my…

The Neglected Ghost Town of Italy’s Dolce Vita Drinking Water

San Pellegrino is an icon of the Italian lifestyle, the most stylish brand of sparkling water you can order anywhere in the world, synonymous with luxury, fine dining, jet set summers in Europe and “la Dolce Vita”. One of its first admirers was allegedly Leonardo da Vinci, who visited the source in Lombardy to sample the…

Take an Eerie Tour of Greece’s Sinking Ghost Town

Ropoto was the perfect little Greek village that sunk. It was once a happy and peaceful place in central Greece, home to 300 families but today, it lies in ruin, a ghost town emptied of its residents who were raised in its charming village streets. In 2012, tragedy struck when a landslide destroyed Ropoto’s terrain, taking with…

This Empty Sicilian Town is Giving away Free Houses

There are records at Ellis Island in New York showing that between 1892 and 1924, the small Sicilian town of Gangi lost about 1,700 of its residents to the American dream. They abandoned their homes to board trans-Atlantic ocean liners, sold to the prospect of a better life by shipping agents pushing emigration in the region. Those…

The Cursed Italian Dreamtown

Here at MessyNessyChic, we can’t get enough of abandoned places, can we? It’s what brings us all together, a mysterious passion we share that none of us can really quite explain… Today’s story takes us to the incredible setting of an abandoned medieval village located in the region of Basilicata, about 25 miles inland…

Buy the “Walking Dead” Ghost Town, Just a Click away on eBay

I click on the eBay listing for the historic Downtown area of Grantville, Georgia. “Add to cart” for $680,000, a “unique opportunity” but “may not ship to France”. Crumbs. Anyone else interested? It’s not everyday you find 9 buildings on 40,000 square feet of a downtown historic district up for sale on eBay, but then again, the…

Are Mongolian Nomads moving into China’s Ghost Cities?

“I stumbled across some traditional Mongolian yurts plonked in the middle of this empty ghost city,” said Shane Thoms in an email to me this morning. It’s always exciting to receive news from my favourite urbex photographer who is usually based in Japan but took a break to spend some time in a Northern Chinese ghost city in the…

For Sale! The Ghost Town that Nobody Wanted

Johnsonville, Connecticut may be completely void of (human) inhabitants at present and characterised by those particular houses where one might occasionally see the faint shadows of children in nightgowns watching you from the attic window, but hey– a few licks of paint and a good spring clean to wash those ghosts right out of your lair and you could…

Saving Pie Town: The Last Pie-O-Neers of the American Dessert

As the legend goes, PieTown, New Mexico was founded in the early 1920s by a man called Norman, who had filed a mining claim in the area and opened a general store at the desert crossroads where he liked to bake pies made from scratch and serve them to his family or passing travellers. Word spread about…

Take a Lonely Stroll through Britain’s Conflict Ghost Town

You could be forgiven for expecting a band of shuffling zombies to start walking past at any moment, but in the small town of Gravesend, situated in the borough of Gravesham, Kent, things are exactly the way they’re supposed to be. Developed by the metropolitan police in 2002, the 300 square meter replica town serves as…