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Cahawba was Alabama's first permanent capital, where the Alabama and Cahaba rivers meet. Floods and lost status emptied it, and the woods took it back.

Adak, Alaska grew from a 1942 airfield into a Navy base of 6,000 people in the Aleutians. After it closed in 1997, most of the town was left empty.

Kennecott, Alaska was a copper town deep in the Wrangell Mountains. When the mines closed in 1938, the last train left and the town was left standing.

On Alaska's Arctic coast, a Cold War radar station at Point Lay watched the skies for Soviet attack. The radar is gone now, and walruses crowd the shore.

Utqiagvik, Alaska, formerly Barrow, is the northernmost US city. No roads reach it, and each winter the sun stays below the horizon for about 66 days.

Most of Whittier, Alaska's 272 residents live in one 14-story former Army building, and the only road in is a one-lane tunnel shared with trains.

South of Tucson, a Titan II missile still stands in its silo. Complex 571-7 is the only one of 54 Cold War Titan II sites preserved for the public.

In 1909, a Phoenix newspaper reported an Egyptian-style cave hidden in the Grand Canyon. The Smithsonian has no record of it, and no one has ever found it.

Deep in a side canyon of the Grand Canyon, Supai sits eight miles from the nearest road. It is the last place in America where the mail arrives by mule.

The Wave is a ribbed swirl of Jurassic Navajo Sandstone near the Arizona-Utah border. Only 64 hikers a day get permits, all drawn through BLM lotteries.

Bidwell's Bar was one of the first Gold Rush camps in California. Its site now lies under Lake Oroville, and its 1850s bridge was moved to higher ground.

Wonder Valley near Twentynine Palms is dotted with jackrabbit homestead cabins built on five-acre lots under the 1938 Small Tract Act. Many sit abandoned.

Lake Berryessa drowned the 1866 town of Monticello. When it tops 440 feet, excess water pours into the Glory Hole, a 72-foot-wide concrete spillway.

Mono Lake's tufa towers grew underwater where springs met salty lake water. After Los Angeles began diverting its streams in 1941, the lake fell 45 feet.

On Death Valley's Racetrack Playa, rocks slide across the lakebed leaving long trails. In 2013, researchers finally saw wind-driven ice sheets move them.

The Salton Sea formed when the Colorado River broke through a canal in 1905. Its 1950s resort boom faded, and the shrinking lake now exposes dusty shores.

SF-88 in the Marin Headlands is the most fully restored of the close to 300 Nike missile sites the Army built to defend U.S. cities from Soviet bombers.

Simon Rodia built the Watts Towers by hand from 1921 to 1954. When LA ordered them torn down, a 1959 load test pulled with 10,000 pounds, and they held.

Under 2,000 feet of granite near Colorado Springs sits a Cold War command center built to survive nuclear war, its buildings set on giant springs.

At 11,158 feet, the Eisenhower-Johnson Memorial Tunnel carries I-70 under the Continental Divide and marks the highest point on the U.S. Interstate system.

Gilman, Colorado clings to a cliff 600 feet above the Eagle River. Its zinc and lead mine closed in 1984, and the town has stood empty ever since.

In a Colorado valley between two mountain ranges rise the tallest sand dunes in North America, built by wind, water and ancient lakes.

Coral Castle in Homestead, Florida, was carved by Edward Leedskalnin from about 1,100 tons of oolite limestone. He never explained how he moved the stones.

Fort Jefferson rises from Garden Key, about 70 miles west of Key West. Built with over 16 million bricks from 1846, it was never finished or fully armed.

Oscarville, Georgia is known online as the town beneath Lake Lanier. The video says the real history differs from that legend: the area was part of the 1912 expulsion of Black residents from Forsyth County, and only part of it was later covered by the reservoir.

In 1900, Chicago opened a 28-mile canal that made its river flow away from Lake Michigan. In extreme storms, the river is still sent back into the lake.

Up to 350 feet below Chicago, 109 miles of tunnels catch storm runoff and sewage that once overflowed into rivers, sending it to vast quarry reservoirs.

In Ottawa, Illinois, Radium Dial workers painted glowing dials and shaped brushes with their lips. Told the paint was safe, they swallowed radium.

City Methodist Church in Gary, Indiana, opened in 1926 with U.S. Steel’s help and closed in 1975. The decaying Gothic ruin is now slated for demolition.

In southern Indiana, the Lost River sinks into the limestone and flows underground for at least 23 miles before rising again near Orangeville.

Treece, Kansas sat in the same toxic mining district as Picher, Oklahoma. After an EPA buyout cleared it out, Kansas dissolved the town in April 2012.

Kentucky Bend is a loop of Mississippi River farmland cut off from the rest of Kentucky. The only road in comes from Tennessee, and nine people live there.

Hurricane Katrina closed Six Flags New Orleans in 2005, and its rides stood abandoned for nearly 20 years. Demolition finally began in late 2024.

In central Louisiana, a set of Army Corps floodgates holds the Mississippi River in place. Without it, the river could jump to the Atchafalaya for good.

In a quiet bay of the Potomac, more than 100 burned World War I steamships still rise from the water, now overgrown with trees and full of wildlife.

In 1938, Massachusetts dissolved four towns and moved 7,613 graves to build the Quabbin Reservoir. Their old roads now lie under water and in the woods.

At Sault Ste. Marie, ships rise and fall 21 feet between Lakes Superior and Huron, and 88% of U.S. domestic iron ore shipping depends on one lock.

At Devil's Kettle on Minnesota's Brule River, half the waterfall drops into a hole and seems to vanish. Flow measurements show the water rejoins the river.

When iron ore turned up under Hibbing, Minnesota, the mining company moved the town. From 1919, houses and stores rolled south on wheels and logs.

About 150 feet beneath Kansas City, Missouri, SubTropolis fills an old limestone mine with paved roads, rail lines, warehouses and more than 2,000 workers.

Times Beach was a Route 66 town in Missouri that was abandoned after contaminated waste oil sprayed on its dirt roads caused a major dioxin disaster. After a 1982 flood spread the contamination, the government bought out the town.

The Berkeley Pit in Butte, Montana, filled with acidic, metal-laden water after mine pumps shut off in 1982. Treatment now holds it below a set limit.

Monowi, Nebraska had about 150 people in the 1930s. Today Elsie Eiler is its only resident, serving as mayor, clerk, treasurer, librarian and tavern owner.

Devils Hole is a warm, flooded cavern in Nevada whose bottom has never been found, and the only wild home of the endangered Devils Hole pupfish.

Fly Geyser in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert formed after a 1964 geothermal test well was not properly sealed. Hot water still builds its red and green mound.

Rhyolite boomed after a 1904 gold strike near Death Valley, then emptied within a decade. Its bank ruins and a house of bottles still stand in the desert.

Love Canal in Niagara Falls, NY, held 21,800 tons of buried chemical waste beneath a school and near homes. The crisis helped spur the 1980 Superfund law.

North Brother Island in NYC’s East River once held Riverside Hospital and Typhoid Mary. Abandoned in 1963, it is now a forested, off-limits bird sanctuary.

North Dakota's Safeguard Complex and its radar pyramid were built to stop Soviet warheads. Fully operational in October 1975, it shut down in 1976.

Beneath Cincinnati's Central Parkway lies about two miles of subway tunnel dug in the 1920s. The money ran out, no tracks were laid, and no train ever ran.

Picher, Oklahoma mined the lead and zinc that helped arm America. The mining left the town poisoned and undermined, and by 2009 it had shut down for good.

Every summer, Lost Lake on Oregon's Santiam Pass drains away through holes in its own lakebed, leaving a meadow. Every fall and winter, it fills again.

On Oregon's coast, a hole in the rock seems to swallow the Pacific. Thor's Well is only about 20 feet deep, but at high tide it's a spectacular sight.

An abandoned highway in the mountains that is slowly disappearing into the forest.

Graffiti Highway was a cracked, abandoned stretch of Route 61 near Centralia, Pennsylvania. Its private owner buried it under mounds of dirt in April 2020.

The Kinzua Viaduct in Pennsylvania was briefly the world’s tallest railroad bridge. In 2003, an F1 tornado toppled 11 of its 20 towers in under 30 seconds.

Raven Rock, or Site R, is a bunker blasted into a Pennsylvania mountain in 1951-53 to keep the military running after a nuclear attack. It is still active.

A town in Pennsylvania that has been burning underground since 1962.

In 1777, as the British closed in on Philadelphia, patriots hid the Liberty Bell beneath the floor of Zion's Reformed Church in Allentown for nine months.

Before the TVA flooded the valley in 1948, Butler, Tennessee moved to higher ground. The old town's streets and foundations still lie under Watauga Lake.

Oak Ridge, Tennessee was built in 1942 for the Manhattan Project. By 1945 it held 75,000 people behind guarded gates, yet it appeared on no maps.

The 1811-1812 New Madrid earthquakes reshaped northwest Tennessee and the Mississippi poured in, forming Reelfoot Lake. Cypress still stand in its water

In 1928, a crew blasting an elevator shaft into Lookout Mountain broke into a sealed cave and found a hidden waterfall. It was named for Ruby Lambert.

As Utah's Bingham Canyon Mine grew into the largest human-made excavation on Earth, it swallowed the towns around it. Only Copperton is left standing.

Tangier Island, a crabbing community in Virginia's Chesapeake Bay, has lost two-thirds of its land since 1850 as erosion and rising water eat its shore.

Hanford and White Bluffs were Columbia River farm towns emptied in 1943 for the Manhattan Project. Plutonium made there fueled the Nagasaki bomb.

Point Roberts, Washington sits below the 49th parallel on a Canadian peninsula. To drive to the rest of the U.S., residents cross the border twice.

After the Great Seattle Fire of 1889, Pioneer Square's streets were raised, in places by nearly 30 feet, burying old sidewalks and storefronts below.

Green Bank, West Virginia sits in the 13,000-square-mile National Radio Quiet Zone, where radio signals are limited to protect a giant radio telescope.

Thurmond, West Virginia, was a busy C&O railroad hub in the New River Gorge whose businesses faced tracks, not a street. Only 5 people live there today.

On the night of August 21, 1986, Cameroon's Lake Nyos released a cloud of carbon dioxide that killed 1,746 people in nearby villages as they slept.

Blood Falls in Antarctica’s Taylor Valley seeps iron-rich brine from under Taylor Glacier. When it meets oxygen, the iron oxidizes and stains the ice red.

Villa Epecuén was an Argentine spa resort until a 1985 flood slowly buried it under about 10 meters of salt water. In 2009 the lake began to retreat.

Twice a day, the Passage du Gois in western France vanishes under the Atlantic. The 2.6-mile tidal road to Noirmoutier can only be crossed at low tide.

In 1972, villagers in China's Taihang Mountains began carving a road through a cliff, mostly by hand. In 1977, the Guoliang Tunnel opened to traffic.

Houtouwan, a fishing village on China's Shengshan Island, emptied out through the 1990s. Today climbing vines cover its abandoned houses from wall to roof.

From 1927 to 2003, driverless electric trains carried London's mail through 6.5 miles of tunnels 70 feet below the city. Now visitors can ride part of it.

In eastern Germany, five giant mining machines, up to 125 meters long and nearly 2,000 tons, stand on a lake peninsula where their coal mine used to be.

In 1942 the U.S. built Bluie East Two on a remote East Greenland fjord. Abandoned in 1947, it left a ruined hangar, trucks and fields of rusting drums.

ttoqqortoormiit, East Greenland, has no roads to anywhere else. Sea ice locks it in most of the year, and its heavy supplies come on two ships a year.

In 1959 the U.S. Army built a nuclear-powered base inside the Greenland ice sheet. Abandoned in 1967, Camp Century now lies about 100 feet under the ice.

A single white house on an empty island off Iceland became the internet's "loneliest house." The real story: puffin hunters, not Björk or a billionaire.

Craco sat on a clifftop in southern Italy for nearly a thousand years. Then the clay beneath it began to slide, and by 1980 the old town was abandoned.

In 1950, a hydroelectric dam flooded the village of Graun in South Tyrol, Italy. Only its 14th-century bell tower still rises from the water of Lake Resia.

Hashima Island off Nagasaki packed 5,259 people onto 16 acres in 1959. When its undersea coal mine closed in 1974, everyone left. The concrete remains.

In Kazakhstan's Tian Shan, an earthquake-triggered landslide dammed a gorge and drowned its spruce trees. Their bare trunks still rise from Lake Kaindy.

In 1943, a farmer in Mexico watched his cornfield split open. Within nine years, a volcano 1,391 feet tall stood there, and two towns lay under its lava.

Kolmanskop boomed after a diamond was found in 1908. Abandoned by 1956, its German-style houses now stand deep in the drifting sands of the Namib Desert.

Near Rotterdam, the Maeslant Barrier's two 210-meter steel gates wait in dry docks. In a major storm surge, they swing out to seal a 360-meter channel.

Peru’s Boiling River runs hot for 6.3 km through the Amazon, averaging nearly 203°F at its hottest. Fault-fed hot springs heat it, not a volcano.

A creek still runs beneath West Philadelphia, and sometimes it comes back up. Beginning in 1869, Philadelphia enclosed Mill Creek in a brick sewer about 20 feet across and buried it under as much as 35 feet of fill. Row houses were built right on top.

Tristan da Cunha has no airport and one settlement. Its 221 residents live about 1,500 miles from the nearest inhabited land, reachable only by sea.

Poland’s Wieliczka Salt Mine runs 327 metres deep. Miners carved chapels, altars and statues from rock salt, including St. Kinga’s Chapel 101 metres down.

On the Scottish island of Barra, Loganair flights land on Traigh Mhòr beach. The runways vanish at high tide, so the flight schedule follows the sea.

The world's largest underground iron ore mine is cracking the ground under Kiruna, Sweden, so its city center is moving about 3 km east, church and all.

Carved 85 meters into volcanic rock, Derinkuyu could shelter up to 20,000 people. It lay forgotten until 1963, when a homeowner broke through a wall.

The Duga radar near Chernobyl, nicknamed the Russian Woodpecker, tapped across shortwave radio from 1976 to 1989. Its giant antenna still stands.

Big Pit mined coal in South Wales for over a century. Now former miners lead visitors 300 feet underground, while nature reclaims the land above.