Mining camps that ran out of ore, villages drowned by reservoirs, towns emptied by war, volcanoes and Chernobyl, and thousands of English villages that faded away in the Middle Ages. Here are the abandoned places that open data knows about, coloured by why they were left, and an honest look at how little the record says.
A ghost town, in the words of the historian T. Lindsey Baker, is "a town for which the reason for being no longer exists". The reasons are some of the great forces of history: a seam of silver runs out, a railway passes by, a dam floods the valley, an army arrives, the ground shakes, a reactor explodes, or, slowly, the young leave and do not come back. I wanted to map them all and colour each place by why it emptied.
The best open list of such places is Wikidata, the structured database behind Wikipedia. It holds 3,374 items with a position that are classed as a ghost town, an abandoned village or a deserted medieval village. To them I added England's 2,074 deserted medieval villages and hamlets from Maurice Beresford's gazetteer, which I mapped in an earlier study, and I read Wikipedia's 'List of ghost towns by country' (492 places) and its article on ghost towns for the reasons. What came out is two maps at once: a map of abandonment, and a map of who has written it down.
Points: Wikidata (CC0); England's deserted medieval villages: Beresford's Lost Villages, University of Hull (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0); reasons and hand-placed places: English Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0). Tap or click a point. Ancient cities and sites are a separate layer, off at first: open Map layers.
The first thing the map shows is not where places were abandoned but where people have catalogued them. 2,700 of Wikidata's 3,374 ghost towns, 80%, are in the United States, and 91% of those carry a one-line description of the form "ghost town in such-and-such county", the mark of entries added in bulk. Canada follows with 265, 141 of them in Newfoundland and Labrador, then Greece (101) and Australia (58). 41 of the 53 countries have fewer than ten. Wikidata holds 8 ghost towns in all of Africa, 17 in Asia and 9 in South America.
Abandoned settlements by country, coloured by reason
Wikidata ghost towns and abandoned villages, with England's deserted medieval villages from Beresford's gazetteer as a row of their own. Grey: reason not recorded. Hover a bar.
England is the other giant, for a different reason. Historians have studied its lost medieval villages for seventy years, and Beresford and Hurst's gazetteer lists 2,074 deserted villages and hamlets. Add them and England makes up 38% of the abandoned settlements on the map; the United States and England together make up 88%. Every other country in the world shares the rest.
Two more things shape the data. The query that fetched these items also returned 2,456 Mexican municipalities, which are living places that reach the 'abandoned village' class through a faulty link in Wikidata's class tree; I left them out, with 42 other living towns, castles and museums. And it returned 4,249 ancient cities and archaeological sites, from Greek poleis to Roman towns. They are abandoned too, but they are a different kind of record (52% of them are in Turkey and Greece, from a large import of classical places), so they sit in their own layer and out of the counts.
Wikidata rarely says why a place emptied. Only 165 of its 3,374 ghost towns (5%) get a reason from my rules, and 61 of those rest only on a mining word in the name, such as Gold, Silver, Copper or Galena. Wikipedia's 'List of ghost towns by country' is much more talkative: 300 of its 492 places (61%) come with a reason in the text. Mining and resource booms lead (81), then war and military use (55) and natural disasters (54), economic decline and depopulation (50), reservoirs (27) and nuclear accidents (24).
Reasons in Wikipedia's list, by continent
Share of the list's places by the reason its text gives. The United States and Canada have separate lists on Wikipedia, so North America here means Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and Greenland. Hover a bar.
Each continent has its own story. In Oceania, 41 of 69 places are old mining towns, most of them Australian gold, copper and coal towns (33 of 51 in Australia). Africa's list is led by mining too (11 of 29), from the diamond towns of the Namib to South Africa's old mining camps. Europe's is the most varied: war (33 places), economic decline, disasters, the Chernobyl zone (23) and reservoirs (16). Mexico's entries are split between towns drowned by reservoirs (8) and old mining towns (8).
The picture of a ghost town most people carry is a wooden main street in Nevada or Colorado, built for a mine and left when the ore ran out. The data agree, up to a point. 1,053 of Wikidata's American ghost towns (39%) are in the 11 western states, with Nevada (200) the busiest of them. 65 of the western towns are tied to mining, against 14 in the rest of the country: 6.2% against 0.9%.
Wikidata ghost towns by US state
The 20 states with most. Dark bars: the 11 western states. Amber: tied to mining. Click a bar to see the state on the map.
But look at the size of that "tied to mining" share. Only 18 western towns have mining in their description, class or a Wikipedia text; the other 47 are towns like Galena, Quartz Mountain or Borax, whose names give them away. Bodie and Rhyolite, two of the most famous mining ghost towns of all, have no reason recorded in Wikidata. And the two states with most ghost towns are not western at all: Texas (335) and Missouri (289), where the record gives almost no reasons. Per square kilometre, the West (3.4 per 10,000 km²) has about as many as the rest of the country (3.3). The mining West is real, but in this data it is mostly an inference from names.
England's lost villages are a different kind of ghost town: no saloon, no headframe, often nothing but bumps in a field where the houses stood and the hollow way that was the street. Beresford's gazetteer, which I mapped in The Villages That Vanished, lists 2,074 deserted villages and hamlets in 37 historic counties. Yorkshire has 358, Lincolnshire 220 and Northumberland 165: 36% of the total in three counties.
When England's villages were deserted
Presumed date of desertion for the 270 sites with a usable date in the gazetteer, by period. Hover a bar.
The Black Death of 1348 is often blamed, and plague did empty some villages. But of the 270 sites with a usable date, only 17% fall in the century after it, while 59% fall between 1450 and 1699, when landlords turned arable land into sheep pasture and enclosed the open fields. In the written accounts, enclosure or conversion to pasture is mentioned 63 times, emparking (clearing a village for a landscaped park) 46 times, and plague 32 times. In this study all of them count as "deserted medieval village or plague": the gazetteer gives a period and a type, not a single cause.
The 15 former Soviet republics hold 62 ghost towns in Wikidata, 32 of them in Russia and 14 in Belarus, and 30 of the 62 have no English name at all. Only 10 have a reason. Wikipedia's list does better: 82 places in 12 of the republics, with three stories standing out.
The first is Chernobyl. 23 of the list's places in Ukraine and Belarus were evacuated after the reactor exploded in 1986, from Pripyat itself to small villages now inside the exclusion zones. The second is the Soviet north and its resource towns: mining towns such as Kadykchan in Magadan Oblast and Khalmer-Yu in the Komi Republic, where the mines were shut and the settlement wound up by 1995, Butugychag, a Gulag camp where prisoners mined uranium, and Pyramiden on Svalbard. The third is recent: 7 Ukrainian towns emptied by fighting since the Russian invasion of 2022, such as Marinka, Soledar and Popasna. And then there is the quiet loss of rural Russia: 10 of the list's Russian entries are depopulated or abandoned villages in Yaroslavl Oblast alone, and the old town of Mologa lies under the Rybinsk Reservoir.
Post-Soviet places in Wikipedia's list, by reason
82 places in the former Soviet republics. Hover a bar.
Dates are scarcer still. Only 46 of Wikidata's ghost towns have a date when they were dissolved. Wikipedia's list gives a year of abandonment, or a century, for 156 places, and 85% of those fall after 1900. The busiest decades are the 2010s (19 places), the 1980s, the decade of Chernobyl (17), and the 1950s (16), when reservoirs and mine closures emptied many places: the median year for reservoirs is 1951 and for mining towns 1953. England's dated deserted villages, by contrast, cluster around 1550.
When places were abandoned
Wikipedia list years and Wikidata dissolution dates by decade since 1840, coloured by reason. Switch to see centuries, with England's dated deserted villages. Hover a bar.
80% of Wikidata's ghost towns are American, and only 5% say why they died.
Places. I took every Wikidata item with coordinates that is an instance of ghost town, abandoned village or deserted medieval village, or a subclass of them (10,217 items; 95 more had no usable position). An item is a ghost town here if one of its classes is in the ghost town family (ghost town, abandoned village, deserted medieval village, abandoned hamlet, former village, mining community and a few more), or if it is a 'former settlement' with no ancient or archaeological class. Ancient cities and archaeological sites go to their own layer. Mexican municipalities and other living places are left out. Country, continent and US state come from Natural Earth by the point's position. England's deserted medieval villages and hamlets (2,000 villages and 74 hamlets) come from my earlier study; shrunken, shifted and doubtful sites are left out, and 1 Wikidata item that duplicated one of them was dropped.
Reasons. Each place gets one main reason from keyword rules, read in this order: nuclear, war, disaster, reservoir, mining, medieval, economic. The rules search the place's entry in Wikipedia's list (including any sentence introducing its group, such as "After the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, hundreds of settlements within the exclusion zone were evacuated"), a sentence in Wikipedia's 'Ghost town' article that links to it, and its Wikidata description. Places within 45 km of the Chernobyl plant or 30 km of Fukushima Daiichi count as nuclear. 45 list entries and 29 article sentences were matched to Wikidata items by name and country. Confidence is high when the reason is written in words or comes from a zone, medium when it follows from a Wikidata class (such as 'mining community'), and low when it comes from a mining word in the name. Keyword rules make mistakes: a mining town later flooded by a reservoir counts as a reservoir, and a place "evacuated for an artillery range" counts as war or military use.
Hand-placed places. Most of Wikipedia's list, including Pripyat, Oradour-sur-Glane, Hashima and Tyneham, is missing from the Wikidata extract because Wikidata files them as towns or villages rather than ghost towns, and the list gives no coordinates. So that the map shows them, I placed 44 well-known ones by hand at approximate positions (to within a few kilometres). They are ringed on the map and are not counted in any Wikidata total.
Dates. A list entry's year is the first year or century after a word such as abandoned, evacuated, flooded or destroyed; centuries count as their middle year. England's dates are the gazetteer's presumed dates of depopulation, at the middle of each range.
This is a map of what has been recorded, not of everywhere that was abandoned. The United States and England dominate because of bulk imports and decades of scholarship, not because other countries lost fewer places; Africa, Asia and South America are nearly blank. Wikidata almost never records why a place emptied, so most points are grey, and the mining share in the American West rests mostly on place names. Wikipedia's list is a selection of notable places, not a sample. Reasons come from simple word rules, which can be fooled. Some places in the data are not empty at all: a few still have small populations, and the definition of a ghost town is itself argued over.