Philips ConnorMost people imagine ghost towns as dusty relics from old westerns—tumbleweeds rolling past saloons, wooden facades creaking in the wind.
That romantic notion falls apart when you consider places where the danger is not historical but active, where invisible threats seep from the ground and drift through the air.
These are not abandoned places. They are contaminated communities where a handful of people still wake up each morning, despite breathing toxic dust or living above fires that have burned for decades.
What follows is an examination of ten such locations scattered across the globe. Each one tells a different story about industrial failure, government negligence, or natural disaster, but they share a common thread: people who will not—or cannot—leave.
1. Centralia, Pennsylvania
In May 1962, someone in Centralia made a decision that would define the next six decades. The borough needed to clear trash from an abandoned strip mine, so they set it on fire. Standard procedure at the time. What nobody accounted for was the exposed coal seam sitting right there in the pit. The fire found it, burrowed into the labyrinth of mine tunnels beneath the town, and never stopped.
State geologists estimate the blaze could burn for another 250 years. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection does not mince words about visiting: the risk of serious injury or death is real. Carbon monoxide seeps up through cracks in the earth. Ground subsidence can happen without warning—one day the road is solid, the next day there is a steaming sinkhole where asphalt used to be. Route 61, the main highway through town, buckles and smokes like something out of a disaster film.
By 1980, Centralia had 1,500 residents. Most accepted government buyouts and left. As of 2025, five people remain. They struck an unusual deal with authorities: they can stay in their homes until they die. After that, the properties revert to the state. These holdouts are not naive about the danger. They simply refuse to let a bureaucratic evacuation order sever their connection to a place where they have spent their entire lives.
The lesson here is not complicated. When a small fire is ignored because proper barriers were never built, it becomes an unstoppable inferno that costs hundreds of millions of dollars and destroys an entire community. Prevention would have been cheaper. Much cheaper.
2. Picher, Oklahoma
Picher once sat at the heart of the Tri-State Mining District, pumping out lead and zinc for American ammunition during both World Wars. When the mines shut down in 1967, they left behind chat piles—mountains of toxic mining waste—that dominate the landscape like gray, lifeless dunes. Beneath the town, miles of tunnels had hollowed out the ground so thoroughly that the Army Corps of Engineers eventually determined 86 percent of buildings were at risk of collapse.
But the structural danger is not the worst part. The real threat is chemical. Those chat piles contain lead, zinc, and cadmium. Rain washes the metals into the soil and water. Tar Creek, which runs through the area, turned orange from acid mine drainage. In 1994, researchers found that 34 percent of children in Picher had lead poisoning—a statistic that means permanent neurological damage, developmental delays, and long-term cardiovascular problems for kids who had no say in where they grew up.
The federal government designated Picher part of the Tar Creek Superfund site in 1983 and eventually bought out the remaining residents. The town government dissolved. The 2010 census counted only 20 people. Yet the area is far from empty. The Quapaw Nation operates a headquarters there, managing ongoing cleanup efforts. Environmental workers spend their days in the contamination zone because someone has to.
Picher demonstrates something uncomfortable: the consequences of industrial pollution do not disappear when the company leaves town. They linger for generations, and often the burden of fixing them falls on the very communities—in this case, a tribal nation—that were harmed in the first place.
3. Bombay Beach, California
Bombay Beach sits on the shrinking edge of the Salton Sea, a body of water that was once a mid-century vacation hotspot. Decades of evaporation and water diversion have turned it into an ecological disaster. As the sea recedes, it exposes a toxic playa—dried lakebed laced with agricultural runoff, industrial chemicals, and decades of accumulated waste.
When the wind picks up, and in the California desert it often does, that contaminated dust becomes airborne. Residents inhale Particulate Matter 10, which lodges deep in the lungs and increases the risk of heart disease and chronic respiratory conditions. The sea also emits hydrogen sulfide gas, which smells like rotten eggs and regularly exceeds California air quality standards. Community monitors have found that official government sensors underreport pollution levels, meaning the true exposure is likely worse than the data suggests.
The people who live around Bombay Beach are predominantly low-income Latinx, immigrant, and Indigenous families. They did not choose to live in a toxic dust bowl. They are there because housing is cheap and options are few. Childhood asthma rates in some nearby areas are more than four times the national average. These kids are not getting sick because their parents are careless. They are getting sick because water policy and climate change have turned their home into a public health disaster, and nobody with power has prioritized fixing it.
This is environmental injustice in its clearest form. The crisis could be mitigated with water restoration and rigorous air quality monitoring, but both require political will and funding that have been slow to materialize.
4. Hinkley, California
Hinkley became famous because of a legal case, not because of its charm. Between the 1950s and 1960s, Pacific Gas and Electric Company used hexavalent chromium—Chromium-6—as a rust inhibitor at its compressor station. The wastewater went into unlined ponds, and from there it seeped into the groundwater, creating a contamination plume roughly two miles wide and six miles long.
Chromium-6 is a suspected carcinogen. Exposure has been linked to lung cancer, stomach cancer, and a range of other serious illnesses. For years, there was scientific debate about how dangerous it was when ingested rather than inhaled. That debate allowed the contamination to spread. California finally set a maximum contaminant level of 10 parts per billion in 2014. Some wells in Hinkley have tested at concentrations thousands of times higher.
The 1996 class-action lawsuit resulted in a $333 million settlement, one of the largest of its kind. Many residents took buyouts from PG&E and left. The company now owns about two-thirds of the town. But not everyone sold. The people who stayed, who still drink bottled water provided by the utility, serve as watchdogs. They keep pressure on PG&E to continue the cleanup, which as of 2025 is still ongoing.
Hinkley proves that grassroots activism can force corporations to pay, but it also shows that legal victories do not equal swift environmental recovery. Remediation drags on for decades. The town is fundamentally altered, caught between abandonment and slow restoration, and the people left behind live in that uncomfortable middle ground.
5. Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Ukraine
When Reactor 4 exploded in 1986, it created a 2,600-square-kilometer exclusion zone and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. Radiation from the disaster caused a documented increase in childhood thyroid cancer due to radioactive iodine exposure. Emergency workers received the highest doses and suffered acute radiation sickness. For the broader population, the physical health effects, while real, were less catastrophic than initially feared.
What researchers did not fully anticipate was the psychological toll. Studies have found elevated rates of anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder among evacuees—not primarily because of radiation exposure, but because of forced displacement, economic collapse, and the constant, gnawing fear of an invisible contaminant they could not see or control.
By 2016, approximately 180 “samosely”—self-settlers—had returned to live in the exclusion zone. These are mostly elderly individuals who went back to their ancestral homes despite government warnings. Radiation levels remain higher than normal, particularly from isotopes like Caesium-137 and Strontium-90, but they are not immediately lethal. For the samosely, the risk of low-level chronic exposure is preferable to the trauma of permanent exile.
Chernobyl reveals something that planners often miss: when authorities designate people as “victims” and emphasize danger, they can inadvertently increase psychological distress. The samosely made a calculated choice. They would rather live with radiation than die in unfamiliar places, separated from everything they know.
6. Love Canal, New York
Love Canal started as an unfinished power project in the early 20th century. Hooker Chemical Company used the abandoned canal to bury over 21,000 tons of chemical waste between 1942 and 1953. Later, a residential neighborhood was built nearby. Nobody thought much about what was underground until the late 1970s, when unusually wet winters caused chemicals to leach into basements and yards. Residents found barrels surfacing in their backyards. Children played on fields contaminated with dioxins and volatile organic compounds.
The resulting public outcry led to the creation of the federal Superfund program in 1980, a legislative response designed to hold polluters accountable and fund cleanup of the nation’s most hazardous waste sites. Love Canal became the test case. Cleanup crews installed a multi-layered clay cap and synthetic liner to contain the contamination. In 2004, the site was removed from the National Priorities List, officially declared remediated.
Homes outside the most contaminated inner ring were deemed safe by federal and state health agencies. People moved back. The area was rebranded as Black Creek Village. For a while, it seemed like a success story. Then, in 2024, residents began reporting chemical residue in their basements after heavy rains. The containment cap, it turned out, was not as permanent as promised.
Love Canal is a reminder that even the most celebrated cleanups are not truly finished. Environmental remediation is not a one-time fix. It requires continuous monitoring and maintenance. The chemicals are still there, just contained. And containment, as recent events show, can fail.
7. DePue, Illinois
DePue, a small village in Central Illinois, was home to zinc smelting and fertilizer production for over 80 years. When the facilities shut down, they left behind a 750,000-ton slag heap that locals grimly nicknamed the “Pile of Black Death.” The EPA designated DePue a Superfund site in 1999, but the contamination is not confined to one industrial lot. It is everywhere.
The problem started because the toxic slag was treated like a useful resource. Residents and contractors took it for free and used it as fill material—for driveways, for roads, for landscaping. Essentially, the town paved itself with hazardous waste. The result is that 57 different metals, including lead, arsenic, cadmium, chromium, and copper, are scattered throughout residential areas.
Approximately 1,727 people still live in DePue. They go about their daily lives on contaminated soil, waiting for a cleanup that is slow and extraordinarily complex. You cannot just remove one slag heap and call it done. You have to dig up streets, replace soil in yards, and essentially rebuild infrastructure across an entire functioning community without displacing everyone permanently.
DePue illustrates a particularly insidious form of contamination: when toxic waste becomes integrated into the physical fabric of daily life, remediation becomes nearly impossible without tearing the whole place apart. The cleanup is ongoing, but it will take years, maybe decades, to complete.
8. Kabwe, Zambia
Kabwe is the capital of Zambia’s Central Province, and it is one of the most lead-contaminated places on Earth. British companies established mining operations during the colonial era, extracting lead and zinc until 1994. When they left, they abandoned an estimated 6.4 million tons of lead-bearing waste in open dumps. The United Nations has designated Kabwe a “sacrifice zone,” a term that acknowledges a grim reality: the contamination is so severe and so pervasive that protecting everyone may not be feasible.
Lead is a potent neurotoxin, particularly harmful to children and pregnant women. It causes irreversible damage to the brain and nervous system. Dust from the massive waste piles blows constantly across residential areas, schools, and roads, exposing up to 200,000 people. Researchers estimate that over 95 percent of children living near the mine have elevated blood lead levels. Half of them require urgent medical treatment.
The situation is worsened by poverty. Informal businesses have sprung up around the dumps, with people mining and processing the waste to extract whatever lead they can sell. This generates fresh clouds of toxic dust, perpetuating the cycle of exposure. Families live in close proximity to the dumps not because they are ignorant of the danger, but because they have nowhere else to go and no other way to survive.
Kabwe is a stark example of environmental injustice on a global scale. The toxic legacy of colonial extraction continues to inflict suffering on vulnerable populations decades after the companies profited and left. It also demonstrates the failure of international accountability—there is no mechanism forcing those who caused the damage to pay for the cleanup or provide alternative livelihoods for the people trapped there.
9. New Idria, California
New Idria was once the second-largest mercury producer in North America, critical to refining gold during the California Gold Rush. The mine closed in 1974, leaving behind acid mine drainage and contaminated waste piles. The EPA listed it as a Superfund site in 2011.
Mercury is particularly insidious because it does not stay put. Acid mine drainage carries it into San Carlos Creek, where concentrations frequently exceed California water quality standards by more than 100 times. The mercury binds to particulate matter, which means every rainstorm can remobilize the contamination and send it further downstream into the regional watershed.
The original townsite is fenced off and abandoned, but people still live downstream. The creek runs brown to reddish, depending on the day, and smells of sulfur—a visible, olfactory warning that something is very wrong with the water. Mercury exposure, particularly in its methylmercury form, causes severe neurological damage, muscle coordination problems, and mood disorders.
Research has found that specific microorganisms in the acid mine drainage can actually enhance mercury solubility and transport, making the contamination more mobile and harder to contain. This means cleanup is not just a matter of removing waste piles. It requires understanding and managing complex biological and geochemical processes to prevent mercury from reaching downstream wildlife refuges and contaminating fish that people might eat.
New Idria shows that historical mining operations leave threats that persist for decades and spread far beyond the original site. The cleanup is ongoing because the alternative—letting mercury flow unchecked into the ecosystem—would be catastrophic.
10. Fukushima Exclusion Zone, Japan
The 2011 earthquake and tsunami triggered a nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, forcing the evacuation of approximately 150,000 people. Over the following years, extensive decontamination efforts allowed some areas to reopen, but not all. The “Difficult-to-Return” zones still have radiation levels five to ten times higher than before the disaster. Forested areas remain contaminated because cleaning them is impractical, which means hunting and foraging are still restricted.
Evacuation orders have been gradually lifted in certain towns, but return rates are very low. The few people who have gone back face not only the challenge of rebuilding a community but also persistent anxiety about radiation exposure, particularly regarding their children. New residents moving into areas adjacent to the highest contamination zones must contend with indoor radiation levels significantly above regional background levels.
Fukushima highlights a tension between political goals and public perception. The government has pushed to normalize formerly evacuated zones as part of recovery efforts, but many former residents do not trust official reassurances. The crisis also exposed failures in emergency planning—poor communication and coordination during the evacuation led some people into areas with higher radiation doses than they would have received if they had stayed put.
The disaster underscores a fundamental challenge in managing technical hazards: when public trust is broken, no amount of data or assurances can easily restore it. People make decisions based not just on radiation measurements, but on whether they believe the authorities providing those measurements.
Concluion
These stories are uncomfortable because they do not have neat endings. The fires still burn. The chemicals still leach. The radiation still decays at its own slow pace. The people who remain in these places are reminders that environmental disasters are not historical events—they are ongoing processes that span generations.
Children growing up in Kabwe will face cognitive impairments from lead exposure that affect them for life. Families in Bombay Beach will continue developing asthma and heart disease as long as the Salton Sea keeps shrinking. Returnees to Fukushima will live with uncertainty about radiation for decades.
The question is whether we learn anything from these places or simply allow the pattern to repeat. Better regulation could prevent future Centralias. Stricter enforcement could ensure that companies cannot walk away from contamination the way they did in Picher and Kabwe. More equitable water policy could protect communities like Bombay Beach from bearing the environmental cost of decisions made elsewhere.
But that requires political will. It requires treating environmental protection as a priority rather than an inconvenience. It requires acknowledging that the health of the environment and the health of people are inseparable.
The residents of these ghost towns have not given up. They wake up each day in places that are slowly poisoning them, and they persist. The least the rest of us can do is pay attention and demand better—for them, and for the communities that might become the next Centralia or Picher if we do not.