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Wednesday, June 20, 2012

TOP FIVE WORLD'S MOST POPULAR GHOST TOWNS

Are you guys interested with Ghost tows and to discover the history behind them? When you ghost town, it doesn't literally means that there are ghosts residing in this place, ghost towns are abandoned villages, towns or cities. A town often becomes a ghost town because the economic activity that supported it has failed, or due to natural or human-caused disasters such as floods, government actions, uncontrolled lawlessness, war, or nuclear disasters. Today, most ghost towns served as main tourist attractions.
Listed below are five of the most popular ghost towns in the world. Have fun!

TOP FIVE WORLD'S MOST POPULAR GHOST TOWNS

TOP 5 WORLD'S MOST POPULAR GHOST TOWN
"KAYAKOY , TURKEY"

The ghost town, now preserved as a museum village, consists of hundreds of rundown but still mostly intact Greek-style houses and churches which cover a small mountainside and serve as a stopping place for tourists visiting Fethiye and nearby Ölüdeniz. It was built on the site of the ancient city of Carmylessus in the 18th century. It experienced a renewal after nearby Fethiye (known as Makri) was devastated by an earthquake in 1856 and a major fire in 1885. After the Greco-Turkish War, Kayaköy was largely abandoned after a population exchange agreement was signed by the Turkish and Greek governments in 1923. Many of the buildings were damaged in the 1957 Fethiye earthquake. Today Kayaköy village serves as a museum and is a historical monument. Around 500 houses remain as ruins and are under the protection of the Turkish government, including two Greek Orthodox Churches, which remain the most important sights of the ghost town.

TOP 4 WORLD'S MOST POPULAR GHOST TOWN
"CENTRALIA , PENNSYLVANIA"

Centralia is a borough and ghost town in Columbia County, Pennsylvania, United States. It is more like a real version of Silent Hill in terms of the vicinity and in fact, the game itself was inspired by Centralia. Its population has dwindled from over 1,000 residents in 1981 to 12 in 2005, 9 in 2007, and 10 in 2010, as a result of a mine fire burning beneath the borough since 1962. Very few homes remain standing in Centralia; most of the abandoned buildings have been demolished by the Columbia County Redevelopment Authority or nature. At a casual glance, the area now appears to be a field with many paved streets running through it. The town's four cemeteries—including one on the hilltop that has smoke rising around and out of it—are maintained in good condition.The underground fire is still burning and may continue to do so for 250 more years.

TOP 3 WORLD'S MOST POPULAR GHOST TOWN
"BODIE , CALIFORNIA"

Bodie is a ghost town in the Bodie Hills east of the Sierra Nevada mountain range in Mono County, California, United States. The ghost town has been administered by California State Parks since becoming a state historic park in 1962, and receives about 200,000 visitors yearly. Actually, the town reminds me of the film "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre". Bodie began as a mining camp of little note following the discovery of gold in 1859 by a group of prospectors. In 1876, the Standard Company discovered a profitable deposit of gold-bearing ore, which transformed Bodie from an isolated mining camp comprising a few prospectors and company employees to a Wild West boomtown. The first signs of decline appeared in 1880 and became obvious towards the end of the year. Promising mining booms in Butte, Montana; Tombstone, Arizona; and Utah lured men away from Bodie. The first signs of an official decline occurred in 1912 with the printing of the last Bodie newspaper, The Bodie Miner. n 1917, the Bodie Railway was abandoned and its iron tracks were scrapped. The last mine closed in 1942, due to War Production Board order L-208, shutting down all nonessential gold mines in the United States. The first label of Bodie as a "ghost town" was in 1915.

TOP 2 WORLD'S MOST POPULAR GHOST TOWN
"GUNKANJIMA, JAPAN"

Also known as Hashima Island. Gunkanjima is one among 505 uninhabited islands in the Nagasaki Prefecture about 15 kilometers from Nagasaki itself. The island was populated from 1887 to 1974 as a coal mining facility. The island's most notable features are the abandoned concrete buildings and the sea wall surrounding it. It is known for its coal mines and their operation during the industrialization of Japan. Mitsubishi bought the island in 1890 and began the project, the aim of which was retrieving coal from undersea mines. As petroleum replaced coal in Japan in the 1960s, coal mines began shutting down all over the country, and Hashima's mines were no exception. Mitsubishi officially announced the closing of the mine in 1974, and today it is empty and bare, which is why it is called Ghost Island.

THE WORLD'S MOST POPULAR GHOST TOWN
"PRIPYAT, UKRAINE"

Pripyat is a ghost town near the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Pripyat was founded in 1970 to house workers for the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. It was officially proclaimed a city in 1979 but was abandoned in 1986 following the Chernobyl disaster.Access to Pripyat, unlike cities of military importance, was not restricted before the disaster as nuclear power stations were seen by the Soviet Union as safer than other types of power plants. Nuclear power stations were presented as being an achievement of Soviet engineering, where nuclear power was harnessed for peaceful projects. After the disaster the city of Pripyat was evacuated in two days. Many of the building interiors in Pripyat have been vandalised and ransacked over the years. Because the buildings have not been maintained since 1986, the roofs leak, and in the springtime the rooms are flooded with water. Trees can be seen growing on roofs and even inside the buildings. One notable landmark often featured in photographs of the city, video games (such as Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series) and visible from aerial-imaging websites such as Google Maps, is the long-abandoned ferris wheel located in the Pripyat amusement park.

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LinkAfter exploring the Baclaran Church, I decided to have my lunch before moving back to Cavite. Baclaran Church is seated near the Baclaran public market. There are several “carinderias” or local eateries and series of fast food chains everywhere. Though the market is just too crowded for me to enjoy my meal in a local eatery so I decided to try a fast food chain instead.
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