Abandoned Places
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99 free Abandoned Places trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
12 free Abandoned Places trivia questions with answers. Discover the mysteries of the world's most haunting abandoned locations with our engaging trivia quiz. From ghost towns to crumbling castles, test your knowledge about these fascinating deserted places. Can you answer all 99 questions correctly?
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Built to house workers at the nuclear plant that exploded in 1986, which Ukrainian city was evacuated and never resettled?
Pripyat
Pripyat. Nobody in the city of 49,000 was moved until about 36 hours after the explosion; the evacuation came on 27 April, and the town has stood empty ever since.
Q 02Which abandoned Namib Desert diamond-mining town has been reclaimed by the sands?
Kolmanskop
Kolmanskop boomed after a railway worker found a diamond there in 1908, but richer finds near Oranjemund drew the miners south; abandoned in 1956, its houses now stand knee-deep in sand.
Q 03Which industry built up, then emptied, Japan's Hashima Island, 'Battleship Island'?
Coal Mining
Coal mining. Mitsubishi bought the island and housed more than 5,000 people on a rock 480 metres long; when the mine closed in 1974 they all left, and the apartment blocks were abandoned.
Q 04Which medieval hill town in Italy's Basilicata region was evacuated from 1963 after a series of landslides?
Craco
Craco. Landslides began emptying it in 1963 and the last residents were ordered out in 1980; the deserted hilltop then became a film set, used for the hanging of Judas in The Passion of the Christ.
Q 05Which Pennsylvania town was largely abandoned because of an underground coal-seam fire that has burned since 1962?
Centralia
Centralia. The fire made national news in 1981, when the ground opened under a 12-year-old boy in a backyard and his cousin hauled him out; the borough has since been all but emptied.
Q 06Which European capital is home to the abandoned Spreepark amusement park?
Berlin
Berlin. Spreepark opened in 1969 as East Germany's only amusement park and went bankrupt in 2001; its owner shipped six rides to Peru, and plans to save it died when cocaine was found hidden in one.
Q 07Which Philadelphia prison, open from 1829 to 1971, pioneered solitary confinement in cellblocks radiating like the spokes of a wheel?
Eastern State Penitentiary
Eastern State Penitentiary. Its silence and solitude were meant to bring penitence, but Charles Dickens, who visited in 1842, called the system 'cruel and wrong'; it was given up in 1913.
Q 08On which island is Varosha, the once-glamorous beach resort fenced off by the army in 1974?
Cyprus
Cyprus. Varosha's residents fled the advancing Turkish army meaning to return once things calmed down; a 1984 UN resolution says only they may resettle it, so its hotels were left to crumble.
Q 09Which mineral was mined at Wittenoom, the contaminated Western Australian ghost town?
Blue asbestos
Blue asbestos, or crocidolite, was mined at Wittenoom until 1966. The dust proved so deadly that Western Australia took the town off the map in 2007 and passed a law in 2022 to demolish what was left.
Q 10Houtouwan, a fishing village abandoned in the 1990s and since swallowed by vines, lies on an island off which city?
Shanghai
Shanghai. Some 2,000 fishermen and their families lived at Houtouwan on remote Shengshan Island until the early 1990s, when they left for better schools and jobs; creepers now cover their houses.
Q 11The saucer-shaped Buzludzha monument, opened in 1981, was built by which country's communist government?
Bulgaria
Bulgaria. Party leader Todor Zhivkov opened it in 1981 on the peak where Bulgarian socialists had met in secret 90 years before; eight years later he was deposed, and all upkeep stopped.
Q 12Kayakoy, a hillside of stone houses left empty after the 1923 population exchange, is in which country?
Turkey
Turkey. Kayakoy's Greek Orthodox townspeople were forced out to Greece, and the Muslims sent from Greece in their place did not settle on the hillside, which was left to fall into ruin.
Q 13Which city was purpose-built after 1986 to house Chernobyl plant workers displaced by the disaster?
Slavutych
Q 21Which Texas port, destroyed by hurricanes in 1875 and 1886, was abandoned rather than rebuilt?
Indianola
Indianola was a leading Texas port and the landing place for German immigrants until the hurricane of 1875; rebuilt, it was levelled again in 1886 and gave up its county seat that same year.
Q 22In which French village did Waffen-SS troops kill 642 people on 10 June 1944, almost the entire population?
Oradour-sur-Glane
Oradour-sur-Glane. The men were killed in barns and the women and children in the burning church; in 1946 the government declared the ruins a national memorial, and they stand as they were left.
Q 23The SS division behind a 10 June 1944 massacre was heading for which front?
Normandy
Slavutych was laid out by teams from eight Soviet republics, each giving a district the style of its homeland; the plant's workers and their families began moving in during 1988.
Q 14The Ferris wheel in Chernobyl's abandoned amusement park was built to open on which Soviet holiday in 1986?
May Day
May Day. The park's grand opening was set for 1 May 1986, five days after the reactor exploded; the wheel never opened as planned and became the best-known image of the dead city.
Q 15Which atoll's 167 residents were moved in 1946 to make way for US nuclear tests?
Bikini Atoll
Bikini Atoll's 167 islanders were moved to Rongerik in March 1946, ahead of Operation Crossroads; some went home in the 1970s but were taken off again in 1978 after absorbing caesium-137.
Q 16Hashima Island joined UNESCO's World Heritage list in 2015 as part of which series?
Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution
Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution is a series of 23 sites; the listing went through only after Japan agreed to acknowledge that Koreans had been forced to work on the island in wartime.
Q 17Which Aragonese town's Civil War ruins did Franco order left standing beside a rebuilt new town?
Belchite
Belchite was wrecked in the battle of 1937; Franco kept the ruins as a monument to his victory and had a new town built beside them by about a thousand political prisoners, opening it himself in 1954.
Q 18Who gets a home in Pennsylvania's burning coal borough when its owner dies?
The state
The state. Under a 2013 settlement the few who refused the buyouts may live out their lives there, but cannot sell or pass on their houses; the borough had already lost its ZIP code.
Q 19California's ghost town of Bodie is preserved in a state of what?
Arrested decay
Arrested decay means Bodie's buildings are kept standing but never restored, their interiors still stocked with goods; fires in 1892 and 1932 had already destroyed most of the town.
Q 20What became of W. S. Bodey, the prospector after whom Bodie was named?
Died in a blizzard
Died in a blizzard. Bodey found gold in 1859 and was caught by the storm that winter on a supply trip, before any town existed; the camp kept his name, though the spelling drifted to Bodie.
Normandy. Das Reich was sent north after the D-Day landings four days earlier; harried by the Resistance on the way, its men hanged 99 townsmen in Tulle the day before the village massacre.
Q 24Which rock-cut desert city, abandoned for centuries, did the Swiss explorer Johann Burckhardt reveal to Europe in 1812?
Petra
Petra. Once a rich Nabataean trading capital, it emptied as trade moved away and for centuries sheltered only nomadic shepherds, until Burckhardt's account brought the world to its tombs.
Q 25Which gold-rush ghost town was the first capital of Montana Territory in 1864?
Bannack
Bannack sprang from Montana's first big gold strike in 1862 and became the territory's first capital, but the legislature moved the seat to Virginia City in February 1865, barely a year on.
Q 26Founded in 1872 when the land was still Peru's, Chile's Humberstone and Santa Laura ghost-town works refined which commodity?
Saltpeter
Saltpeter. Chile took this nitrate desert from Peru in the War of the Pacific, fought over the same mineral; the works boomed until synthetic fertiliser undercut them, and shut for good in 1960.
Q 27The pyramid-shaped Ryugyong Hotel, nicknamed the 'Hotel of Doom', towers over which Asian capital?
Pyongyang
Pyongyang. The tower reached full height in 1992 and then stood as a windowless shell for 16 years; an Egyptian firm later finished its facade, but by 2019 it still had not opened.
Q 28Work on the Ryugyong Hotel halted in 1992 for what reason?
Economic crisis after the USSR collapsed
Economic crisis after the USSR collapsed: Soviet aid and investment dried up, building stopped with the shell complete, and a rusting crane sat on the summit until work resumed 16 years later.
Q 29The wreck of the SS Ayrfield in Sydney's Homebush Bay is nicknamed what?
The floating forest
The floating forest is a steamship built in 1911 that carried supplies to American troops in the Pacific in the Second World War; sent to Homebush Bay for scrap in 1972, its hull was left and mangroves took root.
Q 30Italy's island of Poveglia, empty since 1968, served for over a century as what?
A quarantine station
A quarantine station: ships and their cargo were held at Poveglia in the 18th and 19th centuries. Its later hospital closed in 1968, and the ghost stories now told of the empty island are a recent invention.