Ghost Towns
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
93 free Ghost Towns trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
13 free ghost towns trivia questions with answers. Explore the mysterious world of abandoned settlements with our engaging ghost towns trivia quiz. Test your knowledge about famous deserted locations across the globe and discover fascinating historical facts about why these once-thriving communities were left behind. Can you answer all 93 questions correctly?
30 of 93 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which California ghost town is preserved in a state of 'arrested decay'?
Bodie
Bodie's interiors stay as the last residents left them, shelves still stocked; fires in 1892 and 1932 left fewer than a tenth of its roughly 2,000 buildings standing.
Q 02What 1986 event left the Soviet city of Pripyat abandoned?
Chernobyl explosion
The Chernobyl explosion at reactor No. 4 on 26 April 1986 forced Pripyat's residents out the next day; they were told the evacuation would last three days.
Q 03Which Namibian diamond town near Lüderitz now has houses knee-deep in sand?
Kolmanskop
Kolmanskop grew up after a railway worker found a diamond there in 1908; once the mines moved south it emptied in the 1950s, and Namib sand has drifted through its houses ever since.
Q 04Why was the Italian hilltop village of Craco largely abandoned in the 20th century?
Landslides and quakes
Landslides and quakes emptied Craco: residents began moving downhill to Craco Peschiera in 1963 after a series of landslides, and the last were ordered out after the 1980 Irpinia earthquake.
Q 05The French village of Oradour-sur-Glane was destroyed in a massacre during which conflict?
World War II
World War II's Waffen-SS killed the villagers on June 10, 1944; the ruins were left standing as a permanent memorial.
Q 06What is the nickname of Hashima, Japan's abandoned coal-mining island?
Battleship Island
Hashima Island, once a bustling undersea coal mining facility, is widely known as Gunkanjima, or 'Battleship Island,' because of its resemblance to a warship when viewed from a distance.
Q 07Which Pennsylvania town became a ghost town because of an underground coal fire burning for decades?
Centralia
Centralia's fire had smouldered for 19 years when, in 1981, the ground opened under a 12-year-old boy, who clung to a tree root until a cousin pulled him out; two years later Congress voted $42 million to buy out the town.
Q 08What natural disaster buried the Caribbean capital of Plymouth in the 1990s, turning it into a ghost town?
Volcanic eruption
A volcanic eruption of the Soufrière Hills, dormant for centuries, sent pyroclastic flows over Plymouth and the town was permanently abandoned in 1997; the island's government moved north to Brades.
Q 09Rhyolite, a 1905 gold-rush town near the eastern edge of Death Valley, is in which US state?
Nevada
Rhyolite is in Nevada, just outside Death Valley National Park; it sprang up in 1905, withered after the financial panic of 1907 scared off investors, and had its electricity switched off in 1916.
Q 10Pyramiden, a Soviet coal-mining ghost town shut in 1998, sits on which Norwegian archipelago?
Svalbard
Svalbard is Norwegian, but under its 1920 treaty other signatory states may mine there, as Russia still does; Pyramiden passed from Swedish to Russian hands in 1927 and was worked until 1998.
Q 11The deserted Humberstone and Santa Laura works in the Atacama Desert, UNESCO-listed in 2005, refined what?
Saltpeter
Saltpeter, a nitrate dug from the desert for fertiliser, made northern Chile rich until synthetic nitrate undercut it; output slid after the 1929 crash and both works were abandoned in 1960.
Q 12The abandoned Alaskan camp of Kennecott grew up around mines producing which metal?
Copper
Copper: prospectors spotted what looked like a green meadow high on a mountainside, and it turned out to be malachite beside a rich ore known as copper glance.
Q 13The ruined old village of Belchite stands beside its rebuilt namesake as a memorial to which war?
The Spanish Civil War
Q 21The Western Australian town of Wittenoom was wiped from official maps because of decades of mining what?
Blue asbestos
Blue asbestos (crocidolite) was mined at Wittenoom until 1966; the state struck the town's name from official maps and road signs in 2007 and evicted the last resident in 2022.
Q 22Which Missouri town was abandoned after its residents were exposed to high levels of dioxins?
Times Beach
Times Beach, southwest of St. Louis, had its dirt roads sprayed for dust control in the 1970s with waste oil that carried dioxin; the federal government bought out the town in 1983 and it was disincorporated in 1985.
Q 23St. Thomas, a Nevada farm town, was drowned in 1938 as which Colorado River reservoir filled?
Lake Mead
The Spanish Civil War wrecked Belchite in a two-week battle in 1937; instead of rebuilding it, the regime kept the ruins and had a new town built alongside, partly by prisoners held in a camp there.
Q 14Which remote Scottish island community asked the government to evacuate it in 1930?
St Kilda
St Kilda's last 36 islanders chose to go after a young woman's death that winter; on 29 August 1930 they left an open Bible and a small pile of oats in each house and locked the doors.
Q 15Which ride in Pripyat's amusement park became the emblem of the abandoned city?
Ferris wheel
Ferris wheel: the park was due to open officially on 1 May 1986, in time for May Day, but the whole city was evacuated on 27 April and the opening day never came.
Q 16Firefighters reportedly burned what in May 1962, starting the Pennsylvania mine fire that emptied a borough?
The town landfill
The town landfill sat in an abandoned strip-mine pit; volunteers were hired to burn the rubbish before Memorial Day, and the flames are thought to have crept through an unsealed hole into the coal seams below.
Q 17Railway worker Zacharias Lewala started the 1908 Namibian diamond rush by showing his find to whom?
A German rail inspector
August Stauch, a German rail inspector supervising Lewala's track gang, recognised the stone; within months the German Empire declared the coastal strip a Sperrgebiet, or prohibited diamond area.
Q 18Which company bought Japan's Hashima Island in 1890 and mined coal from beneath the sea there until 1974?
Mitsubishi
Mitsubishi shut the mine in 1974 and every resident left within months; at the 1959 peak 5,259 people had been packed onto the tiny island, among the most crowded places on Earth.
Q 19What event emptied Varosha, Famagusta's beach-resort quarter, of its residents?
The 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus
The 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus emptied Varosha: its Greek Cypriot residents fled that August as the Turkish army advanced, and the army kept the quarter fenced off, hotels and all, until part of the beachfront reopened in 2020.
Q 20The Turkish ghost village of Kayaköy lost its Greek Orthodox community for good under which 1923 agreement?
Treaty of Lausanne
The Treaty of Lausanne settlement of 1923 brought the Greek-Turkish population exchange, which uprooted Christians in Turkey and Muslims in Greece alike; the homes of Kayaköy's 6,500 Greeks have stood empty ever since.
Lake Mead rose over St. Thomas after its last resident, Hugh Lord, rowed away from his house in June 1938; decades later the falling lake let the town's ruins resurface.
Q 24The ghost town of Rhyolite, near Death Valley, is best known for a house built chiefly of what?
Empty bottles
Empty bottles, some 50,000 that had held beer and liquor, went into the house miner Tom Kelly built in 1906; Paramount restored it in 1925 to use in a silent film.
Q 25Which theme-park founder bought and rebuilt the California ghost town of Calico in the 1950s?
Walter Knott
Walter Knott of Knott's Berry Farm bought Calico in 1951 and rebuilt it; his uncle had grubstaked the prospectors who found its richest mine, and Knott gave the town to San Bernardino County in 1966.
Q 26Bannack, a gold-rush ghost town, briefly served in 1864 as the first capital of which US territory?
Montana
Montana Territory's first legislature met at Bannack in 1864 before the capital moved to Virginia City; sheriff Henry Plummer had been hanged by vigilantes that January as an accused road-agent boss.
Q 27Which future US president managed the Sons of Gwalia gold mine in Western Australia in 1898?
Herbert Hoover
Herbert Hoover, then a young engineer for Bewick, Moreing and Co., ran the Sons of Gwalia mine in 1898; when the mine closed in December 1963 the town of Gwalia emptied almost overnight.
Q 28Which Caribbean island's capital, Plymouth, has stood abandoned inside an exclusion zone since 1997?
Montserrat
Montserrat has kept Plymouth as its capital on paper, though the government works from Brades in the north and about two-thirds of the islanders left after the south was closed off.
Q 29The Azerbaijani city of Aghdam was largely destroyed after being occupied in 1993 during which conflict?
The First Nagorno-Karabakh War
Armenian forces captured Aghdam in July 1993 during the First Nagorno-Karabakh War and razed most of it to deter returnees; Azerbaijan regained the ruined city in November 2020.
Q 30The Spanish village of Foncebadón is reviving thanks to pilgrims walking to which city?
Santiago de Compostela
Santiago de Compostela's pilgrim road runs through Foncebadón, where by the 1990s only a mother and her son still lived; the revival of the Camino brought hostels and bars back to the village.