World's most eerie abandoned hospitals

When war strikes, disease rages or when communities move on, buildings of health and healing can be left behind — or worse.  

Here's a look at some of the most eerie scenes of abandoned medical facilities around the world. First up is a decaying, untended hospital in New York state's Niagara Falls.

Still life

A baby doll sits on a rotting crib in a rusting maternity ward in Ukraine's Pripyat, the city that was abandoned after the 1986 nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl Power Plant. 

Nazi hospital

The only thing creepier than this room at Germany's abandoned Beelitz-Heilstätten is the hospital's history: Opened in 1898, the facility's patients included the World War I-era Adolf Hitler and World War II-era Nazi soldiers. 

Aftermath

Here's another look at the Pripyat hospital left to rot in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster. 

Fukushima fallout

Japan's 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster created a network of ghost towns  — and led to this empty scene at a hospital in the Fukushima town of Namie.

Horror show

In 2010, inside this section of the former D.C. General Hospital in Washington, D.C., a photographer found a container labeled, "Babies that have been Autopsied." The Washington Post and other media later reported what appeared to be human remains in the hospital.

After Katrina

This is a hospital room at the former St. Rita's Nursing Home weeks after 2005's Hurricane Katrina swamped the St. Bernard, Louisiana, facility, and drowned 35 patients. 

Bloody evidence

This coffin and stretcher, seen left outside a morgue in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad in 2009, are part of the aftermath of car bombings that left dozens dead.

"Haunted" hospital

Known to locals as the "Old Mental Hospital" or the "High Street Haunted House," this imposing facade is found in Hong Kong's Western District. The former psychiatric hospital, built in the late 1800s, and abandoned in 1971, is now a monument.  

Checked out

Here's a 2010 shot of strewn paperwork and old equipment at a former public hospital in Venice, Italy.

Unwelcoming sight

These are the gates of a former mental institution located outside of Milan, in the region of Lombardy, Italy. 

Left behind

According to Atlas Obscura, the Italian institution in the region of Lombardy was closed following the passage of a countrywide mental-health-reform law in 1978.  

Lost to the ages

Records and paperwork lay scattered in the former mental institution in Italy's Lombardy region. 

Devastation

This is the former Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. After the waters receded, 45 bodies were retrieved from the hospital, which lost power during the siege. 

When the levees broke

Here's a corridor at the former Memorial Medical Center as it was in the weeks after Hurricane Katrina.  

Dead zone

Here's the former autopsy room from Ospedale al Mare, an abandoned hospital in Venice, Italy. 

Empty crib

This is another eerie scene from the former Venice, Italy, hospital. 

Dead records

Autopsy records appear all but frozen in time at Venice, Italy's long-abandoned Ospedale al Mare. 

New world, old hospital

Seen in 2003, this forlorn hallway leads to the hospital wing at New York's Ellis Island. The hospital, which served newly arrived immigrants to the United States, closed in the early 1950s.   

Another time

Beelitz-Heilstätten was built to treat people suffering from tuberculosis. 

On these stairs

After World War II, Beelitz-Heilstätten, located in the former East Germany, became a military hospital for the Soviet army. 

Imposing

Closed in the early 1990s, the eerie-looking Beelitz-Heilstätten has been used as a location set for Hollywood productions, including the 2017 horror film "Wellness." 

Broken down

This decrepit wheelchair sits in the abandoned hospital in the Chernobyl-made, Ukrainian ghost town of Pripyat. 

Lonesome town

In 2007, when North Valley Hospital in Whitefish, Montana, moved to a new location, its former location was abandoned. It was demolished in 2015.  

Boarded up

Here's another view of the former North Valley Hospital in Whitefish, Montana.

Bad omen

This is the sign for the psychiatric ward of an abandoned hospital on the abandoned Italian island of Poveglia. 

Echoes of the past

The hospital at Poveglia treated psychiatric patients and the elderly before closing in 1968 — and depleting the island of its only inhabitants. The lonely locale, also once used to quarantine sufferers of the plague, has been called the "world's most haunted island."    

Shattered

In 2017 in the Philippines. a months-long battle between ISIS-aligned rebels and government forces devastated the people and infrastructure of Marawi City, including this local hospital. 

Vacancy

Here's a hospital room as it was left behind amid the 2017 siege in Marawi City, Philippines.

Collateral damage

A bullet hole in a hospital window puts a point on the devastation caused to the Marawi City hospital in the Philippines. 

Obsolete

This desolate scene was captured in the 1950s, when a hospital wing at the U.S. Army's Fort Logan in Colorado sat unused and forlorn. The grounds are now home to a mental health center. 

Chipped away

This is a 2006 shot of an abandoned building on the grounds of the still-operating Barlow Respiratory Hospital in Los Angeles. 

Stairway to nowhere

Built in 1854, the Smallpox Hospital on New York City's Roosevelt Island hasn't treated patients since the late 1800s. Its facilities, now a collection of ruins, hasn't served any function at all since the 1950s. 

Historic ruins

Sometimes referred to as Renwick Smallpox Hospital for its renowned architect, James Renwick, Jr., who also designed New York City's St. Patrick's Cathedral, the former hospital is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

Blown away

In 2014, a psychiatric facility in the eastern Ukraine town of Semenivka is seen battered and abandoned after an incursion by the Russian army. 

Scavenger

A lone dog wanders the destroyed mental-health facility in eastern Ukraine in 2014.

Crumbling

In 2015, nearly a year after Russian troops rolled into eastern Ukraine, the former psychiatric facility in Semenivka is a spectral presence. 

Drop and go

The Ebola epidemic in Liberia in 2014 is behind this ghostly scene, captured at a treatment center in the capital city of Monrovia. The clothes were left behind by people infected with the virus. 

From days past

Italy's push for mental health reform in the 1970s spelled the end of this 19th-century-founded psychiatric hospital in Volterra, Italy.    

Off the job

This is among the lonely scenes created when doctors in the African country of Ivory Coast went on strike in 2007.

No more patients

This is a registry preserved from England's former St. Francis Hospital, a mental health facility closed in 1995.  

Holding pattern

The former Malden Hospital in Massachusetts, seen here in 2017, has been vacant — and the source of local debate — since 2004. 

Sign of the times

In 2014, as some U.S. troops left Afghanistan, a paper sign is about all that's left of a hospital at a forward operating base in Pul-e-Alam. 

Victim of war

This emptied hospital shows the scars of the devastating 2016-2017 battle for Mosul, the Iraqi city that had been overtaken by ISIS fighters.   

Moved on

This German hospital — and its surrounding village — was abandoned in 2013 to make way for a coal-mine expansion. 

Graffiti magnet

This is a shot of the entrance to a former ward of the Morisset Hospital in New South Wales, Australia. The psychiatric hospital is still in operation; the ward depicted here was closed in 1991.  

Former leper colony

Now promoted by the Greek tourism officials, the island of Spinalonga was abandoned for decades after serving as a leper colony from 1904 to 1957.

Out of business

A 2019 study by a German think tank argued there were too many hospitals in the European nation and that closures  — especially of clinics in rural areas, such as this closed facility in the Bavarian village of Hersbruck  — would benefit patients.   

What might have been

Construction on this hospital in Moscow began in 1980. The project was abandoned in 1992, with the complex having never opened its doors. Per the Moscow Times, the abandoned site became known as the "gloomiest building" in the Russian capital. It was demolished in 2018.  

Bearing the scars

In Gwoza, Nigeria, a hollowed-out hospital is seen in 2017, two years after the town was wrested from the control of the terror group Boko Haram. 

Underwater

Flooding in Kenya overtook the maternity wing of this hospital in Baringo County in 2014.