A well-kept cabin is a wonderful thing to behold, but some cabins look amazing after being abandoned for years. There’s a growing trend online of finding and sharing photos of long-abandoned spaces—places where the disintegrating walls, overgrown windows, and eerie stillness are oddly beautiful.
These photos of abandoned cabins and other buildings show how, given the chance, nature will reclaim any space. Moss grows over cement, vines crawl through cracks in concrete, and everything slowly returns to its origins.
These structures are a real-life peek into the world imagined by journalist Alan Weisman in his book The World Without Us. In the book, Weisman details what would happen to the environment humans have created if we all suddenly disappeared. It’s a fascinating look at deterioration and the impact our actions have on the environment—according to Weisman, residential neighbourhoods would become forests in 500 years, but plastics and radioactive waste would prevail long after.
These abandoned buildings already show the beginnings of that process. It’s humbling and strangely compelling to see these man-built structures slowly return to the earth.
