Places Ian Grafmuller Wants to Go

Where America’s first doomsday cult awaited the end of the world.

A toxic ghost town sitting atop a massive coal fire.

The world’s first penitentiary, meant to be humane, drove men insane.

An abandoned cemetery lies in ruins as the surrounding forest swallows it whole.

An out-of-place Air Force radar dome is all that denotes this park as a former missile launch site.

A lone historical marker off the highway and scattered debris are all that remain of this Cold War-era missile site.

The remains of a historic plantation nestled in between a parking lot and the rental car return at Reagan National Airport.

This labyrinthine resting place of Black American leaders has been reclaimed by nature.

The eerie ruins of a remote abandoned hamlet said to be founded by the survivors of a shipwreck.

An eight-sided home built during a brief octagon craze in the 1850s.

The semi-reclaimed ruins of this canal were once part of an ambitious plan to reroute the mighty potomac.

An overgrown garden stands as a grim marker of an unrealized dream.

This pre-Revolutionary War grist mill ground corn and flour for soldiers in seven American wars.

A small Richmond island dotted with the remnants of hundreds of years of history.

Paranormal investigators claim this abandoned asylum is the most haunted spot in the eastern U.S.

The ruins of this Thomas-Jefferson-designed mansion have been left to crumble since the Christmas Day they burnt down.

The skeletal white beams stand as a monument to religious dissent.

A former mental hospital founded in the 1930s by a eugenicist who advocated for the forced sterilization of patients.

Nine of the very few concrete ships ever made in the U.S. are beautifully decaying off a Virginia pier.

This once-palatial plantation may have been the site where a draft of the Declaration of Independence was written.

Giant busts of 42 U.S. presidents sit, crumbling in a field in Virginia.

The remains of a failed attempt at medieval nerdery are hidden deep in the woods of Virginia.

These abandoned waterworks are crumbling into the Potomac River.

This forgotten boat elevator was an engineering marvel in its heyday.