Kadykchan in Russia's far north-east was dug out of the permafrost by Gulag prisoners in 1943 to feed a power station. Then a mine explosion and a state decision left its flats empty and its streets silent.
In 1997 a 45-metre Gulliver was laid out on a hillside below Mount Fuji, tied down by Lilliputians, and four years later the park was dead. The bank behind it had collapsed, and the giant stayed where he lay for six more years.
Hidden in the Brandenburg forest north of Berlin, Vogelsang was a Soviet garrison town of up to 15,000 people, and for a few months in 1959 it held the first Soviet nuclear missiles in Germany.
In 1961 a Japanese showman built his own Disneyland in Nara, complete with a castle, a Matterhorn and a Main Street. For forty-five years it thrilled families, then it sat empty and overgrown for a decade before the bulldozers arrived.
