In the wake of the Chernobyl disaster, Pripyat residents were given less than an hour to pack.
Residents left behind Soviet-era posters, ballot boxes, and flags.
The city’s buildings, homes, and amusement park have been deserted ever since.
“We didn’t just lose a town, we lost our whole lives,” one evacuee recalled in the book “Voices from Chernobyl” by Svetlana Alexievich.
Some artifacts have survived the test of time, while others have disintegrated.
Graffiti artists have drawn strange shadowy figures on the walls of buildings.
One motif seen throughout the area is a series of childlike figures that are said to represent the ghosts of former residents.
Creepy dolls can be found on windowsills and beds, but they were likely staged by visitors.
A group of “disaster tourists” arranged some the haunting dolls on the beds in an abandoned kindergarten for dramatic effect.
Nearby, the ghost town of Kopachi is also open for tours.
Tours of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone — a 1,000-square-mile restricted area surrounding the nuclear power plant — often take visitors to Kopachi, which is on the road from Pripyat to Chernobyl.
Read more: Photos of the abandoned towns around Chernobyl show time standing still
Most of the village’s homes were bulldozed and buried after Chernobyl.
The action was supposed to prevent the spread the contamination, but it wound up having the opposite effect — the efforts pushed radiation deeper into the soil and closer to groundwater.
Few buildings remain, aside from an abandoned kindergarten.
There is also a memorial that honors the Soviet soldiers who liberated the village during World War II.
Meanwhile, an abandoned trolley bus sits in the middle of a forested area.
Twenty-five years after Chernobyl, a power plant disaster in Fukushima, Japan, forced the evacuation of multiple towns in 2011.
On March 11, 2011, the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami resulted in three nuclear meltdowns and multiple hydrogen explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan.
The morning after the disaster, Japanese authorities evacuated the entire town of Namie, which is downwind from the power plant.
Residents weren’t allowed back for six years.
In 2017, the government partially lifted the evacuation orders, allowing around 21,000 former residents to reoccupy certain areas. About 1,000 people chose to move back.
Namie is divided into three zones, two of which have been re-opened.
The third zone, which makes up around 80% of the district, is still off-limits due to elevated levels of radiation.
With humans gone, wild boars began roaming the streets.
The animals started foraging for food in Namie after the disaster, so local hunters began trapping and killing them.
Many former residents are still too scared to return.
Some former residents remain skeptical of claims that the area is safe, while others find it too painful to live among the demolished homes and empty school buildings.
In addition to Namie, Japanese authorities designated other municipalities as “difficult-to-return” zones.
One of those zones was Futaba, was home to about 7,000 people at the time of the accident.
Futaba is now an eerie shell of its former self.
Many buildings there are strewn with discarded objects, and abandoned vehicles have been enveloped by overgrown weeds.
The vast majority of the town is still under an evacuation advisory.
Authorities are working to make the site livable by 2022, but few residents are expected to return.
“If this was two or three years after the disaster, I might have a choice to return. But my house became run-down and I got old,” a 69-year-old evacuee told The Japan Times in 2017. “Realistically speaking, I don’t think I can live there now.”
The Japanese town of Ōkuma has already reopened to the public after sitting empty for eight years.
Ōkuma lies to the south of Namie and Futaba. The town was home to about 10,000 residents at the time of the Fukushima disaster.
Earlier this year, Japanese authorities determined that radiation levels in two of Ōkuma’s districts were low enough for people to return.
Many of Ōkuma’s sites are still shuttered, though.
Around 50 people began moving into new homes in April, but most former residents have chosen to stay away.
Though Ōkuma has a new corner shop and town hall, its hospital and town center still aren’t safe to enter due to radiation.
An explosion at the Mayak nuclear facility in Russia is considered the world’s third-worst nuclear accident, behind Fukushima and Chernobyl.
The explosion released around 2 million curies of radioactive waste.
In 2009, residents were relocated about a mile away to an area dubbed “New Muslyumovo.”
Much of the old territory was torn down. Homes were demolished, and the remains were thrown into pits, then buried.
But a few families belonging to a local ethnic group, the Tatars, chose to remain in the ghost town.
The ghost town of Atomic City, Idaho, meanwhile, didn’t empty out all at once.
In 1955, a small nuclear meltdown took place just outside Atomic City, at the Experimental Breeder Reactor-1, the world’s first electricity-generating nuclear power plant.
Then in 1961, three people died in a steam explosion and meltdown at a nuclear power reactor in nearby Idaho Falls.
David Hanson
Those accidents led to a steady decline in the town’s population: It went from around 140 residents in 1960 to just two dozen in 1970. The population has hovered around 25 ever since.
David Hanson
