12 Indiana Ghost Towns You’re Not Supposed to Find!!

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]If you've lived in Indiana long enough, there's a good chance you've passed places where entire towns once existed without ever realizing it. Across this state are communities that disappeared, and some of them are still talked about by locals today. These are 12 ghost towns in Indiana, and number one is [music] the one that stays with you.

[00:00:21]Number 12, Hindostan Falls, Indiana.

[00:00:25]In 1820, this was the largest and most promising town on Indiana's frontier, and within 3 months half the population was dead. Homes were burned to stop the [music] spread of disease, and the town treasurer buried a pot of gold coins and died without telling anyone [music] where. The town was founded in 1816 along one of the only major roads in the state at the time, connecting [music] Vincennes and New Albany, and because travelers had few alternatives, that route brought a constant flow of settlers, merchants, and commerce, growing the population quickly to around 1,200 [music] people. Buildings lined the river, including mills, hotels, and workshops, all supported by the steady movement of people passing through.

[00:01:11]Then, the same route that built it carried disease into [music] the town.

[00:01:15]Historians believe it was cholera, yellow fever, or both, spreading rapidly through a population that had no way to contain it, [music] and within a 3-month period at least 138 people died, with the real number likely higher. Families who could leave did. Homes were abandoned, and to slow the spread, the houses of the dead were burned while mass graves were dug along the river.

[00:01:39]By 1824, less than half the original population remained. [music] During this time, the county treasurer, who had been collecting tax money, fell ill and buried several thousand dollars in gold and silver coins somewhere near the town, intending [music] to retrieve it later. He never did. The location of the money was lost with him and it [music] has never been found. Over the following years, the town continued to decline.

[00:02:03]>> [music] >> The post office closed and by the mid-1800s, the last residents had moved [music] away.

[00:02:09]Today, the site is a quiet fishing area with the falls still running and the stone along the river marked by holes where mill equipment once stood. But, there is nothing left to show who lived there.

[00:02:22]The town [music] is gone.

[00:02:24]Number 11, Gary, Indiana.

[00:02:28]This is the city where Michael Jackson was born, a place that grew from nothing into a city of 175,000 people in just a few decades [music] and then began to empty out, leaving entire blocks of buildings abandoned.

[00:02:42]In 1906, US Steel built the city on swampland along Lake Michigan, [music] creating neighborhoods, schools, churches, and a full downtown around a single purpose with everything tied directly to the steel plant [music] that powered it.

[00:02:57]Workers came from across the country and from overseas, drawn by the promise of steady work [music] and within a short time, the population surged as the city became one of the [music] most important industrial centers in the region. In 1919, tens of thousands of workers went on strike demanding better conditions and when replacement workers were brought in, violence broke out across the city, forcing the governor to declare martial law and send in thousands of troops to restore order.

[00:03:26]The strike ended, [music] the mills kept running, and for a time, the city continued to grow. But, the industry it depended [music] on began to decline in the decades that followed and as jobs disappeared, the population started to fall with them.

[00:03:40]Factories reduced their workforce, [music] neighborhoods emptied, and buildings that had once been filled with people were left standing with no one [music] inside.

[00:03:49]By the late 20th century, large sections of the city had been abandoned, leaving behind massive structures like churches, [music] theaters, and train stations slowly falling into decay.

[00:04:00]Some of the most recognizable places still stand, including the City Methodist Church and the auditorium where the Jackson 5 once performed, both now partially ruined. Today, thousands of people still live there and the steel plant continues to operate, but much of the city remains empty. A place that expanded as fast as possible and then was left behind when the system that built it began to break down.

[00:04:24]Number 10, Tunnelton, Indiana.

[00:04:28]In southern Indiana, there was a town built around a railroad tunnel that became one [music] of the most unusual and unsettling places in the region. A place where the story of how it was built [music] and what happened inside it stayed with people long after the town itself began to fade. The tunnel came first, cut straight through a limestone hill in the 1850s [music] with a sharp curve that made it impossible to see from one end to the other, >> [music] >> leaving the entire middle section in complete darkness.

[00:04:56]During construction, workers broke [music] into an old graveyard and when the graves collapsed into the tunnel, the work continued [music] anyway, sealing that part of the hillside into the structure itself.

[00:05:08]Once the tunnel was finished, a town grew up around it, forming a small but active community with homes, businesses, [music] a school, and even a building that quietly served as a stop on the underground railroad, helping people pass through the area without being seen. But the tunnel became more than just part of the town's foundation. In 1882, a group of men passing through were overheard planning a robbery and instead of reporting it, residents organized their own response, setting up an ambush inside the tunnel where the darkness made it impossible to see what was happening.

[00:05:41]The men entered expecting to pass through, they never came out.

[00:05:45]What happened inside was never officially recorded, but the bodies [snorts] were buried somewhere along the hillside near the tracks without markers, and over time the exact location was lost. As the years passed, the town declined as rail traffic changed and fewer trains needed to stop there, and the buildings that once supported it gradually disappeared.

[00:06:06]The tunnel remained.

[00:06:08]Trains still pass through it today, moving through the same stretch of [music] darkness, while somewhere in the hillside beside it are the of the men who walked in and never left.

[00:06:20]Number nine, Monument City, Indiana.

[00:06:24]In northeastern Indiana, there was a small town built around a Civil War memorial, a place where generations of families lived on the same land tied together by the memory of the people the town had lost. For decades, >> [music] >> it remained a quiet farming community with a school, a church, and a main street that hadn't changed much over time, holding onto a history that mattered to the people who lived there.

[00:06:48]Then a decision was made that erased it completely.

[00:06:51]In the 1950s, the federal government selected the valley for a flood control project, and residents were told their town would be flooded to create what would become Salamonie Lake. Graves were moved, buildings [music] were torn down or left behind, and by the mid-1960s, everything the town had been, including the monument it was named after, was underwater. But it didn't disappear entirely.

[00:07:14]During dry summers when the water level [music] drops, parts of the town begin to reappear with foundations, roads, [music] and the layout of the main street rising out of the mud for a short time before being covered again.

[00:07:27]People whose families once lived there still come back when that happens, walking across what used to be their town, [music] following streets that haven't existed for decades in a place that was erased, but not completely [music] gone. Number eight, Gas City, Indiana. This is a town that stared at the largest natural gas deposit in American history, decided it would last forever, burned it around the clock just to [music] show the world what it had, and was out of gas in 15 years. When natural gas erupted from the [music] ground near the Indiana town of Eaton in September 1886, the flame at the wellhead was reportedly visible from 10 miles away.

[00:08:05]The news spread across the state like the gas itself. The Indianapolis News wrote that "It's a poor town that can't muster enough money for a gas well."

[00:08:15]The entire eastern corridor of Indiana sat over the Trenton gas field, the largest natural gas deposit discovered to that point in American history, and the rush to drill it was as frenzied as any gold rush.

[00:08:28]A small farming community of 145 people called Harrisburg decided to compete aggressively. In 1892, the town voted to rename itself Gas City, an unambiguous advertisement aimed at every factory owner in the Midwest. It worked.

[00:08:45][snorts] Eight manufacturers relocated within 3 months of the name change. The population surged 2,400% in a decade, from 145 to 3,622, [music] and banks, hotels, and an opera house rose on streets where corn had been growing 2 years earlier. The gas belt towns were not subtle about their wealth. They burned flambeau, open gas torches on poles, 24 hours a day in the streets, >> [music] >> and some residents actually lit wells on fire just to watch the flames. Think about that for a second. The Indiana General Assembly eventually banned the practice, one of the first states in the country to legislate energy conservation, but the damage was already done. By 1902, gas pressure at most wellheads had dropped to nearly nothing.

[00:09:34]By 1913, Indiana was importing natural gas from West Virginia. Gas City's 12 glass factories closed or relocated, the population reversed, [music] and the boom that had multiplied the town 25 times over left behind a place that never found a second identity to replace the one that burned itself out.

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[00:10:01]Number seven, New Harmony, Indiana.

[00:10:05]This is the only town in America that was abandoned twice by two completely different [music] utopian communities 11 years apart. And the wreckage of both experiments left behind the first free public school in America, the first kindergarten, and some of the most important scientific work of the 19th [music] century. In 1814, a group of German Lutheran separatists, led by a preacher named George Rapp, crossed the Wabash River into the Indiana wilderness and built a town from nothing. The Harmonists believed the second coming of Christ was imminent and organized their lives around that belief. No private property, no alcohol, and strict celibacy, which meant the community couldn't grow its own membership and had to [music] recruit every new soul from outside.

[00:10:50]What they built in 11 years was remarkable. Over 180 structures, orchards, vineyards, textile mills, a trade [music] network reaching as far as New Orleans. They called it the wonder of the west.

[00:11:03]Then Rapp decided Indiana was too isolated for trade and moved everyone back to Pennsylvania.

[00:11:08]>> [music] >> He sold the whole town, 20,000 acres, every building, to a Scottish industrialist named Robert Owen for $150,000.

[00:11:17]Owen had already made his fortune at a textile mill in Scotland, [music] where he proved that decent housing, free education, and no child labor could coexist [music] with a profitable business. He believed an entire model society could be built [music] on the same principles. He renamed the town New Harmony and opened [music] it to anyone who agreed. About 800 people arrived, scientists, educators, feminists, reformers, and by Owen's own account, a considerable number of freeloaders and opportunists. Owen's partner William McClure chartered a keelboat in Philadelphia, loaded it with some of the most distinguished scientists and naturalists in America, and sailed down the Ohio to the Wabash, [music] a voyage that became known as the boatload of knowledge. The experiment it was meant to sustain lasted two years.

[00:12:06]The free-thinking reformers proved harder to govern than Scottish mill workers, the factions multiplied, [music] and by 1827, Owen had lost 80% of his personal fortune and the community had dissolved. His sons stayed and built careers that lasted. One introduced the legislation creating the Smithsonian Institution, another conducted the first geological survey of Indiana.

[00:12:28]A third became the first president of Purdue University. New Harmony itself established both the first free public library and the first free public school in America.

[00:12:39]Today, it is a small living town on the Wabash where both communities' buildings still stand. [music] A place where two visions of how people should live were tried, failed, and left something [music] that outlasted both of them.

[00:12:52]Number six, Moscow, Indiana.

[00:12:56]Every town on this list had time to decline, time to lose businesses, time for families to decide to leave, time for the place to quietly empty out.

[00:13:06]Moscow, Indiana had 30 seconds. On June 7th, 2008, an EF3 tornado touched down in Rush County and tore through the small town of Moscow along the [music] Flatrock River.

[00:13:19]The winds were enough to level wood frame buildings and carry debris for miles. Moscow had existed as a quiet river crossing community since 1829 [music] and the tornado struck it directly. Most of the structures that had defined the town were destroyed or made unlivable.

[00:13:35]The covered bridge over the Flat Rock River, built in 1886, still standing after 122 years of Indiana floods and [music] ice storms, was demolished by the storm. The few residents who stayed rebuilt, [music] but most did not come back.

[00:13:50]The original town site has been converted [music] into a memorial park along the river.

[00:13:55]Open grass and walking paths where streets and houses used to be. The Flat Rock River still runs through it and somewhere in the trees at the edge of that park [music] is the absence of a covered bridge that had survived two world wars, the [music] Great Depression, and a century of Indiana weather and didn't survive one [music] night in 2008.

[00:14:16]Number five, Elkinsville, Indiana.

[00:14:20]Most ghost towns lost their reason [music] to exist. Elkinsville never lost its reason.

[00:14:26]The federal government simply decided the land was worth more without the town on it, made every family an offer, and waited until the last one took it.

[00:14:35]Elkinsville had been a farming community [music] in Brown County since the mid-1800s.

[00:14:41]When the federal government began expanding the Hoosier National Forest in the 1950s and 1960s, Elkinsville was in the path of the acquisition.

[00:14:50]The US Forest Service approached each property owner individually with an offer and waited. Some sold quickly, others held out for years, a few attempting legal challenges that went nowhere. But the Forest Service had a budget and patience that individual farm families simply could not outlast.

[00:15:07][music] By the late 1960s, the last families had accepted Elkinsville was cleared and the buildings were demolished. The roads were left to become [music] forest floor. Today, hikers walk trails through what were once people's front yards and have absolutely no idea anything was ever there. The only thing the Forest Service could not easily take was the Elkinsville Cemetery, where generations of the community's families are buried, still sitting in the middle of the national forest, surrounded by trees on every side, maintained and accessible.

[00:15:40]The people who built Elkinsville are still there, in the ground, while the town they built is gone.

[00:15:47]Number four, New Amsterdam, Indiana.

[00:15:51]This is Indiana's oldest town, established in 1815, [music] a full year before Indiana became a state, and after two centuries of floods, bypassed railroads, and rural decline, it [music] is still technically alive. Barely.

[00:16:06]It has a handful of residents, a church, a cemetery, and a general store that has been listed for sale for years with no takers.

[00:16:14]New Amsterdam sits on the north bank of the Ohio River in Harrison County, founded before Indiana had been fully surveyed, before there were roads connecting it to anywhere else. The river was the road. Flatboats carrying Indiana corn and pork down the Ohio to New Orleans built the town's early economy. When steamboats replaced flatboats in the 1820s, New Amsterdam's reason to exist began draining away, and that slow drain started a century before the event most people associate with its near death.

[00:16:46]The 1937 Ohio River flood, the worst in the river's recorded history, which put nearly a million [music] people out of their homes across the valley, reached New Amsterdam, and most of the families who left did not come back.

[00:16:59]>> [music] >> What remains is a church, a cemetery, and the abandoned Shaffer General Store, listed for sale at a price so low that buyers cannot find reasons not to buy it, yet somehow never do.

[00:17:13]The town that predates Indiana itself continues to exist in the narrow margin between [music] alive and gone, precisely because no one has gotten around to finishing either outcome.

[00:17:24]Number three, Lockport, Indiana.

[00:17:27]Lockport was built for one reason, the Wabash and Erie Canal, >> [music] >> and when that canal became obsolete, Lockport didn't outlast it by a decade.

[00:17:36]The entire life of this town from founding to abandonment was determined by a single infrastructure decision made in the [music] 1850s that rendered it unnecessary before most of its residents had finished building their homes.

[00:17:49]The Wabash and Erie Canal [music] was the longest canal in American history, 468 miles connecting the Great Lakes to the Ohio River. And at its peak in the 1840s and 1850s, it was one of the most important freight routes in the American interior. Lockport was one of its lock stations [music] in Fountain County, where boats were raised or lowered between water levels and crews resupplied. The town existed because the canal needed [music] it there.

[00:18:17]The railroads reached Indiana in the 1850s, and canal freight simply [music] moved to the faster, cheaper rail network. Without traffic revenue, canal maintenance stopped, sections deteriorated, [music] and by 1874, the Wabash and Erie Canal had ceased operations entirely. Lockport followed within years. No lock traffic meant no customers for the businesses, [music] no businesses meant no reason for residents to stay. What remains is a historical marker and fragments of canal infrastructure in the surrounding land.

[00:18:50]It is one of the most complete disappearances on this list, not destroyed, not flooded, not bought out, just made unnecessary, and that was [music] enough.

[00:19:00]Number two, Leavenworth, Indiana.

[00:19:03]The original town of Leavenworth is at the bottom of the Ohio River. It has been there since 1937, submerged for most of the year under the river's shifting level, once or twice a decade when a dry summer pulls the water low enough, the stone foundations and old pavement emerge from the mud, and people whose families once lived there come down to the bank to stand on what used to be Main Street.

[00:19:27]Leavenworth was established in Crawford County in 1818 as a river [music] port and ferry crossing, and for over a century it served the Ohio Valley trade.

[00:19:37]A ferry, warehouses, and stores that the river flooded regularly, and the town [music] rebuilt after every time. The 1937 Ohio River flood was different, the worst in the river's recorded history.

[00:19:49]It left parts of the lower Indiana shore under 30 ft of water. When the flood receded, the families of Leavenworth were offered help to rebuild, but only on higher ground. Most relocated to the bluffs above, where New Leavenworth [music] was built and still stands.

[00:20:05]The original site was left to the river.

[00:20:07]It sits there now, mostly hidden, surfacing only when the conditions are right. Stone foundations, old streets, the bones of a town that chose to move rather than fight the Ohio one more time. When it appears, the people who remember it come to look.

[00:20:23]When the water returns, so does the silence. Number one, Rome City, Indiana.

[00:20:30]Rome City didn't flood, didn't burn, and didn't run out of anything. The federal government decided it wanted the lakefront land for a state park, made every resident an individual offer, and bought the town out of existence one family at a time, leaving behind a best-selling novelist's house and a cemetery as the only evidence a community [music] was ever there.

[00:20:51]Rome City had existed on the shore of Sylvan Lake in Noble [music] County since the 1830s. A post office, churches, schools, a small resort economy built around [music] the lake.

[00:21:02]One of its residents was Gene Stratton-Porter, one of the 10 best-selling novelists in America in the early 20th century, whose nature writings sold [music] millions of copies and drew readers from around the country to this particular lake in Northeastern Indiana.

[00:21:18]Her house on the lake shore still stands as a state historic site. In the 1950s, the Indiana Department of Natural Resources began purchasing land around Sylvan Lake for a state park expansion.

[00:21:32]The process was the same as Elkinsville.

[00:21:34]Individual offers, individual negotiations, no community vote on whether the town survived. Each family made its own calculation alone, and one by one they sold. By the time the last acquisition was complete, Rome City's commercial center was inside the park boundary.

[00:21:51]>> [music] >> The businesses had no customers, the post office closed, and what had been a town was a park [music] entrance. The state could not acquire the cemetery, which remains in its original location surrounded by parkland, [music] or Gene Stratton-Porter's house, which became a historic site. Her name is on the entrance sign, and her house is still on the lake shore, and the town [music] that produced one of the best-selling writers of her era is otherwise completely gone, replaced by a recreational area that most visitors [music] enjoy without any idea that an entire community was erased [music] to create it. Drop a comment. What town are you from in Indiana? Tell me the name, and I'll turn one of them into a story for the next video. Subscribe so you don't miss it.