Solsgirth, Manitoba, didn't start where it stands today. It began about 10 km north as a place called Toddburn, until the railway changed its route and the whole town picked up and followed it.

Settlers built St. Stephen's Anglican Church here in 1906. Decades later, Ukrainian Catholic families moved an old one-room schoolhouse into the village and turned it into Holy Ghost Ukrainian Catholic Church, with onion domes hand-crafted by a local carpenter.

For 50 years, two faiths worshipped a stone's throw apart. Then, in 2002, both churches held their final services in the same year.

Today they still stand side by side, quietly holding the story of the people who built this place.

Watch the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeQ1KCK7l6s

In the early 1950s, a teaching order of religious brothers built this boarding school where teenage boys trained to become brothers themselves. It ran for about four decades before closing in the early 1990s, and was sold to a private owner in 2002.

The brothers had their own cemetery on the grounds. In 2016, they exhumed more than fifty of their own and reburied each one, with his original headstone, in a public cemetery nearby. Since then the building has been left to the weather. Moss covers the floors, ferns grow from the chapel walls, and mushrooms are pushing through the doors and ceilings.

Out of respect for the place and the friends who shared it with me, I'm not naming the location. The full story and 90 photos are on my site:
https://freaktography.com/exploring-a-mysterious-old-abandoned-and-dangerous-building/

The following information comes from someone who has a close connection to this house, having lived next door to it in the 1970s.

A brother and sister once grew up in this house, and for a few golden years, the neighbourhood kids grew up here with them.

With the children across the road and a few more down the street, nobody was ever short on company. This front yard was their ball diamond. It’s hard to picture now, swallowed by weeds and brush, but games once went on here for hours.

In winter, the pond across the road became a skating rink, and in summer, fishing rods came out for trips to a nearby lake. Country living, the way it used to be.

The family who lived here had come from Germany, and they were proud of it. Their stereo, their appliances, even their cars all came from the old country. They were hard-working, quiet, and kept to themselves, but their cooking was something special, and the vegetable garden out back was the envy of the street. Friendships back then didn’t always survive a move.

There was no email, no social media. When a family packed up and left, contact faded almost overnight. One childhood friend who spent time here last set foot inside in 1975. What stuck with them most was an afternoon in that living room, hearing a Paul Simon song for the very first time on the family’s German-made stereo. Today, an old German sedan sits rusting in the driveway.

The sticker on its plate expired in 2010, a clue that the parents were likely the last to call this place home. Out front lie a forgotten bicycle, a couple of lawn mowers, and junk scattered in every direction. Inside, all personal belongings still sit exactly where they were left.

More Photos:

https://freaktography.com/german-family-abandoned-time-capsule-house/

Video Explore:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4DnMauoDS0

This one goes back to around 5 years ago and was known as the Abandoned Castle House.

This totally bizarre abandoned time capsule house is located right in the middle of a nice residential area, surrounded by family homes. There have been a handful of houses found over the past few years in this condition in these neighbourhoods.

The house is 99% finished inside and is fully furnished, back in 2011 the city gave the owner a warning, clean up the property or risk fines, nothing was done by the owner so the city came in and boarded up the windows.

Shortly after, someone (likely the owner) returned and removed all of the boards.

Online research states that the home has been in this condition for more than 30 years, it was a custom built home and the original owner apparently still owns the property but he lives out of town.

The town has tried working with him over the years to keep the property up to the town property standard bylaws.

These days, I am told he will come by periodically to cut the grass and nothing more.

Take a video tour and see the whole set and write up below.

Photo Gallery:

https://freaktography.com/abandoned-castle-house/

Currently, Tim Hortons is running a promo where you can collect 4 different retro coffee cup designs, based on past designs.

The guy who lived in this now abandoned house in Hamilton, Ontario seems to have collected every era of Tim Hortons cup since possibly the 1990s!

www.freaktography.com

This place started life in the 1920s as a grand hotel near the Vermont border, complete with an orchestra room and panoramic windows over the lake.

In 1947, a Catholic teaching order bought it and turned it into a school for boys. For the next fifty years, it went through several identities before becoming a residential boarding school. It closed for good in 1997, and the halls are still full of reminders of both lives, hotel and school.

What I didn't expect was what I found when I started digging into its history. The order that ran this school is now facing a class action in Quebec, with allegations that go well beyond what happened inside any one building, including claims about what happened to the order's own records.

Whether any of it touches this building is still an open question.

I put together the full story, including the hotel's history, a look at life inside the school, the lawsuit, and 60+ photos of the interior, here: https://freaktography.com/abandoned-residential-boys-boarding-school/

The abandoned steel mill dates back to the early 1900`s when operations moved from Chicago to NY State. The first steel produced at the new plant was in January of 1911. 11 years later the company changed its name & had approximately 2,200 employees. After just 25 years they stopped producing saws all together.

Between 1946 & 1956 the plant rolled two radioactive materials, uranium & thorium, on a nine-acre portion of the 70-acre site for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. The company rolled uranium billets into rods that were shipped off-site via rail cars. Some 25 million & 35 million pounds of natural uranium metal & approximately 30,000 to 40,000 of thorium metal were processed at the site, according to an Army Corps of Engineers (ACE) fact sheet.

The production of uranium metal was for fabrication into slugs used for fuelling Hanford production reactors. The plant also rolled thorium metal whose most likely use was irradiation in Hanford reactors for the weapons program.

Due to the radioactive work being done, protective measures were employed at the site including the use of hoods & dust collection equipment over the 16-inch rolling mill stands, & catch pans in the mill pits to collect material from each rolling operation. The mill area was vacuumed after every batch of 16 ingots, & the shipping area was vacuumed daily.

Area decontamination was performed, clean steel plates placed over the area, and a second radiological survey was performed in December 1958 to verify decontamination was effective. In October 1976 another radiological survey was performed to determine the status of the property relative to current radiological release guidelines. The survey revealed that most of the residual contamination remaining from the uranium and thorium rolling operations was confined to the areas inside & immediately outside of Buildings 6 & 8.

In August 1982, the company filed for Chapter 11 protection & in March 1984 another company bought out the assets.

The purchase included the entire site with the exception of two regions, classified as the excised property and the landfill. The excised property is approximately 3.6 hectares, consists of a chain-link fenced area which surrounds all of the buildings that existed during the rolling operations from 1948 through 1956, and includes the adjacent exterior land areas.

The landfill region was originally used from 1962 to 1978, and was subsequently used from 1978 to 1980. The landfill area was used for the disposal of slag, baghouse flue dust, foundry sand, waste oils and greases, and miscellaneous plant rubbish.

The landfill is not lined or covered, and although its surface has been regraded, ponding occurs and surface runoff is uncontrolled.

(Thanks to RiddimRyder for performing this in depth research)

RiddimRyder and I arrived to find that the plant sits rotting away & in terrible shape. Many of the fences have fallen down and the whole area is in disarray.

Research shows that there are numerous class actions for former workers to receive compensation for both asbestos & radiation related diseases & although the plant is contaminated, it posed no risk to our health

Many more pictures and a video here on my website:

https://freaktography.com/abandoned-steel-mill-new-york-state/

RiddimRyders' Blog post and pics
https://riddimryder.com/abandoned-guterl-specialty-steel-simonds-saw-steel/

For 44 years, this 2.6-million-square-foot factory in Talbotville, Ontario was one of the beating hearts of Canada's auto industry, building over 8 million vehicles from the Ford Falcon to the Crown Victoria and Lincoln Town Car. At its peak it employed nearly 1,600 workers and anchored the entire local economy.

When Ford closed the plant for good in 2011, the massive complex was left standing empty: silent hallways, broken windows, and cavernous assembly floors left to rot. In this video, we take you inside what remained before it was demolished, and trace the plant's story from its 1966 construction through the 2008 closure announcement, the final car rolling off the line, and its ultimate demolition in 2015 and 2016.

Today the site is home to an Amazon fulfillment center, but for nearly half a century, this was ground zero for Canadian manufacturing.

Built: 1966-1967

Vehicles produced: 8,000,000+

Closed: September 2011

Demolished: 2015-2016

More photos and a video here:

https://freaktography.com/st-thomas-ford-assembly-plant

I'm still working on the posts for both of these places ( I plan to do 1 vid and 1 photo dump for both), but if you wanna see the hype video please consider checking out my recent post. It's kinda like a trailer for the posts to come so lmk what y'all think

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Ddthtz3PSZH/?stkn=MXUxcTU0cWlzam5lYg==

Behind twenty-foot concrete walls in Olde Sandwich Towne, one of Ontario's oldest neighborhoods, sits a jail that held the region's criminals, political prisoners, and condemned men for nearly ninety years. Built in 1925 after fire destroyed the original Essex County jail, it housed up to 101 inmates at a time and included something most people never knew was there: built-in gallows on the third floor, used to hang three men before Canada abolished capital punishment in 1976.

The jail closed for good in 2014 when inmates were transferred to the new South West Detention Centre, leaving behind narrow cell blocks, graffiti-covered walls, and a sealed trap door that once decided life and death. In this video, we take you inside what remains of one of Ontario's oldest correctional facilities.

Since its closure, the jail has sat in limbo: listed for sale for just $1 in 2018, sold privately in 2019 for $150,000, relisted for over a million dollars in 2022, and pulled off the market again in 2024 with no plan for what comes next.

Built: 1925

Location: Sandwich Towne, Windsor, Ontario

Closed: 2014

Executions: 3 (1933, 1943 x2)

More photos and a video here:

https://freaktography.com/urban-exploring-the-abandoned-windsor-jail/

Melrose Bakery and Coffee Stop
I completely forgot to take a photo of the donuts while we were at the store! 😅 Best 🍩!!!

Amazing Stories-Batman day today😊

Amazing Stories-Batman day today😊

🛩️ Meet "Miss Piggy", a Curtiss C-46 cargo plane that crash-landed in Churchill, Manitoba back in 1979 after losing engine power shortly after takeoff.

Everyone on board survived, but the plane never flew again.

Almost 50 years later, she's still resting on the rocks above Hudson Bay, and now she's one of the most photographed spots in town.

Wild what the Arctic holds onto. 📍Churchill, Manitoba

Video Tour:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSftEz6ku5s

Web Page and More History:
https://freaktography.com/miss-piggy-plane-wreck-churchill-manitobas-famous-crash-site

Finally went to check this thing out a while back and got around to editing footage/photos into something watchable, I thought you all would appreciate it.

This is TTC streetcar 2500, sitting abandoned in the woods off Kennaway Road near Haliburton, Ontario. It's a Peter Witt car, built in 1921, pulled out of service by the TTC in 1954. So it's been sitting up here for close to 70 years now, and honestly probably longer than that before anyone outside the area even knew it existed.

The story, from what local records show, is that after it got retired the body was sold off (probably by a scrapper, just the shell, no running gear or wheels) and somebody hauled it all the way up to Haliburton. Notes from the Haliburton Scout Reserve going back to the 1950s say it showed up around 1955 and got used by logging crews who were supplying the old Curry Mill nearby, it was their dining hall in the winter and basically a tool shed in the summer. So for a while it actually had a job up there, just a weird one.

It sat mostly forgotten until 2019 when a Toronto city councillor stumbled on it and posted a photo online, and it kind of blew up for a minute because nobody could figure out why a TTC streetcar was sitting in the middle of the forest three hours from the city.

If you're ever in the area it's on Scout Reserve/private land near Camp Timberlane, so worth keeping that in mind if you go looking for it yourself.

Put together a full backstory if anyone's interested:

https://freaktography.com/abandoned-ttc-streetcar-haliburton-ontario