New York is filled with history but perhaps one of the most fascinating relics of its storied past are the long-abandoned places that dot its landscape.
Covered in overgrown brush and decaying, these are some of the creepiest places you'll find within the entire state.
The abandoned community of Love Canal is one of those places. A neighborhood located in Niagra Falls, Love Canal was built in the 1950s with the intention of creating a dream working-class community.
Little did the owners of the property know that the site on which they built 100 homes was actually a toxic chemical dumpsite.
The neighborhood prospered for about 2 decades before running into some seriously disturbing problems.
During the 1970s, residents began to complain of terrible odors. After a particularly bad snowstorm in 1977, more than 20,000 tons of toxic waste and discarded pesticides began to leak out of the metal drums that had been buried beneath the homes of these residents.
Black liquid began to seep up from the ground and suddenly, Love Canal became known as America's first case of the havoc caused by dumping toxic waste materials.
A state of emergency was declared by the President in 1978. It eventually took $400 million and more than 20 years to clean up the abandoned neighborhood of Love Canal.
Today, Love Canal is nothing more than an empty 70-acre lot closed off by fences.
Have you ever heard of the abandoned toxic neighborhood of Love Canal? To learn more about this fascinating disaster and the history that surrounds it, you can visit the EPA's official site here or watch this interesting video uploaded to YouTube last year.
Comments / 70