There’s something eerie and sad about the sight of an abandoned old house, or an unfinished building site, or a gargantuan experimental space gun slowly rusting on a tropical shore. Well, all right, perhaps that last one isn’t so much sad as it is bizarre and terrifying. But, as this list will show, it isn’t even close to being the only weird decaying ruin from our recent past.

10 Hitler’s Hollywood Mansion

In the 1930s, an American Nazi group called the Silver Shirts (we guess all the cool shirt colors were taken) were convinced that Hitler was sure to triumph over his enemies and rule the world—from his swanky Hollywood pad. The group, led by wealthy landowners Norman and Winona Stephens and mining heiress Jessie Murphy, spent $4 million ($66 million in today’s money) to buy the property from legendary cowboy actor Will Rogers. The group hoped that Hitler would use the ranch house as his base while he spread his message throughout America.

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Of course, nothing but the best was good enough for the Führer. The Silver Shirts refurbished the ranch with a bomb shelter, armed guards, and a diesel power plant, and there were plans to add a swimming pool, library, and gym. The plan fell apart after Pearl Harbor, when the FBI swarmed onto the compound and arrested around 50 Silver Shirts living there. The house, on some of the most expensive real estate in the world, was left to decay into a graffiti-coated ruin. In 2012, plans were announced to bulldoze the property and turn the land into a picnic area. Forbidden Archeology: ... Richard L. Thompson Best Price: $14.66 Buy New $25.52 (as of 06:15 UTC - Details)

9 Fordlandia

Henry Ford was not a man who was afraid to dream big. The Ford Motor Company had revolutionized American manufacturing and transportation, but that wasn’t enough for Ford—he wanted to change the rest of the world, too. In 1928, his company started spending huge sums of money to establish a rubber plantation in an isolated area of the Amazon Rainforest.

On the face of it, the project had solid economic motives—Ford’s reliance on Anglo-Malaysian rubber went against his principles of vertical integration—but in reality the project had loftier goals. The Native Brazilian workers would labor collecting rubber during the day, then return to live in a model American town, featuring hamburgers, golf courses, ice cream parlors, and white picket fences. The settlement, soon dubbed Fordlandia, was modeled on Dearborn, Michigan, and would also feature compulsory gardening and a ban on alcohol. In this way, Ford hoped to shape the “primitive” Brazilians into perfect, small-town Americans.

Sadly for Ford’s “civilizing” mission, things didn’t quite work out that way. For one thing, the Brazilians hated being forced to wear American-style clothes and subsist on staples like tinned peaches and brown bread. They also couldn’t understand why Ford forced them to work during the hottest parts of the day instead of the cooler evening. The town was rife with malaria and yellow fever, and illegal bars quickly sprung up. The workers also never took to their new American houses, and tended to leave as soon as they had been paid. In 1945, Ford, which had invested $20 million in Fordlandia, sold the place to the Brazilian government for less than $250,000. It’s still there, an American ghost town rotting away in the jungle.

8 The Barbados Space Gun

The famous Platinum Coast of Barbados contains some of the most expensive real estate in the world, packed with hotels, villas, and jet ski rental cartels. Well, except for the stretch occupied by the rotting Cold War supergun, Forbidden Archeologist... Cremo, Michael A. Best Price: $9.85 Buy New $16.85 (as of 04:30 UTC - Details) that is. Project HARP (not to be confused with conspiracy theory-magnet Project HAARP) was a joint Canadian-American project to build an enormous gun capable of launching projectiles into space. It was led by Dr. Gerald Bull, a controversial Canadian engineer who was borderline obsessed with building huge guns (let’s not get all Freudian, maybe he just liked explosions).

Whenever the gun was fired, the tremors were said to have shaken the entire south coast of the island, and the gun’s backers were frequently forced to pay for repairs to nearby houses. Funding was eventually cut off in 1968, when the US realized that there were easier ways to launch things into space. The Barbados government had also become hostile to renewing the lease on the testing site after discovering that Dr. Bull was involved in supplying arms to apartheid South Africa. The gun was simply abandoned where it stood—slowly rusting away in the sea breeze. The iron relic is still there today, proudly looking out over the gentle waters of the Caribbean. Dr. Bull was mysteriously assassinated in 1990 while illegally building a supergun for Saddam Hussein.

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