13 Abandoned Texas Places You're Not Supposed to Explore

There is a missile silo outside Abilene, Texas that requires a dive certification to reach the bottom. It was built to survive a nuclear strike. It holds close to two million gallons of cold black water. It is not the strangest thing on this list. Texas has a way of forgetting things in layers, and the layers go deep. This video works through thirteen sites across the state, each one abandoned in a different way: a 135-year-old smokestack with no factory left beneath it, standing beside Brackenridge Park in San Antonio above the quarry that became the Japanese Tea Garden. An 828-foot ASARCO copper smelter stack in El Paso that organized a skyline for a century before thirty seconds of dynamite removed it in 2013, leaving behind a fenced remediation site and a hillside cemetery that never moved when the neighborhood did. A Nike Hercules missile battery north of Denton, one of four Cold War sites that once ringed Dallas-Fort Worth, switched off in 1968 when ICBMs made surface-to-air defense obsolete. The Longhorn Army Ammunition Plant on Caddo Lake in Karnack, which produced over 414 million pounds of TNT during World War II and later hosted the first INF Treaty missile destructions, now a national wildlife refuge where cypress roots are doing the slow work of demolition. Also here: the Hot Wells Hotel ruins in San Antonio, where Theodore Roosevelt and Hollywood figures once soaked in sulphur water before the structure burned three separate times. The AstroWorld site in Houston, cleared to a grass field by mid-2006 with only the Loop 610 pedestrian bridge remaining to mark where the entrance once stood. The town of Bluffton, submerged under Lake Buchanan since 1937 and briefly surfaced again during the 2009 drought, its hotel foundations and cotton gin scales now protected archeology on a schedule set by rainfall. The Pyote Rattlesnake Bomber Base in Ward County, where roughly 2,000 surplus aircraft baked in the West Texas sun after V-J Day, including, for a period, the Enola Gay. And then the Atlas F missile silo, engineered to outlast a nuclear exchange, decommissioned before it was ever used, and now filled with close to two million gallons of cold, enclosed water. Certified divers only. Appointment required. 0:00 Introduction - Texas Ruins Overview 1:04 Portland Cement Plant, San Antonio 3:06 ASARCO Smelter and Smeltertown, El Paso 5:24 Joyland Amusement Park, Lubbock 7:24 Cold War Defense Infrastructure, North Texas 17:34 Bluffton - Submerged Ghost Town 21:39 Hot Wells Resort Ruins, San Antonio 25:58 Flooded Atlas Silo Near Abilene