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Anderson, Indiana, is one of the few places that has had two major forms of employment move out of the area; in 1912, their sources of natural gas were depleted causing the factories that employed most of the town to close their doors and move onto other areas of the United States to continue their business. Once General Motors moved in, things started looking up for the city. However, like many other automobile industry boomtowns in the Rust Belt, once the industry was outsourced to other countries and the plants closed, the population fled for greener pastures. The once vibrant city was left to decay. Schools that once vibrated with the laughter of kids were left without students; clubs once filled with laughter and joy were forgotten in the face of overwhelming poverty; hotels that housed those traveling through were shuttered and turned into cheap housing before eventually being closed by the city; and shopping malls that once had thousands of customers were largely forgotten as the anchor stores closed for lack of profits. A place that once housed over 70,000 citizens has lost over 20% of the population since the deindustrialization of the 1970s and 1980s.

Western Indiana is home to Purdue University, along with many factories that have managed to flourish while others left the state; however, that is not to say the area is free from blight. Entire neighborhoods that once housed professors and students are left to rot minutes away from campus, and hotels that once hosted important visitors have been closed overnight, leaving everything behind. Areas that were important for America during the Cold War and World War II have been forgotten, while the places that sheltered our most vulnerable have become ghosts on the side of the highways, overlooked and overgrown. Homes are left standing in the woods, a monument for better, happier times. Family photos look on from the wall, smiling from the past. Bomb shelters meant to protect from the threat of atomic annihilation have been completely forgotten about, their locations lost to history and forgotten in the corn fields, only known from old newspapers. Join Amanda Bennett-Cole on an exploration of these abandoned and forgotten locations in Western Indiana.