Goussainville is a village just north of Paris with a peculiar history. Once it was a perfectly normal small French town -up until just 40 years ago. It is now a group of abandoned homes showing some signs of decay, along with relatively modern touches that show it was not long ago that child grew up here. What happened? The short answer is that the Charles de Gaulle Airport was built.
Goussainville-Vieux Pays was once a postcard perfect town, but less than a year before CDG opened in 1974 a plane crashed into it, destroying several houses and killing six crew and eight locals. The destruction caused many of the townspeople to evacuate immediately, with others following over the course of the subsequent year as the sound traffic from the airport and sorrow for the devastation of their town became too much. Now only a few residents remain.
The result of this recent abandonment is a scene that resembles a post-apocalyptic movie set. See a collection of pictures of Goussainville as you take a short tour at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: Ophelia Holt)