20th Century Ruins
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
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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