Meet Houtouwan, the island city that everyone forgot.

Yes, that is (was?) a real town.

I have more videos to show you, but first, if I didn't know this overgrown ghost town was real, I probably probably would have thought it was the set of some Lost reboot.

(Heaven forbid that there's ever a Lost reboot.)

The 2,000-person town, like many small island outcroppings that used to have sizable fishing communities, disappeared in the '90s when the residents decided it wasn't worth it any more to be separated from modern society.

Who can blame them? All over the world, small towns like this have disappeared off the map. Islands used to protect people against plague, invaders, and busybody tyrants. Alternatively, they were also useful as bases of operations for said invaders and tyrants.

I have to admit, it looks like a climate activist's paradise there: Lots of greenery, eco-friendly architecture, and most importantly, zero people!

The island was rediscovered several years ago by a photographer after being completely forgotten about. Now, tourists from Shanghai regularly pop over to see the abandoned ruins.

What is it about ruins and ghost towns that fascinates us?

You can go stand among ancient ruins, like the Roman town of Gadera, the city where Jesus cast demons out of crazed men and into pigs:

Or you can visit the Easter Island heads off the coast of Chile, built 800 years ago:

Or you can visit Scotland's Hirta Island, where people last lived in 1930:

Then there are ghost towns in the making, like Adak Island off the Alaskan coast, which has only a few residents left after the U.S. military base there closed in the late 1990s.

But if you want a green ghost town that doesn't look haunted like those in the Wild West and doesn't have radiation like Chernobyl, Houtouwan might be your best bet!