Picture a place where Stepford wives meet their eerie Tim Burton-inspired neighbors and you just might find yourself in none other than Ireland. Despite being more commonly known for lush rolling hills and beautiful scenery, the country is also home to thousands of unoccupied houses. And unlike most of the haunted buildings that have made their way into the category known as “abandoned places porn,” these ghostly structures, which bear now-ironic names like “Paradise Valley,” were actually never occupied — they were simply left unfinished when the luck of the Irish dissipated and the housing bubble burst in 2008.
Unfortunately for the Emerald Isle, the uplifting monikers as well as the perfect preservation of the uninhabited properties just simply cannot detract from their creepiness, which can be seen in Valérie Anex’s book “Ghost Estates.”
And while the number of ghost estates has dramatically decreased in Ireland since 2010, the pictures below help prove that the mission of Anex’s project — to depict how consumer fetishism led to the collapse of an economic system — remains untainted.