In China, ghost cities are starting to pervade the landscape like some kind of cancerous growth, void of human presence.

Throughout America, you can find the old cellar holes and cemeteries that mark the location where some colonial village once stood. American forests are filled with such communities of the past. They are usually former farming villages or mining outpost towns that got swept away by the advent of new technologies like trains, or paved roads and the automobile.

There are even places where some of the actual structures still stand, and have become tourist attractions. You’ll find places like Jerome, Arizona with its line of abandoned saloons down Main Street, or Centralia in Pennsylvania where an underground coal fire forced all residents to eventually move away.

However, China ghost cities are different. They are not abandoned towns reflecting ghosts of the past. Instead, they are large abandoned cities reflecting ghosts of times that would never come.

These ghost cities were first covered in great detail in the middle of 2011 when Business Insider published a series of shocking satellite images of the abandoned cities filled with concrete high-rises clustered together, waiting for residents that never came. (4) Michael Christopher, a Time Magazine photographer, went to China and obtained some of the most haunting images of those cities.