Celestia in Laporte Township, Pennsylvania

In the mid-eighteen-hundreds, Peter E. Armstrong founded Celestia, a mountaintop community in Pennsylvania envisioned as a 'City of Heaven' for millennialists awaiting Christ's return. Per Atlas Obscura, Armstrong and his followers built a sacred refuge, expecting to live apart from the world in preparation for biblical prophecy. But the settlement became famous for an unusual legal decision: in eighteen sixty-four, Armstrong deeded the land directly to Almighty God and 'His heirs in Jesus Messiah.' When the divine proprietor failed to pay property taxes, Sullivan County seized and sold the land. The community unraveled, and by the time Armstrong died in eighteen eighty-seven, Celestia had been largely abandoned. Today, little remains but forest, old foundations, and a historical marker—not a ghost town but a ghost idea, the fading footprint of a utopian experiment in the Pennsylvania Wilds.

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