An Appalachian dream that conjured the spirit of the old west, left to rot on a North Carolina mountainside; in the ex-Soviet republic of Georgia are the remains of an ingenious sky-high solution to a ground-based problem, Chiatura, once known as the Venice of the air; Guernsey Hospital was a vast complex built when a slice of Britain lived under the Nazi yoke; and Houtouwan , a Chinese island of simple means, caught up in a brutal revolution that ushered in a tragic period of mass incarceration and murder.