Design by Lauren DeLuca for Yahoo Travel.) Nothing is quite as ominous and foreboding as a huge abandoned building, one with burnt, crumbling walls pockmarked with shattered window panes seeming to glare down as if from the blackened eye holes of a skull. Abandoned hotels seem to possess a special malignant aura, as if the souls of long-dead guests from the past lurk in the rubble, angry that their formerly happy retreat has been forsaken. The world is dotted with such ruins, some caused by war, some by natural disaster, others just by bad business or neglect. Not strictly a hotel but rather a guest house for visiting farm managers, the Liebig House was owned by a large farming company and was sold multiple times before being abandoned sometime in the 1950s. Photo: Bill Fink When I stopped there one Sunday morning, I walked through the once-majestic but now collapsing interior stained with decades of graffiti and rot.