Old Abandoned Montana School Hides Creepy Warnings

WARNING: Under no circumstances should you enter this property. By doing so you risk bodily harm and/or prosecution for trespassing on private property.

Eastern Montana is home to plenty of crumbling ruins.

Countless abandoned communities and homesteads are dotted across the treeless plains, coulees, and rolling hills of eastern Montana. Montana is a challenging place to live in modern times and you can imagine the struggles that homesteaders and fortune-seekers faced in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Read More: An Abandoned Hotel in Circle, Montana Gives Us the Chills

One such place is the ghost town of Vananda, MT.

Located in Rosebud County, approximately 20 miles northwest of Forsyth on Hwy 12, the town popped up with the arrival of the Milwaukee Railroad in 1907.

Montana's Historic Landscapes recounts that in 1984, locals began efforts to preserve some of the former railroad town's buildings, registering downtown Vananda on the National Register of Historic Places in the 90s.

Boom and bust on the Montana plains.

I couldn't easily locate census data on how big the town ever grew, but it reportedly had big dreams. There was a lovely brick bank, a large two-story brick schoolhouse that could have easily accommodated 100 kids, and we can assume it had dozens of houses and other businesses a century ago.

The former bank was relocated to downtown Forsyth, and now Vandanda is little more than the old schoolhouse, a few decrepit houses, and a smattering of other small structures.

YouTube explorer ReAnne Michelle poked around on what's left of Vananda, checking out the various buildings that remain at the old townsite. For this article, we're focused on the schoolhouse, which was surely the grandest structure in town during Vananda's heyday.

At some point in the last few decades, the old schoolhouse property was reportedly owned by an individual who worked in the oil well equipment reclamation business, tearing apart old gas and oil tanks from Montana's first oil boom in the 20s and 30s.

Remnants of truck parts, machinery, and equipment litter a portion of the 1st floor of the two-story schoolhouse.

Rotting floors make this property particularly dangerous to trespassers.

Vananda, MT is one of many railroad towns that popped up along the tracks in eastern Montana and died relatively quickly. Vanando's demise is largely credited with poor soil and no water, disappointing homesteaders lured to the area under the premise of low-cost land and opportunity.

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The final nails in Vandanda's coffin were the Great Depression and the demise of the railroad line through town. The rest is... history.