Field in Virginia with battered busts of US presidents

In 2004, a presidential park opened in the US state of Virginia. It is a very strange sight: 43 busts of US presidents rise in the open. It was supposed that the statues almost six meters high would teach schoolchildren the history and art of sculpture, while residents from neighboring states would come to see the park. However, these giants did not particularly impress the Americans, and someone even called the idea bad taste. As a result, in 2010, due to the lack of visitors, the park was closed.

Three years, the busts stood in splendid isolation. They should have been destroyed, but the owner Howard Hankins did not dare to do it. Instead, he bought the statues and moved them to his private territory. And for several years now, 43 US presidents have been towering in the nameless field of Virginia. Paint gradually peels off from them, someone has lost a nape, others - a nose. Surprisingly, interest has awakened to them now, and residents of neighboring states come to look at them.

Of course, stalking, popular in recent years, is to blame. This is what industrial tourism was called in abandoned places. Hankins even began working with local photographer John Plashal, who specializes in Abandoned Virginia: he conducts excursions in an old abandoned prison, in an old school and other creepy places in the state. Plyashal said that the night tour “over the heads of the presidents” became the most popular destination. And this is not surprising, because in the light of the moon these giant six-meter busts look very different.