Maryland’s derelict sites split cleanly into two groups: a handful you can legally walk up to, and a handful that are fenced, patrolled and prosecuted. Knowing which is which saves a wasted drive.
Places worth knowing about
Mallows Bay is the one everybody wants and it is completely legal. The wooden steamship wrecks sit in Mallows Bay-Potomac River National Marine Sanctuary, designated in July 2019 and co-managed by NOAA and the state. The shoreline is a free Charles County park with a kayak launch, and Charles County accepted a NOAA grant in July 2025 to build a visitor center. Disturbing or removing wreck timber is prohibited under sanctuary rules.
Glenn Dale Hospital is the big one that is genuinely abandoned: 23 buildings put up between 1933 and 1960, empty since 1982, owned by the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission. It is fenced, Park Police patrol it, and as of February 2026 the county was soliciting a new developer after terminating the last one. The county is also pursuing an EPA cleanup grant, which tells you what is in the buildings.
Springfield State Hospital is not abandoned at all. It is an operating Maryland Department of Health psychiatric hospital. The derelict part is the former women’s campus, the Warfield complex, which the town of Sykesville is redeveloping. 145 townhomes were finished there in 2023, and several historic buildings are still empty while litigation over the restoration grinds on.
Two well known sites no longer exist. Uplands Mansion in west Baltimore, a 42-room house from about 1850, burned in a three-alarm fire on 30 October 2023. Holland Island in Dorchester County lost its last building, an 1888 house, in October 2010, and the island itself is now marsh and open water.
Access, site by site
Mallows Bay Park is free and open with no trespass issue. The Maryland Mine ruins sit inside Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park: the three-mile Gold Mine Loop from the Great Falls Tavern visitor center is public, but the National Park Service has fenced the stonework and sealed the shafts, so you look and do not climb. Glenn Dale and Springfield’s vacant buildings are both closed with enforcement, and Holland Island needs a boat across open Chesapeake Bay to reach a place with nothing left standing on it.
On conditions: the institutional sites here are pre-1960 construction with asbestos and lead paint, and Glenn Dale in particular has documented contamination and buildings that have been leaking since 1982.
Full state list with check dates: abandoned places in Maryland.