Ruinous Riches: Unbelievably Costly Abandoned Constructions

4. Whirlwind Mansion, Clinton, Tennessee

Location: Tennessee's Clinton Time period: 1970s Cost: *$800,000, pending sale price in 2017 This 20,000-square-foot estate in Clinton, Tennessee, was enormously lavish and grandiose during its prime in the 1970s. Jake Butcher, a banker whose primary source of income was fraud, discovered it. With his ill-gotten riches, he constructed the forty-room Whirlwind Mansion, complete with a helipad and swim-up bar.

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Clinton, Tennessee's Whirlwind Mansion, @atlasobscura/Pinterest But there was a cost to this extravagance. Butcher was spending tens of thousands of dollars a month on utilities alone. Because all he did was unlawful, Butcher was unable to pay his debts and had no real riches of his own. He was imprisoned and arrested for fraud in the middle of the 1980s. Whirlwind was abandoned soon after because nobody wanted to pay the ridiculous maintenance fees.