Urban exploration videos usually trade in dust, graffiti and nostalgia. When one explorer trained his camera on a stagnant pond inside a forgotten zoo, the footage delivered something closer to nightmare fuel, exposing how easily captive animals can slip from tourist attraction to haunting afterthought. The scene in that murky water, and the global stories it echoes, reveal a deeper truth about what happens when the gates of a zoo or aquarium swing shut for the last time.
I want to trace how that single pond connects to a wider pattern, from a shuttered zoo in Thailand to abandoned tanks in Argentina and a preserved great white shark that became an internet horror icon. Together, these places show how closures, often triggered by crises far beyond the animals’ control, can leave behind both ethical questions and eerie relics that refuse to disappear.
The explorer, the pond and a shuttered Thai zoo
The viral clip that set social feeds buzzing begins with a simple act: a man tossing something into a dark, scummy pond and waiting to see if anything moves. The explorer is identified as Sean King, who was walking through the overgrown grounds of Thailand’s now-defunct Phuket Zoo when he stumbled on the water feature that would make his video infamous. According to reporting on his trip, Sean King was exploring the abandoned enclosures of Phuket Zoo when he decided to test whether anything still lurked beneath the surface.
Phuket Zoo itself is a character in this story. Once a busy tourist stop on the island, it closed in 2020 after visitor numbers collapsed during the global spread of COVID, a shutdown that official records attribute directly to the impact of the COVID pandemic on travel. What Sean King walked through was the aftermath of that collapse, a place where concrete pools and cages had been left to crack and fill with algae. The pond he filmed, ringed by crumbling edges and choked with green water, became a symbol of how quickly a commercial attraction can decay once the ticket booths close and the caretakers leave.
What the “nightmare fuel” really shows
In the clip, the moment of horror arrives when the water suddenly comes alive, revealing that the pond is not empty at all. Viewers see something large and very much alive respond to the disturbance, a jolt that turns a quiet ruin into a living, if unsettling, habitat. The shock on Sean King’s face, as described in coverage of his visit, comes from realizing that an animal has been surviving in this forgotten corner of Thailand long after the crowds disappeared.
What makes the footage feel like nightmare fuel is not only the creature itself but the context. The pond is part of a facility that, according to official descriptions, once marketed close-up encounters with exotic animals before the closure. Seeing a lone survivor in a derelict pond forces viewers to confront the uncomfortable question of what happens to animals when a business model fails. The video’s power lies in that collision between entertainment and abandonment, a collision that repeats in other corners of the world where zoos and aquariums have gone dark.
From Phuket to Belle Isle and Mar del Plata, a global pattern
The story of Phuket Zoo is not unique. On Detroit’s Belle Isle, a once-iconic zoo that opened in 1895 was eventually closed in 2002 under the administration of Kwame Kilpatrick, who was then Mayor of Detroit, leaving behind a cluster of empty cages and crumbling infrastructure. Local accounts note that the site, which had been a civic landmark for more than a century, ended up being used for a zoo fight scene before plans emerged to bring in the wrecking ball, a fate documented in posts about the Belle Isle attraction’s demise. The animals there were not left in ponds, but the physical shell of the zoo lingered for years as a reminder of how quickly public priorities can shift.
In Argentina, the stakes have been even more immediate for living creatures. At the former Aquarium of Mar del Plata, dolphins and sea lions were left in limbo after the facility shut its doors, with Animal welfare organizations warning that promised transfers to sanctuaries had not been fully carried out. Campaigners described how, despite official assurances, the relocation plan was only partially honored and that dolphins and sea lions remained on the premises, prompting protests and signature drives that demanded a better outcome for the abandoned animals. The contrast between these ongoing struggles and the eerie quiet of Phuket’s pond underscores how closures can produce both visible ruins and hidden suffering.
Rosie the Shark and the strange afterlife of captive animals
Few abandoned exhibits have captured the internet’s imagination like Rosie the Shark, a 5 meter great white that became a viral specter after urban explorers broke into Wildlife Wonderland in Australia. When they entered the defunct wildlife park in 2018, they found Rosie the Shark floating Whole and slowly rotting in a cloudy tank, a scene that later featured in a video titled Abandoned Shark Found. The image of her dorsal fin extending ominously above the waterline turned Rosie into a symbol of how spectacle can outlive the institutions that created it.
Rosie’s story did not end in that decaying tank. She was eventually moved to a new home at Crystal World Exhibition Centre, where staff worked to stabilize her preservation and explain to visitors why her tank has not been refilled. In an interview shared by the centre, owner Tom Kapitany described how Rosie the Shark is now displayed as a preserved specimen, with efforts focused on maintaining her skin and preventing further decay, and noted that Rosie the Shark is free to view seven days a week from 12 pm to 5 pm at the Crystal World site. Her journey from abandoned attraction to curated exhibit shows one path for dealing with the physical legacy of captive wildlife, even if the unsettling images that first made her famous still circulate widely.
The haunting aesthetics of abandonment
Part of what draws explorers like Sean King to places such as Phuket Zoo is the atmosphere, a mix of silence and decay that feels cinematic even before anything moves. Online, viewers can virtually walk through the overgrown paths and derelict structures of the Thai site using tools that compile user imagery into a navigable map, turning the closed facility into a kind of digital ghost zoo accessible through place viewers. The same aesthetic has surrounded Rosie’s story, where videos of her tank are often set to tracks like Spooky, Quiet, Scary Atmosphere Piano by Bucyrus Audio, leaning into the horror-movie mood that first drew attention to her plight and to the efforts to keep her skin hydrated in preservation clips shared with the tag Spooky.
As a viewer, I find that aesthetic both compelling and troubling. The same framing that makes a forgotten pond or a preserved shark feel like a horror set piece can distract from the real animals and decisions behind the images. When I watch Sean King’s footage from Phuket Zoo, or revisit the early clips of Rosie drifting in her tank, I see not just nightmare imagery but the residue of choices about profit, care and responsibility. The nightmare truth in that forgotten pond is that once the crowds leave, the animals and their enclosures do not simply vanish. They linger, in waterlogged pits, in empty show pools and in preserved glass tanks, forcing us to decide whether we will look away or confront what we have built and then abandoned.
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