Strange Building Has Mysteriously Appeared at a Beach

You’ve just reached your perfect spot on a deserted beach. It’s so quiet here that you start to doze off. But as you open your eyes, you’re shocked. “Wait a minute... Is that an actual house that has just been washed up on the shore!?”

It may sound like the beginning of a sci-fi novel, but not if you live near this beach in El Salvador. There’s a mysteriously abandoned house there that looks as if it’s just been washed ashore. How did this villa end up there? How long has it been here without anyone noticing it?

This mysterious construction is 46 miles south of El Salvador’s capital, San Salvador. Locals say the building used to be a hotel called Puerto Ventura. At the time it was built, its main attraction was the fact that it was really close to the sea. Unfortunately, the engineering behind it wasn’t well planned out. All because locals didn’t need any official permission to start the construction.

The hotel was too close to the water and dangerously exposed to the elements. The Roman-style villa is now a mere 50 feet from the edge of the sea when the tide is low. It can only be accessed in the morning because later, the tides fill the first floor with saltwater. What’s now left of the hotel looks like the ruins of a two-story house. The front part is very impressive, with Roman-type pillars. It also has wide windows on the second floor.

You can still see parts of the iron structures and remains of what used to be the gateway to the second floor. There are some bleachers at the top of the building — they’re sometimes used by tourists. More and more people are now browsing the area, taking photos — even though the building is obviously not safe for climbing. There’s little information on how long it’s been sitting in its current location. But some locals say it’s been there for at least 20 years. It had remained a local secret for years before it was discovered by a TikTok user in 2021.

But that doesn’t answer the question: how did the hotel end up in another location altogether? This is where things become a little fuzzy: while some locals say that the building was abandoned decades ago, others claim it was deserted after Hurricane Mitch hit this area back in 1998. Hurricane Mitch was one of the most dangerous weather phenomena to ever hit Central America.

During the storm, the winds traveled at 178 mph. And the hurricane itself lasted for about 15 hours! It was also the cause of a huge amount of rainfall, which resulted in floods and many dangerous landslides. Being built so close to the shoreline, the former hotel had little chance of surviving the extreme weather conditions. So, it must have been literally displaced.

After sitting under the sun, you might start dreaming of some snowballs getting washed ashore. You know, to even out the temperature! I’m not kidding — this strange natural phenomenon did happen back in 2016! It resulted in about 11 miles of the coast of the Gulf of the Ob getting covered with huge snowballs. Because of the low temperatures, small pieces of ice started to form in the water.

Afterward, the wind and waves rolled them into giant snowballs. Some of them were the size of a tennis ball, but others were up to 3 feet wide! A 2004 Harley-Davidson Night Train motorcycle popped up ashore on a British Columbia beach back in 2012. It was neatly packed inside a shipping container. It took some time to do it, but the owner was eventually traced down. His name was Ikuo Yokoyama, and he lost his motorcycle after a tsunami struck Japan on March 11, 2011.

To get to its final destination, the Harley-Davidson traveled more than 4,000 miles! To celebrate its long journey, Yokoyama donated the bike to the Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee. It has been on display there ever since — in case you want to visit. This strange phenomenon made it look as if someone spilled dish soap all over the beach!

But it does happen pretty often in Queensland — sea foam covers the shore there a couple of times each year. It mostly happens after a storm, when ocean waves move dissolved organic matter around. It’s basically like a giant ice cream maker. After Cyclone Debbie back in March 2017, some beaches actually needed to be closed because of huge amounts of white foam! The wind even brought some of that foam to the nearby towns, making locals believe it was snowing.

Would you be surprised to see a six-by-six-foot rusty metal die washed ashore on your local beach? Because back in 2017, people in Coeur d’Alene in Idaho sure were! It turned out to be an old storage tank. Someone decided to spice it up a bit by adding some white spots to make it look like a die. In 1992, thousands of rubber duckies got stranded at sea after a large container ship that was transporting them was hit by a wave.

As you can imagine, the ducks started popping up all over the world, in Hawaii, Alaska, South America, Australia, in Europe, and even in the Arctic! It’s estimated that a couple of hundreds of those unlucky rubber ducks are still out there. Interestingly, they turned out to be very useful to scientists. Based on their movements, researchers can monitor the directions of water currents.

If you happen to like dinosaurs, you’ll be happy to know sea waters can also bring ashore some fossils. In 2018, a large dinosaur jawbone ended up on the coast of Lilstock beach in Somerset, England. It used to belong to a dinosaur called Ichthyosaurus.

Thanks to this finding, scientists were able to make an impressive discovery. Before, they thought the Ichthyosaurus could reach a maximum length of about 69 feet. But after they studied the jawbone, they ended up recalculating the creature’s size. They concluded that the Ichthyosaurus could grow up to 85 feet!

The Megalodon was the largest predator in our planet’s history. It lived almost all over the globe, except near the poles. How do we know that? Because Megalodon teeth keep appearing on beaches every now and then. One staggering Megalodon tooth — which was way over 20 inches long — was discovered in a river in Croatia. Since these creatures have been extinct for about 3 million years, their teeth are highly prized by fossil hunters.

A giant Lego man that washed ashore is something I never thought I’d hear about. And it turns out it didn’t happen just once! There were four of these giant Lego men in total, each around 8 feet tall. One was found in England and one in the Netherlands, while the other two popped up in Florida and California.

It was surely not a coincidence, and after some research, people found out that a Dutch artist was behind this. Ego Leonard started this project as a personal statement campaign. A short film was even made about this, and it was called No Real Than You Are. This sentence was written on each of the four Lego men put to sea.

A bundle of over 50 letters was washed ashore in New Jersey on a beach in Atlantic Highlands back in 2012. It happened shortly after hurricane Sandy had struck the area. A 14-year-old boy found the letters and gave them to his mum. She was so touched by them that she decided to carefully dry and return them to their owner.

The letters were the correspondence of two people named Dorothy and Lyn. They were dated between 1942 and 1948. The last was written a week before their wedding. With the help of an online genealogy site, the woman reached Dorothy and returned the letters to the 88-year-old woman who was living in a retirement home.