Pyramiden cut its last coal on 31 March 1998; the final resident sailed out that October, and nobody ever came back to pull the town down. Sweden founded the settlement in 1910 and sold it to the Soviet Union in 1927, and the state mining trust Arktikugol built it into a showpiece — a model Soviet town for about a thousand people at 78 degrees north, with a swimming pool, greenhouses lit through the polar night, a cultural palace holding the world's northernmost grand piano, and a granite bust of Lenin, the northernmost anywhere, set on the square facing the glacier. Ships even carried soil north so that the square could grow a lawn. When coal prices fell and the Soviet Union came apart, the mine stopped paying for itself, the evacuation ran fast, and the buildings were left standing with the furniture inside them.
Getting here still means crossing Billefjorden: a long day by boat from Longyearbyen between May and October, or by snowmobile over the sea ice in spring. You walk in a group behind an armed guide, because polar bears do come through the streets. What surprises most people is the noise. The family block that miners nicknamed the Crazy House, after the children who tore up and down its corridors, is now a seabird cliff — hundreds of kittiwakes nest on its window ledges each summer and scream over the empty square. Curtains still hang in dormitory windows, the apartment blocks stand in Soviet rows, and behind them the Nordenskiöld Glacier calves into the fjord. Pyramiden is no longer quite a ghost, either: the Tulpan hotel reopened in 2013, a handful of caretakers hold the town through the season, and you can drink a beer under Lenin's gaze before the boat leaves.