▲A doll hangs in front of an unoccupied house in Constitución city after one of the strongest earthquakes on record and a tsunami killed hundreds. The disasters left destroyed cities and villages along the country's south-central coastline.

▲A doll lies in the charred rubble of a home in the Rancho Santa Fe area of San Diego following the towering wildfires that ravaged through Southern California, forcing more than 500,000 people to flee.

▲Charred dolls hang from a wall in an orphanage in Sarajevo where five babies died and 17 babies and a nurse were injured in a fire.

▲A doll lies in the backyard of a mobile home in Hudson Oaks, Texas, where three children and their mother were found hanged. An 8-month-old baby was also found hanging but survived.

▲An abandoned doll lies on a rail track in Tovarnik, along which migrants, mostly Syrian, were traveling after trekking northwards through the Balkans from Greece.

▲Charred cradles, baby beds, teddy bears, and dolls could be seen scattered around the three gutted rooms.

▲Firefighters rescued 23 children from the three rooms that were worst affected by the fire.

▲One of the babies was dead when first responders arrived, and the other four died shortly after.

▲At the time, around 29,000 people were passing through Croatia en route to wealthier countries in the west and north of the European Union.

▲A doll belonging to a stranded Iranian migrant hangs from barbed wire in front of Macedonian police at the Greek-Macedonian border near the Greek village of Idomeni.

▲The stranded migrants were protesting against what they say was the closure of the border for Iranian migrants.

▲A doll is seen on a fence near an illegal dump on Slieve-na-Aura mountain, near the village of Cargan, where heavy snow resulted in the closure of schools across the country.

▲This doll was left behind by a young Central American migrant on the fence at the El Chaparral port of entry border crossing between Mexico and the US. She is part of a caravan of thousands who are trying to enter the US.

▲A teddy bear is seen on razor wire at the border crossing with the Hungarian town of Roszke, in Horgos.

▲A doll belonging to a Central American migrant, part of a caravan trying to reach the US, is pictured along the highway to Arriaga from Pijijiapan.

▲The historic Prosfygika complex in Athens, built in the 1930s to house Greeks fleeing Turkey, has become active once again as Greece's economic slump has increased the number of homeless.

▲Women sit among dolls meant to be donated to low-income families on the morning of January 6 during the Christian holiday of the Epiphany. In Spain, children believe that the Three Wise Men deliver their Christmas presents.

▲A doll hangs from a wall of a damaged bedroom filled with debris in the besieged area of Homs.

▲Christmas ornaments and other toys are seen among the remains of homes destroyed as a consequence of Hurricane Sandy in the Breezy Point area of New York's borough of Queens.

▲A doll sits amid the ruins of homes damaged in the deadly tornadoes that hit Tuscaloosa on April 27.

▲Debris and other items retrieved by firemen are seen among ruins in Rikuzentakata, Iwate Prefecture, after the area was ravaged by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami.

▲A toy doll hangs from the US-Mexico border fence in Naco, Arizona.

▲Peace activists hung a doll with two heads on a fence of the Kleine Brogel military base to protest against nuclear weapons.

▲This image and the ones that follow were taken by photographer Gleb Garanich in the town of Pripyat, which has been abandoned since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

▲Many of the dolls have been moved by visitors to the area.

▲Buildings are littered with discarded gas masks, as Soviet propaganda continues to hang on the walls, and children's dolls are scattered about.

▲Visitors have been placing the dolls on the derelict bed frames, potentially as a tribute to the children.

▲Its schools and hospitals appear untouched since the town was hurriedly evacuated in April 1986.

▲Though visitors are warned not to touch anything within the nuclear exclusion zone, many disregard it.

▲In addition, it is likely that visitors even bring their own dolls, as some of them look too new to have been lying around for more than three decades.

▲Visitors don't just bring items. Many portable items have been smuggled out by illegal trophy-hunters and scrap-dealers alike, even though it is illegal to remove anything from the radioactive zone.

▲The area sees as many as 10,000 visitors each year.

▲Visiting the zone for short periods of time is considered safe, as the radiation released in 1986 has since decayed.

▲The exclusion zone lies inside a 2,600 sq km (1004 sq mile) area.

▲Radiation levels present in sites visited on these tours range from 15 to several hundred micro-roentgens per hour.

▲A person would have to be exposed to between 300 to 500 roentgens an hour for radiation to be deadly.

▲Ukrainian officials say that Pripyat will not be inhabitable for another 20,000 years.

▲The nuclear accident killed two people immediately as a result of the explosion.

▲The town was equipped with 15 primary schools, five secondary schools, and a technical college.

▲Located just a few kilometers from Chernobyl, Pripyat was built in the 1970s to house the nuclear plant's workers and their families.

▲Pripyat also had a hospital, two sports stadiums, and an amusement park.

▲Over the next few days, 28 firemen and employees died as a result of acute radiation sickness.

▲Another 15 cases of fatal child thyroid cancer were confirmed to be linked to the nuclear accident.

▲However, the long-term effect of the radiation is harder to quantify. It is still unclear how many fatalities the disaster caused.

▲An abandoned teddy bear lies on the ground near the Croatian border, close to the village of Berkasovo.

▲A doll lies in a shop window a day after a fire broke out in a store in the Andalusian capital of Seville.

▲A doll's head lies in sewage running through a formerly deserted building, which eventually became a home to dozens of families in Rio de Janeiro.

▲Personal items lie abandoned in the mud on December 31 in Paraliya following the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami that killed nearly 228,000 people.

▲A child's dolls lies in a trunk, left behind when the inhabitants slowly left Portsmouth Island, located off the coast of North Carolina. The island now sits abandoned.

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As a miniature model of a human being, dolls have historically taken on a number of different uses and have frequently been used in symbolism. They have also been used in magic and religious rituals tracing back to ancient civilizations, including Egypt, Greece, and Rome. With no defined line between spiritual dolls and toys, they have made their way into local lore, where there is no shortage of legends of possessed dolls.

But dolls are also often left behind as a result of abandonment, tragedy, or merely as a result of the passage of time. Browse the gallery and check out these haunting photos of abandoned or otherwise lost dolls.

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