Industrial ruins, abandoned places and landscapes of urban decay have to an increasing extent come to surface in popular representations of towns and cities. Not only filmmakers and photographers explore and utilize the ghostly ambience of these leftover spaces. Their images are also circulated through online media platforms enacted by such groups as urban explorers, ruin tourists and heritage tourists. Together, these “cultures of circulation” weave an increasingly complex imaginary texture of the recent past, where dominant and alternative representations of the city may collide, intersect and/or coalesce, and where different registers of imagination and emotion are being evoked. In this talk I explore the cultural tensions between the rough, but no less phantasmagorical, materiality of decaying urban areas and ephemeral cultures of online circulation. Taking the example of urban exploration, I discuss how the expanding logic of “spreadability” brings previously hidden places into new light, in some cases contributing to the sacralisation of new (unexpected) tourist sites and ultimately influencing the symbolic construction of entire towns and cities. I also show how the attitude to spreadability implicates different positions within this socio-cultural field.