Images Showing Abandoned KFC Bucket-shaped Restaurant
In February 2026, a post to Facebook shared several images of an abandoned KFC restaurant designed in the shape and appearance of one of its signature chicken buckets. The images’ caption merely read, “An abandoned bucket-shaped fast food restaurant. Would you visit it?”
The claim: Images shared online in February 2026 authentically showed a bucket-shaped KFC restaurant in Dayton, Ohio, that was closed and abandoned years ago.
The same Facebook page also posted a video allegedly exploring the restaurant with clips shot from the same places the images were taken. According to the description of the video, the “abandoned bucket-shaped restaurant outside Dayton, Ohio, closed in 2021” and was “never cleaned out.”
Other Facebook pages and X accounts that shared the images also claimed the restaurant was in Dayton and closed in 2021.
In short, the images and video of the bucket KFC were generated with artificial intelligence tools and the story about the restaurant was fictional. Therefore, we have rated the claim as fake.
Google leaves invisible watermarks in images and videos generated with its AI tools. These watermarks can be detected by Google’s SynthID AI tool. When we checked one of the images in the post with the tool, the check found that “most or all of this image was edited or generated with Google AI.”
The original post’s edit history revealed the post once had a disclaimer about the images’ AI origins. They were posted on Feb. 13, 2026, with the description, “An abandoned bucket-shaped fast food restaurant hidden outside Dayton, Ohio. Closed in 2021 after financial collapse, the entire building was left untouched — from the dining area to the basement storage rooms. A forgotten piece of fast-food history frozen in time.”
Later that day the page edited the post to remove the em dash and add a disclaimer that said, “This is an AI-generated fictional abandoned location and a fictional story.” We archived this version of the post. The same disclaimer also appeared at the end of the video’s description. However, the page removed the detailed description and the AI disclaimer from the images in favor of the “would you visit it?” description about an hour later.
Apparently, the page, appeared to post mostly AI-generated content consisting of fictional abandoned places. Many of these images had the same AI disclaimers that were removed from the KFC bucket restaurant post, including those attached to a post depicting another abandoned KFC and to a video of a Kmart that the page similarly claimed was closed in 2021 for financial reasons and left untouched since.
The images of the bucket KFC themselves included several major clues confirming they were AI-generated. For example, two images included a poster to the left of the counter that was filled with gibberish, which has long been a common type of mistake made by AI when generating content.
In the image of the hidden storage basement, the lights were on, suggesting the building still had power even though the location was supposed to have been abandoned for five years. Many of the boxes in the image lacked dust or cobwebs even though cobwebs remained on the ceiling and the boxes had five years to build up dust.
Finally, the windows as they appeared from inside the restaurant didn’t match the size and shape of the same windows as seen from outside, though they should have been identical.
