Chilling Photo of a Hyena Prowling in a Ghost Town Wins ‘Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2025’

For years, photographer Wim Van den Heever (@wim_van_den_heever) noticed brown hyena tracks and droppings embossed into the sands of the South African “ghost town,” Kolmanskop. Over time, it became one of the greatest dreams on his bucket list to capture these majestic desert predators as they patrolled the sand-filled streets of this town. One night, his dream materialized. When a hyena patrolled the outdoor stretch of a dilapidated building, the camera trap Heever had set captured it in an image. Little did he know that his dream image would land as the top contender in the 2025 Wildlife Photographer of the Year award, organized by the Natural History Museum (NHM).

“It took me 10 years to finally get this one single image of a brown hyena, in the most perfect frame imaginable,” he said in an interview with NHM. The image, also shared by NHM on Instagram, reveals a sinister night sky illuminated only by the yellow lights glowing inside the tumbledown structure. Prowling in front of the ramshackle brick-and-wood house is a brown hyena standing with a fierce gaze on the rubbly ground. Behind the predator, a cloud of mist hangs in the air, enshrouding the fallen bricks and stones piled up in front of the building, per NamibiaCam.

The photograph, as sensational as petrifying, is a perfect portrayal of the town's core vibration. Namibia, one of the driest places on Earth, wasn’t always what it is today. Today, it is just a mirage of what it was, draped in thick sand, the ghost of a land built on the graves of purloined diamonds. In the early 1900s, it was squatted under the control of German leaders, according to National Geographic. One day in 1908, a railway worker was ambling through the town just when he spotted something glittering vividly in the sand, and he knelt to pick it up. It turned out to be a diamond. Ever since then, the town became a magnet for miners and gem-seekers. The town suddenly came alive. Luxurious German-style buildings and tree-lined villas punctuated the grounds.

About 6 miles from the town of Lüderitz, a hospital loomed with the first X-ray machine in the southern hemisphere. A power station popped into the picture, to be accompanied soon enough by an ice factory, a butcher, a bakery, a bowling alley, and a theatre that screened the latest European films. However, as years passed, the town lost its seductive appeal. People discovered a bigger mine of diamonds somewhere further south near the Orange River. Companies packed up, employees resigned, and the town was abandoned.

Time went by. The diamond fever cooled down and was replaced by the crumbling houses, half-buried in sand. Abandoned and enshrouded in silence, the town became completely swallowed up and reclaimed by sand. The photo by van den Heever is one of the 60,636 entries that were submitted for the award. Titled “Ghost Town Visitor,” the photograph depicts a brown hyena, also known as a strandwolves, an elusive predators that hunt through the night for Cape fur seals washing ashore along the Namib Desert coast. The photograph also grabbed the top place in the Urban Wildlife category, according to Live Science.