AKRON, Ohio -- Rolling Acres Mall has transformed into a snowy winter wonderland this year, but not by deed of any marketing ploy.

Johnny Joo, a "24-year-old photojournalist from Akron" who operates an online photo gallery called Architectural Afterlife, posted these pictures to his artist's Facebook page Friday showing a snow-encrusted atrium at the vacant 1.3 million-square-foot mall.

"As most of the glass ceiling has given away, we are left with the very strange scene of winter wonderland staged by nature in the middle of destruction," Joo wrote. "Nature paints a soft and beautiful world into the last place you would expect to see it."

Joo's pictures were shared hundreds of times on Facebook. The Mentor-area resident said he started photographing abandoned homes and buildings when he was 16 and, like many people, couldn't look away.

"It's that something has been left behind. It's something you see every day but after while you come back and it looks post-apocalyptic," he said. "You just put stories together and try to figure out what happened to those people when they just seemingly disappeared."

The future of Rolling Acres Mall, vacant since 2008, remains uncertain after its

which pulled the complex from a scheduled sheriff's sale.

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