Most Ghost Towns Never Had Ghosts

The word does a lot of unearned work. A ghost town is not a haunted one — it is an abandoned one, and the causes of abandonment are almost always dull, economic, and worth knowing.

There are more than twenty in this index. Here is how they actually ended.

The ore ran out

The commonest cause by a distance.

Rhyolite appeared in the Bullfrog gold rush of the early 1900s, grew fast enough to have a bank and a stock exchange, and emptied within a decade when the ore disappointed and the money left. Garnet, in Montana, reached about a thousand people in the 1890s and dwindled the same way. Logan City, in Nevada, lasted four years.

None of these towns did anything wrong. They were built on top of a finite thing and the thing finished.

The ore was never there

Leadfield is the honest version of the same story, and the best of them.

The boom lasted under a year, in 1926 and 1927. It was driven by aggressive promotion rather than geology — investors and miners pulled into Titus Canyon on the strength of claims about ore that was not there. When that became obvious, the town emptied almost immediately.

What is left is a few shacks on a one-way road through Death Valley, and a lesson about how quickly people will move somewhere on the strength of a prospectus.

The railroad went somewhere else

Cotton Gin, in Texas, was a real working settlement before 1848 — churches, a school, a newspaper, stores. It had been built around a mule-powered cotton gin and it worked until the railroad was laid a few miles away in the 1870s. Then the businesses went to where the track was, and the town did not.

There is a historical marker there now, explaining a place that is no longer present.

The river kept coming back

Pahreah, in Utah, was settled by Mormon pioneers in 1865 and given up after repeated flooding of the Paria River. Not one catastrophe — repetition. People rebuilt, and then eventually did not.

A cellar and a chimney remain, five miles down a dirt road.

Why they are worth the drive

Because a ghost town is a place where you can see an economy that stopped.

Most of what we build is continuously renovated over the top of itself, so the older version is invisible. These are the exceptions: towns that were left, rather than replaced, and are therefore legible.

That is a better reason to go than atmosphere, and it survives the disappointment of arriving to find that there is nothing there but foundations — which, at most of these, is exactly what you will find.

Going to them

Almost all are remote, on unpaved roads, with no water and no signal.

Several are privately owned — Cerro Gordo and Ballarat among them — and being abandoned does not make a place public. Check before you go, take more water than you need, and do not enter old mine workings under any circumstances.