A street corner in the ghost town of Bodie, California.

A ghost town is a town that has been abandoned, usually because the economic activity that supported it has failed or because of natural or human-caused disasters.

Ghost towns are almost stereotypically common in mining areas: Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, Montana, and California in the western United States, though they can be observed as far south as Louisiana and Georgia. They are also seen in Northern Ontario and British Columbia in Canada, as well as in parts of Australia. Old mining camps that have lost most of their population at some stage of their history, such as Central City, Colorado; Aspen, Colorado; Virginia City, Montana; Tombstone, Arizona or Cripple Creek, Colorado are sometimes included in the category, although they are active towns and cities today.

Other factors leading to abandonment of towns include natural resources such as water no longer being available, railroads and highways bypassing or no longer accessing the town, shifting economic activity elsewhere, human intervention such as highway and river rerouting (see Aral Sea), and nuclear disasters (see Chernobyl). Chance significant fatality from epidemics has also produced ghost towns; for example, some places in eastern Arkansas were abandoned after near-total morbidity during the Spanish Flu pandemic.

The town of Kalapana, Hawaii was turned into a ghost town due to a lava flow in 1990.

Prypyat, Ukraine was abandoned after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. It has been a virtually untouched area since then, and as such is a large time capsule of the late Soviet era.

Jonestown in Guyana became a ghost town following the mass suicide of the People's Temple community that lived there.

Ghost towns may also be created when land is expropriated by a government and everyone living there is told to leave, such as when NASA needed a rocket propulsion testing center and built the John C. Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, which required a very large (approx. 500 square kilometers) surrounding buffer zone because of the loud noise and potential dangers associated with testing huge rockets. This created mysterious abandoned communities and roads overgrown in the middle of the forest. There are also underwater ghost towns brought about by the building of dams.

Some ghost towns are tourist attractions, especially those that preserve interesting architecture. Visiting, writing about, and photographing them is a minor industry. Other ghost towns may be overgrown, difficult to access, or illegal to visit.

A few ghost towns even manage a second life, often due to the tourism surrounding ghost towns of historic note propogating an economy able to support residents. Walhalla, Australia, for example, was a town deserted after its gold mine ceased operation. Owing in part to its relative accessability and partly to proximity to other attractive locations, Walhalla has had a recent surge in economy and population.

A recent attempt to declare an "Official Ghost Town" in California collapsed when the adherents of the town of Calico, in Southern California, and those of Bodie, in Northern California, could not come to an agreement as to which of their favorites was more deserving.

Abandoned bank building in Rhyolite, Nevada

See also: List of ghost towns

Additional reading

• Stampede to Timberline, Colorado's Ghost Towns and Mining Camps by Muriel Sibell Wolle, Revised and Enlarged Edition, Paperback, Swallow Press, 1991, ISBN 0-8040-0946-5
• Timberline Tailings, Tales of Colorado's Ghost Towns and Mining Camps, Muriel Sibell Wolle, Sage Books, Swallow Press, 1993, Paperback, ISBN 0-8040-0946-5; older hardback editions are available as used books.

The author was a professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado and began visiting old mining camps in the Boulder area in the 1920s and 1930s and eventually visited most of the ghost towns in Colorado, sketching them. The second book Tailings is mostly letters and other information elicted by the first book.

Ghost town was a hit in the British charts in the 1980s for Ska group The Specials