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 such as
war. The word is sometimes used in a deprecative sense to include areas where the current population is significantly less than it once was. It may be a partial ghost town such as
Tonopah, Nevada or a neighborhood where people no longer live (like
Love Canal). A tourist ghost town has significant economic activity from tourism, such as
Oatman, Arizona, or numerous sites in Egypt, but cannot sustain itself except by tourism. A true ghost town is totally abandoned, such as
Bodie, California, but often will see visitors. A ghost town may be a site where little or nothing remains above the soil surface, e.g.
Babylon. Often a ghost town will still have significant art and architecture, e.g.
Vijayanagara in
India or
Changan in China. Most large countries and regions contain locations that can be considered ghost towns.
Some ghost towns are
tourist attractions, such as
Kolmanskop and
Elizabeth Bay, outside
Lüderitz,
Namibia. This is especially true of those that preserve interesting architecture. Visiting, writing about, and photographing them is a minor industry. Other ghost towns may be overgrown, difficult to access, dangerous or illegal to visit.
Factors creating ghost towns
As with many gold rush towns, the once thriving community of
Cassilis is now abandoned
Factors leading to abandonment of towns include depleted natural resources (as was the case of
Smeerenburg and
Grytviken), or natural resources such as water no longer being available,
railways and
motorways bypassing or no longer accessing the town (as was the case in many of the ghost towns along Ontario's historic
Opeongo Line), shifting economic activity elsewhere, human intervention such as highway rerouting (as was the case with many towns located along U.S.
route 66, when motorists bypassed the towns on the faster moving
I-44 and
I-40), river rerouting (the
Aral Sea being one example of this), and nuclear disasters such as
Chernobyl. Significant fatality rates from
epidemics have also produced ghost towns; for example, some places in eastern
Arkansas were abandoned after near-total mortality (over 7,000 Arkansans died
[1] during the
Spanish Flu epidemic of
1918 and
1919). The Middle East has many ghost towns, created when the shifting of politics or fall of empires caused capital cities to be socially or economically unviable, e.g.,
Ctesiphon.
Natural disasters can also create ghost towns. After being flooded over 30 times since their town was founded in 1845, residents of
Pattonsburg, Missouri had enough after two floods in 1993. With government help, the whole town was rebuilt three miles away, now known as New Pattonsburg, leaving the old Pattonsburg behind as a ghost town.
Accidental land contamination can also create a ghost town. This is what happened to
Times Beach, a suburb of
St. Louis.
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 (approximately 34 square miles) surrounding
buffer zone because of the loud noise and potential dangers associated with testing huge rockets. This created abandoned communities and roads overgrown in the middle of the forest. There are also underwater ghost towns brought about by the building of
dams. A good example of this would be the settlement of
Loyston, Tennessee, which was inundated by the creation of
Norris Lake. The settlement was reorganized and continues to exist today on nearby higher ground.
Centralia in
Pennsylvania was abandoned due to a dangerous underground coal fire, but since some residents chose to stay despite the dangers, it cannot be classified as a true ghost town.
Revived ghost towns
A few ghost towns even manage a second life, often due to the tourism surrounding ghost towns of historic note propagating 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 accessibility and partly to proximity to other attractive locations, Walhalla has had a recent surge in economy and population.
The second largest city of Egypt,
Alexandria was a flourishing city in the Ancient era, but declined during the Middle Ages, qualifying as a ghost town in the 19th century with only 150 inhabitants. Only the Modern period has seen its growth into a city of 3.5 to 5 million inhabitants.
Ghost towns around the world
Americas
Argentina
Most European immigrants to
Argentina settled in the cities, which offered jobs, education, and other opportunities that enabled newcomers to enter the middle class. Many also settled in the growing small towns along the expanding railway system. Since the 1930s, many rural workers have moved to the big cities.
The
1990s saw many rural towns become ghost towns when train services ceased and local products manufactured on a small scale were replaced by massive amounts of cheap imported goods. Some ghost towns near cities offer touristic attractions, especially during weekends.
Canada
Ghost towns are seen in
Northern Ontario,
Central Ontario,
British Columbia,
Saskatchewan,
Newfoundland and Labrador (see
outport) and in
Quebec. Some of these were logging towns or dual mining and logging sites, often
developed at the behest of the company. In British Columbia, they were predominantly mining towns and prospecting camps as well as canneries and, in one or two cases, large smelter and pulp mill towns.
British Columbia has more ghost towns than any other jurisdiction on the North American continent, with one estimate at the number of abandoned and semi-abandoned towns and localities upwards of 1500.
[1] Barkerville, once the largest town north of
San Francisco and west of
Chicago is also located in BC. See
List of ghost towns in British Columbia.
Chile
Most of the ghost towns in Chile have once been mining camps or lumber mills, such as the many
saltpeter mining camps that prospered in from the end of the
Saltpeter War until the invention of
synthetic saltpeter during the
First World War. The ghost towns of
Humberstone and Santa Laura Saltpeter Works in the middle of the
Atacama Desert were declared
UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 2005. In matters of copper the mining camp of
Sewell high up in the
Andes of
Central Chile became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2006. Despite protection laws most of this ghost town suffer "tourist looting" due to the lack of
vigilance among other reasons.
Port Famine (
Spanish: ''Puerto Hambre'') is arguable Chile's oldest ghost town. It was founded in the
Strait of Magellan in
1584 by
Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa. Starvation and the cold climate killed all of the inhabitants. The
English navigator, Sir
Thomas Cavendish landed at the site in 1587 he found only ruins of the settlement. He renamed the place ''Port Famine''.
Other lesser known ghost towns are located in the southern part of the
Chilean Coast Range, were they once were lumbermills were
Fitzroya were cut down to make
roof shingles, as they it was a typical element of
Chilota architecture.
Guyana
Jonestown in
Guyana became a ghost town following the mass suicide of the
Peoples Temple community that lived there.
Mexico
★
Ojuela
★
Real de Catorce,
'
Real de Catorce' was once a flourishing
silver mining town in northern Mexico. Its dramatic landscapes and buildings have been used by Hollywood for movies such as
The Mexican (
2001) with
Brad Pitt and
Julia Roberts.
Recent efforts to adapt the town to tourism have created a mixture of ghost town and touristic site adapted to visitors in search of interesting history south of the border.
USA
:''Main article:
List of ghost towns in the United States''
There are many ghost towns in the American
Great Plains, whose rural areas have lost a third of their population since
1920. There are more than 6,000 abandoned sites of settlement in the state of
Kansas alone, according to Kansas historian
Daniel Fitzgerald. Thousands of communities in the northern plains states like
North Dakota,
South Dakota, and
Montana became railroad ghost towns when a rail-line failed to materialize. Hundreds more were abandoned when the US Highway System replaced the railroads as America's favorite mode of travel. Ghost towns are common in
mining or old
mill town areas:
Washington,
Colorado,
Arizona,
Nevada,
New Mexico,
Montana,
Minnesota, and
California in the western
United States and
West Virginia in the eastern USA. They can be observed as far south as
Texas,
Louisiana,
Arkansas,
Georgia and
Florida. When the resources that had created an employment boom in these towns played out, eventually the businesses ceased to exist, and the people moved on to more productive areas. Sometimes a ghost town consists of many old abandoned buildings (like in
Bodie, California), other times there are simply structures or foundations of former buildings (i.e.,
Graysonia, Arkansas). Even some of the earliest settlements in the US are or have been ghost towns, such as
Jamestown, Virginia and the
Zwaanendael Colony in Delaware.
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;
Marysville, Montana;
Tombstone, Arizona;
Deadwood, South Dakota;
Park City, Utah;
Crested Butte, Colorado; or
Cripple Creek, Colorado are sometimes included in the category, although they are active towns and cities today.
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.
The derelict British base in Whalers Bay, Deception Island destroyed by volcano eruption
Antarctica
The oldest ghost town in
Antarctica is located in
Deception Island, where in 1906 a Norwegian-Chilean whaling company started using Whalers Bay as a base for a factory ship, the Gobernador Bories. Other whaling operations followed suit, and by 1914 there were 13 factory ships based there.
Antarctica also has many more-recently abandoned scientific and military bases, especially in the
Antarctic Peninsula.
The ghost town of Grytviken with the Manager Villa turned into South Georgia Museum
South Georgia
The
Antarctic island of
South Georgia used to have several thriving whaling settlements during the first half of the 20th century, with a combined population exceeding 2,000 in some years. These included
Grytviken (operating
1904-64),
Leith Harbour (
1909-65),
Ocean Harbour (
1909-20),
Husvik (
1910-60),
Stromness (
1912-61) and
Prince Olav Harbour (
1917-34). These settlements have become increasingly dilapidated, and remain uninhabited nowadays except for the Museum curator's family at Grytviken. The jetty, the church, and dwelling and industrial buildings at Grytviken have recently been renovated by the Government of
South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, becoming a popular tourist destination. Some historical buildings in the other settlements are being restored too.
Australia
Similar to the United States, Canada and other former frontier countries, most ghost towns in
Australia were usually formed after the end of mining operations or the removal of railway services. They are spread throughout the country and are located in every state and territory. Some ghost towns in Australia include
Cassilis in
Victoria,
Farina in the far north of
South Australia and
Goldsworthy in
Western Australia.
Europe
In Europe, many
villages were abandoned over the ages, for many different reasons. Sometimes, wars and genocide end a town's life, and it is never resettled. This happened to the Swedish town
Sjöstad, in
Närke, in
1260, when the town's 700 merchants had crossed the ice of Lake
Vättern and been cut down by the Danes. The Danes then proceeded to the town, ravaging and burning it. The town was never resettled. A farm named ''Skyrstad'', ruins and a silver treasure which yielded 4000 coins are all that testify to its existence (see
abandoned village). In the United Kingdom, the once thriving farming village of
Knaptoft in
Leicestershire was abandoned after it was razed by
puritan parliamentarian forces during the
English Civil War and was never resettled. The ruins of the former church still exist as a graveyard, with graves even occupying ground inside the ruins of the church. The villages of
Imber on
Salisbury Plain,
Wiltshire and
Tyneham near
Dorset's historic
Jurassic Coast, as well as several villages within the
Stanford Battle Area in
Norfolk, were evacuated by the
British Army, and the abandoned buildings are now used for training exercises. Natural disasters also play a role. For example, the erupting volcano of
Vesuvius famously terminated
Pompeii and
Herculaneum in Italy in
AD 79.
This process continues to this day, with the village of
Etzweiler in northwestern
Germany being abandoned in the
1990s to make way for a
coal mine
[2] [3].
Pyramiden (Norwegian, meaning "the pyramid", Russian: Пирамида) was a
Russian settlement and coal mining community on the archipelago of
Svalbard,
Norway. It was founded by
Sweden in 1910, and sold to the
Soviet Union in 1927. The settlement, with a one time population of 1,000 inhabitants, was abandoned in the late-1990s by its owner, the state-owned Soviet company Trust Artikugol, and is now a ghost town.
There are no restrictions on visiting Pyramiden. However, visitors may not enter any buildings without permission, even if the doors are open. Most buildings are now locked. Pyramiden is accessible by boat or snowmobile. Guided tours are available (in Russian, Norwegian, and English).
The city of
Prypiat and dozens of smaller settlements in northern
Ukraine and southern
Belarus were abandoned after the
Chernobyl nuclear disaster and turned into a closed
alienation zone. The area has been largely untouched since then, and as such it functions as a large
time capsule of the late
Soviet era. There is an
online photojournal of this area.
Several Ghost towns were created in
Ireland in the latter half of the nineteenth century , particularly in the west of the country, due to a combination of the
potato famine and econonic decline brought on by the famine. These now consist primereably of knee high ruins of cottages .Notable ghost towns are on
Achill Island and in the
Burren area of county Clare. A more recent ghost town was created in the 1950s on
Great Blasket island, where island life became unfeasible and the island was depopulated. The Island is only accessible to tourists in the summer months.
The
Île aux Marins of the
Saint-Pierre and Miquelon groups of islands.
In
Finland, which is one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world, most people live in the biggest towns, and some villages near the Russian border and in
Lapland are nearly abandoned.
Hundreds of villages were abandoned during the
Ottoman wars in the
Kingdom of Hungary in the 16-17th century. Many of them were never repopulated but generally they are not classified as ghost towns because few visible traces remained of them. Real ghost towns are rare in present-day
Hungary, except the abandoned villages of
Derenk (left in 1943) and
Nagygéc (left in 1970). Due to the decrease of rural population beginning in the 1980s dozens of villages are now threatened with abandonment. The first village officially declared as "died out" was
Gyűrűfű in the end of the 1970s but later it was repopulated as an eco-village. Sometimes depopulated villages were successfully saved as small rural resorts like
Kán,
Tornakápolna,
Szanticska,
Gorica and
Révfalu.
While
Athens, Greece, experienced severe decline after the end of the Byzantine Empire, it may never have been a ghost town, although it certainly came close, dwindling to some 3,000 or 4,000 people by the
19th century. It has since gone back to being a major city.
Rome experienced similar declines, but it, too, hasn't been completely abandoned (one of its lowest estimated populations was 17,000 in
1347, down from more than a million in Imperial times ).
Bulgaria
An increasing number of settlements in
Bulgaria are becoming ghost towns as a result of the ongoing demographic decline of that country since the late
20th century. According to the
2001 census there were 138 uninhabited villages, estimated to have become over 150 by
2006. There are such ghost villages in 16 out of the 28 provinces of the country, more numerous in
Gabrovo Province (57 in
2001),
Veliko Tarnovo Province (34),
Kardzhali,
Blagoebgrad,
Burgas, and
Lovech Provinces. Some Bulgarian villages may avoid that fate thanks to immigration of settlers from abroad, mainly from the
United Kingdom but also other
EU countries, former
Soviet republics, even
Israel,
Japan etc.
[2][3]
Middle East
Following the 1974 events in
Cyprus, the southern part of
Famagusta, also known as
Varosha/Maraş, was abandoned by its original inhabitants without being settled. While the
problem is not resolved, Varosha/Maraş is a ghost town and a tourist attraction.
Kayaköy in southwestern
Turkey was inhabited by Anatolian Greeks, until 1923 when a population exchange was agreed by the Turkish and Greek governments which left the town as a site of empty houses and Greek churches. There are many ghost villages in
Iran,
Syria and
Lebanon abandoned as a result of migration to major cities. Most of these towns are in ruins and a few serve as a tourist attraction.
Asia
Cambodia
The 12th-century temple of
Angkor Wat apparently had a large settlement or settled area surrounding it between the 9th and 16th centuries AD.
[4][5]
Pakistan
Harappa and
Mohenjo Daro, two ancient cities in current day
Pakistan, found use as free brick piles for centuries after their abandonment.
India
In addition, numerous cities in
India, such as
Vijaynagar, and other such towns have been known to have been destroyed or turned into ghost towns and since revived or had new cities built in the vicinity over the millennia.
Japan
Hashima Island was a
Japanese mining town from 1887 to 1974. Once known for having the world's highest population density (in 1959 at 3460 people per square kilometer), the island was abandoned when the coal mines were closed down.
Africa
Outside
Luderitz,
Namibia there are two ghost towns,
Elizabeth Bay and
Kolmanskop. Both were diamond mining towns and have been partly covered by the shifting sands of the
Namib Desert. There is also the ancient city of
Carthage, which was rendered a ghost town by the Romans, revived by the same empire, and then destroyed again a few centuries later, with
Tunis becoming the central city. Suburban settlement later occurred in the Carthage area.
Dallol is a former mining town in Ethiopia. It is located in the
Dallol crater, were the temperatures can rise as high as 104° Fahrenheit (40° Celsius). Therefore, it was the hottest inhabited place on Earth when people lived there.
Ghost towns in popular culture
Film
★ The 2006 film adaptation of ''
Silent Hill'' drew inspiration from the real life town of
Centralia, Pennsylvania. Centralia was rendered a ghost town after a major
coal mine fire, which began in 1962.
Video Games
★ The
1999 Playstation games ''
Silent Hill'' takes places in a ghost town of the same name. It has spawned three sequels as of now.
★ The
2000 PlayStation game ''
Vagrant Story'' takes place in a ghost town named Leá Monde.
★ The
2003 PlayStation 2 game '' takes place in a small, ghostly Shinto village in rural Japan.
★ The
2004 game features several ghost towns.
★ Parts of the
2006 PC game ''
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'' take place in the abandoned city of
Prypiat.
See also
★
Dogpatch USA
★
Ghost Town in the Sky
★
List of ghost towns
★
List of ghost towns in British Columbia
★
Rotten borough
★
Unused highway
★
Urban Exploration
Further reading
★
Ghost Towns of Texas by T. Lindsey Baker,
University of Oklahoma Press, 1991, Paperback, ISBN 0-8061-2189-0
★
Standing legacy: Ghost towns preserve the Ottawa Valley’s rich history. Photography by Paul Politis and text by Tobi McIntyre. (''Source:
Canadian Geographic''
★
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.
★
Ghost Towns of the American West by
Berthold Steinhilber (Photographer),
Mario Kaiser (Author),
Michael Koetzle (Author),
Wim Wenders (Author),
Harry N. Abrams, 2003.
Notes
1. Bruce Ramsey, ''Ghost Towns of British Columbia", Mitchell Press, Vancouver (1963-1975)
2. Monitor Daily, Dr. Boris Kolev: Over 150 are the dead villages in Bulgaria, Sofia, August 8, 2006 (in Bulgarian)
3. Trud Daily, Foreigners colonize native villages, Sofia, August 13, 2007 (in Bulgarian)
External links
★
GhostTowns.com
★
GhostTownGallery.com
★
Ghost Towns of America
★
Forgotten Minnesota
★
Ghosts Of North Dakota
★
Forgotten Nevada - Abandoned and historical sites in Nevada. Pictures and directions
★
Ontario Abandoned Places
★
Abandoned communities in Canada. Lots of pictures
★
Return to Varosha
★
Chernobyl-area ghost town (Note: some statements described as fact on this site are disputed)
★
Monument Gallery
★
Examples of mining ghost towns
★
Abandoned towns, villages and other communities in Great Britain
★
San Pedro a ghost towns in México (in Spanish)
★
Mineral de Pozos a ghost towns in México (in Spanish)
★ http://menotomymaps.com/quab_1.html. Map showing the towns buried under Quabbin as they looked in 1912 with original house locations and current reservoir water level
★ Abridged Version of 'Dead Lonesome' by Filmmaker 'Joe Taylor'.
Shot on 35mm Motion Picture Stock, 'Dead Lonesome' Explores the Sights, the Sounds, the Ghost Towns, and the Mystique of the Western Landscape.
★ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nimxKk1r420
★ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHPVp-QuL4Q
★
Unlocking the Past by Madeline DeJournett and Elfreda Cox (May 2007) provides historical background of more than a dozen ghost towns in north Stoddard County, Missouri.
العربية
中国
Français
Deutsch
Ελληνική
हिन्दी
Italiano
日本語
Português
Русский
Español
