Arikah Map

Ghost town

For the song Ghost Town by The Specials, see Ghost Town.
Ghost town:Bannack, Montana, a well preserved ghost town that is now a State Park.
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Bannack, Montana, a well preserved ghost town that is now a State Park.

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 sometimes referred to 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, i.e. Babylon. Some ghost towns revive as living cities, such as Alexandria in Egypt. Often a ghost town will still have significant art and architecture, i.e. Vijayanagara in India or Changan in China. Most large countries and regions have what qualifies as ghost towns.

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, dangerous or illegal to visit.


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Factors creating ghost towns

Ghost town:As with many gold rush towns, the once thriving community of Cassilis is now abandoned
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As with many gold rush towns, the once thriving community of Cassilis is now abandoned

Factors leading to abandonment of towns include 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 (see Aral Sea), and nuclear disasters (see 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 epedimic 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, i.e. Ctesiphon.

Natural disasters can also create ghost towns. After being flooded over 30 times since their the town was founded in 1845, residents of Pattonsburg, Missouri had enough after two floods in 1993. With government help, the whole town was rebuilt a mile away, now known as New Pattonsburg, leaving the old Pattonsburg behind as a ghost town.

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 55 square kilometers) 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 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 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 city with number of 3.5 to 5 million inhabitants.

Ghost towns around the world

Americas

USA

Main article: List of ghost towns in the United States
Ghost town:A street corner in the ghost town of Bodie, California.
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A street corner in the ghost town of Bodie, California.

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. Ghost towns are common in mining or old mill town areas: Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Montana, 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 (ie Graysonia, Arkansas).

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.

Canada

Ghost towns are seen in Northern Ontario and Central Ontario, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Newfoundland and Labrador (see outport) in Canada (some of these were logging towns or dually mining and logging).

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, specially during weekends.

Guyana

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

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).

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 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.

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.

The Île aux Marins of the Saint-Pierre and Miquelon groups of islands.

Asia

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.

Episodes of The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family and the short-lived Me and the Chimp (starring Ted Bessell) have been set in the fun and humour of settings in a ghost town, usually with a colorful and eccentric individual who still calls it home.

The 2006 film adaptation of Silent Hill is based on events in a fictional ghost town of the same name in the fictional Toluca County, West Virginia. Silent Hill was rendered a ghost town after a major coal mine fire that occurred in the 1970's.

In a Scene of "The Muppet Movie",the Eletric Mayhem and Staff arrive on a bus in Ghost Town

Abandoned bank building in Rhyolite, Nevada.
Church in Tocco Caudio, Italy.
Ghost town near Chernobyl.
The town of Kalapana, Hawaii was turned into a ghost town by a lava flow in 1990.

See also

Additional reading

Categories


Ghost towns | Lost cities and towns

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