Ghost town

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For other uses, see Ghost town (disambiguation).

It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Abandoned village. (Discuss)

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 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.

[edit] Factors creating ghost towns

Image:Cassilis historical area02.jpg

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 [2] 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Ghost towns around the world

[edit] Americas

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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] Some ghost towns have revived their economies and populations due to historical and eco-tourism, such as Barkerville, once the largest town north of Kamloops, which is now a year-round Provincial Museum.

See also:

List of ghost towns in Canada

[edit] 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.

[edit] Guyana

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

[edit] Mexico

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.

[edit] USA

Main article: List of ghost towns in the United States

Image:Bodie ghost town.jpg

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.^{[citation needed]} 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.

Image:Deception-Base.jpg

The derelict British base in Whalers Bay, Deception Island destroyed by volcano eruption

[edit] 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.

Image:Grytviken museum.jpg

The ghost town of Grytviken with the Manager Villa turned into South Georgia Museum

[edit] 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). The abandoned 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.

[edit] 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, Cossack, Wittenoom, Newnes in New South Wales, and Goldsworthy in Western Australia. Ravenswood in north-eastern Queensland was a ghost town for many years, due to the declining gold rushes, but new gold discoveries in the area and improved mineral processing technologies, has boosted the economy of the area and revived the town.

[edit] 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 [3] [4].

Also in Belgium, several villages had to disappear to facilitate the expansion of the port of Antwerp, such as the former villages of Oosterweel, Oordam, Wilmarsdonk, Lillo and Oorderen. Soon, the village of Doel will follow suit.

Pyramiden (Swedish and 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 economic decline brought on by the famine. These now consist primarily 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.

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^{[citation needed]}).

[edit] Hungary

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.

[edit] 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]

[edit] Ukraine

See also: Pripyat, Ukraine

Pripyat is one of the biggest ghost towns today because at its peak, it had a population of over 50 thousand residents and all of them have completely abandoned the town after the Chernobyl disaster. Pripyat was built to be the home for the workers of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Unlike its neighboring town Chernobyl, Pripyat remains to be a ghost town and is completely empty.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Asia

[edit] 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. [5][6]

[edit] Pakistan

Harappa and Mohenjo Daro, two ancient cities in current day Pakistan, have such good quality bricks displaying the creativity of the ancient people , that they still stand to their original forms up to 75%.

[edit] India

In addition, numerous cities in India, such as Vijaynagar,Bhangarh, and other such towns have been known to have been destroyed or turned into ghost towns .

[edit] 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 3,460 people per square kilometer), the island was abandoned when the coal mines were closed down.

[edit] Africa

In Morocco a significant archaeological site, Chellah, was inhabited successively by Phoenicians, Romans and native rulers: however, Chellah was almost totally abadoned and became a ghost town in the 13th century AD, when the ruling dynasty relocated to Fes; the site was resettled by the Merinid Dynasty within the next century and re-used as a necropolis and mosque.^[4]

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.

[edit] Ghost towns in popular culture

[edit] 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.

[edit] Video Games

The 1999 Playstation game Silent Hill takes place in a ghost town of the same name. It has spawned over three sequels.
The 2000 PlayStation game Vagrant Story takes place in a ghost town named Leá Monde.
The 2003 PlayStation 2 game Fatal Frame 2 takes place in a small, ghostly Shinto village in rural Japan.
The 2004 game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas features several ghost towns.
Parts of the 2007 games S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Call of Duty 4 take place in the abandoned city of Prypiat.

[edit] See also

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Ghost towns

[edit] 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.

[edit] References

^ Bruce Ramsey, Ghost Towns of British Columbia", Mitchell Press, Vancouver (1963-1975)
^ Monitor Daily, Dr. Boris Kolev: Over 150 are the dead villages in Bulgaria, Sofia, August 8, 2006 (in Bulgarian)
^ Trud Daily, Foreigners colonize native villages, Sofia, August 13, 2007 (in Bulgarian)
^ C. Michael Hogan (2007) Chellah, The Megalithic Portal, ed. Andy Burnham, [1]

[edit] External links