Ghost town

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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 Luderitz. 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.

Contents 1 Factors creating ghost towns 2 Revived ghost towns 3 Ghost towns around the world 3.1 Americas 3.1.1 Argentina 3.1.2 Canada 3.1.3 Chile 3.1.4 Guyana 3.1.5 Mexico 3.1.6 USA 3.2 Antarctica 3.3 Australia 3.4 Europe 3.5 Middle East 3.6 Japan 3.7 Asia 3.8 Africa 4 Ghost towns in popular culture 5 See also 6 References 6.1 Further reading 6.2 Notes 6.3 External links

[edit] Factors creating ghost towns

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 (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 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.

[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 city with number 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, specially 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 bequest 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.

[edit] Chile

Most of the ghost towns in Chile have once been mining camps or lumber mills, such as the many salpeter mining camps that prospered in from the end of the Salpeter War until the invention of synthetic salpeter 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 "turist 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 following the mass suicide of the Peoples Temple community that lived there.

[edit] Mexico

Real de Catorce

One of the finest ghost towns in the Americas, Real de Catorce was once a flourishing mining town in northern Mexico. Its marvelous landscapes and buildings have been used by Hollywood for movies like The Mexican (2001) with Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts. Recent efforts to adapt the town to tourism have created a nice mixture of ghost town scenario and touristic site adapted to visitors in search of interesting historic travelling south of the border.

[edit] 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. Ghost towns are common in mining or old mill town areas: Washington, 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). 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.

[edit] Antarctica

The oldest ghost town in Antarctica is located in Deception Island, were 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.

[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 and Goldsworthy in Western Australia.

[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 village of Imber on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire was 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 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 (Swedish, 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.

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, the most of 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, might not have 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] 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. Megiddo is an ancient ghost town in Israel, while Catal Huyuk is an archaeological site in Turkey.

[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 3460 people per square kilometer), the island was abandoned when the coal mines were closed down.

[edit] Asia

Harappa and Mohenjo Daro, two ancient cities in current day Pakistan, found use as free brick piles for centuries after their abandonment. In addition, numerous cities in China and India, such as Luoyang,Vijaynagar,and other such towns have been known to have been destroyed /turned into ghost towns and revived or had new cities built in the vicinity over the millennia, due to such things as shifts in the course of the Yangtze River, political struggles, and changes in the country's capital (China has had several capitals over its long history).

[edit] 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.

[edit] Ghost towns in popular culture

• 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 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.

• The Playstation 2 game Fatal Frame 2 takes place in a small, ghostly Shinto village in rural Japan.

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

• In the movie Yogi's Great Escape, Yogi Bear and his friends meet Quick Draw McGraw at a ghost town.

[edit] 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

[edit] References

[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] Notes

[edit] External links

• 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
• Ontario Abandoned Places
• ghosttowns.com
• 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
• Abandoned communities in Canada. Lots of pictures