America has more than 600 documented ghost towns west of the Mississippi alone, a figure that doesn't even count the old mill hamlets rotting along New England creek beds, the coal patches emptied by mine closures in Appalachia, or the Route 66 outposts that vanished the day the interstate bypass opened. "Ghost towns USA" draws roughly 110,000 searches every month, making it one of the most searched travel-history topics in the country, and for good reason. No other nation built boomtowns as fast, abandoned them as completely, or left them standing in such spectacular ruin. The United States built its western frontier on the assumption that the ore, the oil, or the railroad traffic would last forever. When it didn't, the towns stayed. The climate in the Great Basin, the high Rockies, and the Sonoran Desert is hostile enough to bleach wood silver-gray and bake adobe back into the earth, but dry enough to preserve that same wood and adobe for a century or more without the rot and mold that would dissolve an eastern ghost town in a generation.
The country's ghost town tradition runs deeper than the Hollywood images of tumbleweeds on Main Street and a lone sheriff's badge in the dust. The Bureau of Land Management alone administers more than 600 documented western ghost town sites. The National Park Service has incorporated entire ghost towns (Thurmond, Elkmont) into its management portfolio. California has an official State Silver Rush Ghost Town. Montana runs a state park dedicated entirely to an 1862 gold camp whose last residents left in 1970. And Pennsylvania is home to a borough that has been on fire underground for more than six decades and still technically has a zip code.
The scope here runs from that small Pennsylvania borough to a Colorado mining camp at 11,185 feet that gets buried in 25 feet of snow every winter. It covers a West Virginia coal town with a population of five, a Nevada gold rush city that materialized and evaporated in under a decade, and a Route 66 border outpost that died at exactly 11:30 a.m. on September 28, 1973, when Interstate 40 opened. And then it covers the flip side: the wild west towns that were written off as ghost towns in the 1960s and 1980s but came back hard as heritage tourism magnets, places where Wyatt Earp's name still sells more hotel rooms than any marketing campaign ever could. Deadwood's saloons, Tombstone's OK Corral, Virginia City's Comstock silver and the Mark Twain byline that came out of it, Jerome's billion-dollar copper vein and its jail that slid 200 feet downhill. These places never fully died, and that's part of the story too. What ties all 20 together is that their history is real, their bones are visible, and the weight of what happened there hasn't been cleared away by time or by development.
Free urbex and ghost town GPS: how Urbex Maps changes the game
Every spot in this guide has a free GPS pin waiting for you on the Urbex Maps interactive atlas. No paywall, no registration, just coordinates dropped onto the map with access notes, visitor info, and links to the original historical sources. The atlas works on mobile, which matters when you're navigating 13 miles of washboard gravel trying to reach Bodie, or looking for the turnoff to Vulture City on a state highway with no cell signal.
The GPS format throughout this article uses the `FREE_SPOT` shortcode, which feeds directly into that interactive map. When you see a pin below, tapping it opens the full spot card with seasonal access notes, nearby services, and links to the photography guides. The goal isn't to gatekeep ghost towns; it's to give you enough context to visit safely, legally, and with the right expectations. Some of these places are federally managed and wide open. Some are on private land with posted admission. A few are in active Superfund zones where the soil itself is the hazard. The map tells you which is which.
Ghost towns near me is one of the most common refinements on the core search, and the interactive atlas handles it directly: drop a pin on your current location and the map surfaces the nearest spots ranked by distance, with access notes for each. Whether you're in Tennessee and Elkmont is 90 minutes away, or you're driving I-40 across the Texas Panhandle with Glenrio 20 miles off the next exit, the map gives you the pull-off coordinates, the parking notes, and the rough walking time before you commit to the detour.
What counts as a "ghost town"
The phrase "ghost town" gets stretched to cover a lot of territory, so this article establishes categories upfront.
A pure abandoned ghost town has no permanent residents, no operating businesses, and buildings in active decay. The federal government or a state park system may manage the site for preservation, but no one lives there. Centralia and North Brother Island fall into this first category, as do Elkmont, Glenrio, Animas Forks, Garnet, and Rhyolite. Some in this category are freely accessible; others are off-limits or require permits. The GPS pin for each will tell you the status before you make the drive.
A preserved "arrested decay" ghost town is abandoned but stabilized, usually by a state park or the Bureau of Land Management, with enough maintenance to keep the roofs from falling in but zero reconstruction. Bodie, Bannack, and the BLM-managed Garnet are the clearest American examples. These places feel like the residents walked out yesterday, because the policy is explicitly to keep them looking that way. No repainting, no reproductions, no costumed interpreters on the porch. The California State Park system has even formalized the philosophy as official policy for Bodie, using the term "arrested decay" in its management plan. The result is a category of American site that has no real parallel anywhere else in the world: a real 1870s or 1880s mining town, at full scale, with every original artifact in place, open to the public, sitting in the desert or the mountains under the same sky it always had.
A tourist heritage town was once a genuine ghost town (or close to it) but was revived by heritage tourism, casino legalization, or artist colonization. It has permanent residents today, and its "ghost town" label is partly brand identity. Deadwood, Virginia City, Tombstone, Bisbee, Jerome, Calico, and Wallace all fall here. These towns have real history, real original architecture, and real ghost town bones under the souvenir shops and wine tasting rooms. The original buildings are there. The cemeteries are there. The mines are there. They belong in this article because no serious ghost towns USA list is honest without them, and because the romantic mythology of the American wild west was largely constructed from the specific streets and saloons and OK Corrals of these seven places.
This article presents 13 abandoned and arrested-decay towns first, then 7 tourist heritage towns, ranked by historical weight within each group. The ordering within each category reflects a mix of national name recognition, urbex visitor interest, and uniqueness of experience rather than strict population peak or historical significance.
Why some famous ghost towns don't make this list
Honest disclosure on four common exclusions and one contested inclusion.
Calico (listed at #18 below) is included but with an asterisk. Walter Knott's 1950s restoration was sympathetic and well-documented, but a significant portion of what visitors see today was built from old photographs rather than original timber. Calico is officially California's State Silver Rush Ghost Town, and the site is genuinely historic. But if you're expecting Bodie-level authenticity, recalibrate. The county park administers the site and is transparent about what was original (five structures) and what was reconstructed. That honesty earns Calico a spot here despite the asterisk.
Two Guns, Arizona is a genuine Route 66 ghost town ruin with a legitimately dark history (a 1925 massacre in a canyon cave, a lion farm, multiple owners' suspicious deaths), but most of the stone buildings visible in photographs today are not original structures. The site has been picked over, sold, and partially bulldozed multiple times since the 1930s, and the access situation involves private land with uncertain permissions. It didn't make the cut.
Ruby, Arizona is one of the best-preserved genuine ghost towns in the Southwest, with a violent mining history and dozens of intact adobe and frame structures on private land with formal tour access. It simply lost the ranking fight to Vulture City, Bisbee, and Jerome here. It will get its own full entry and GPS pin on the Urbex Maps atlas as part of the Arizona ghost towns supplement.
Crested Butte, Colorado was classified as a ghost town in the 1950s but is now a ski resort with real estate values that would have baffled any 1880s coal miner. Including it here would be misleading. The same applies to Telluride, Colorado, which was legitimately near-abandoned in the 1970s before ski development arrived.
Knott's Calico shouldn't be confused with actual Calico. The Knott's Berry Farm theme park recreation in Buena Park, California is a separate entity that shares a name and inspiration but has no geographic connection to the original site.
# PART 1: 100% ABANDONED GHOST TOWNS
1. Centralia, Pennsylvania
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There's a borough in the anthracite coal belt of eastern Pennsylvania where the streets crack open and vent wisps of sulfurous smoke, where the hillside grass stays unnaturally green in winter because the ground beneath it never freezes, and where a population that once exceeded 2,000 people has dwindled, by court order and federal buyout, to fewer than ten elderly residents who hold a negotiated right to stay until they die. Centralia, Pennsylvania has been on fire since May 27, 1962, when a borough work crew lit the municipal landfill to clean it up before Memorial Day. The dump sat in an abandoned strip mine pit. The fire worked its way down through the old pit into the anthracite seam below, and the anthracite seam runs for miles under the surrounding hillsides in every direction. Sixty-four years later it's still burning, across an estimated 400 underground acres, generating temperatures that can exceed 900 degrees Fahrenheit at the coal face.
The fire burned quietly for years before it became a public emergency. The first sign of serious danger came in February 1981, when a 12-year-old boy named Todd Domboski walked into his grandmother's backyard and nearly disappeared: the ground opened under his feet, dropping him into a steaming sinkhole four feet wide and 150 feet deep. His cousin pulled him out. The incident made national news and began the long political fight over what to do with the town. Congress eventually allocated 42 million dollars for a voluntary buyout program. Most residents accepted. A handful refused, and a court allowed the holdouts to remain for the duration of their natural lives. The Postal Service revoked the zip code in 2002. The population, which peaked at 2,761 in 1890, was recorded at 5 by the 2010 census.
The streets are still there: cracked and heaved and overgrown, lined with fire hydrants standing in front of lots where houses used to be. The smoke vents from cracks in the pavement on cold mornings. A stretch of the old Route 61 asphalt south of town buckled and fractured in the 1980s and became a landmark for graffiti artists and urban explorers before Pennsylvanian authorities buried it under fill in 2020. The town directly inspired the foggy, burning ruins of the Silent Hill video game series and the 2006 film adaptation. It's arguably the most famous ghost town in the eastern United States, and the coal fire is still burning right now, tonight, under the dark Pennsylvania hillside.
Read the full story: Centralia, Pennsylvania: Inside America's Burning Ghost Town
2. North Brother Island, New York
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Thirteen acres of forest sitting in the East River between the Bronx and Rikers Island, visible from the Amtrak Hell Gate Bridge, inaccessible to the public, and slowly being consumed by the same aggressive urban forest that reclaims every abandoned piece of New York City real estate. North Brother Island is the only ghost town within the five boroughs, and one of the most quietly inaccessible places in the most visited city in the United States. Riverside Hospital opened here in 1885 as a quarantine facility for infectious disease patients, particularly those with typhoid, smallpox, and yellow fever. The island's isolation was the point: put the sick somewhere they couldn't spread disease to the mainland.
Its most famous involuntary resident was Mary Mallon, known in tabloid history as "Typhoid Mary," an Irish-born cook who was an asymptomatic carrier of Salmonella typhi and caused at least three documented typhoid outbreaks among the families she cooked for in Manhattan. The health authorities confined her to North Brother Island from 1907 to 1910, released her on the condition she never work as a cook again, and returned her to the island permanently in 1915 when she was found cooking under a false name in a Bronx maternity hospital. She lived in a small cottage on the island for 23 more years, alone and with full knowledge that she was confined there for life. She died on November 11, 1938, of a stroke. She was buried in the Bronx, not on the island.
On June 15, 1904, while Riverside Hospital was in full operation, the passenger steamboat General Slocum caught fire in the East River just offshore from the island's northern tip. More than 1,000 people, mostly German-American women and children from St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church on a summer excursion, died in the fire and in the water. It was the deadliest disaster in New York City history until September 11, 2001. The hospital's staff rushed to the dock and treated survivors on the shore. The hospital continued as a tuberculosis facility into the 1940s, then reopened in the 1950s as a rehabilitation center for adolescent heroin addicts, a program later investigated by federal authorities for corruption, patient abuse, and the disappearance of pharmaceutical records. It shut down in 1963. The buildings have been empty since then. The New York City Department of Parks manages the island as a bird sanctuary, particularly for black-crowned night herons, and doesn't permit public access.
Read the full story: North Brother Island: Typhoid Mary's Abandoned Hospital in the East River
3. Bodie, California
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Bodie is what a gold rush looks like 140 years after the gold ran out. The town sits at 8,375 feet on the dry eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada, two hours north of Mammoth Lakes, reached by 13 miles of unpaved washboard road that will rattle the fillings out of your teeth and reduce your average speed to 20 miles per hour. At its 1879 peak, Bodie had close to 10,000 residents, 65 saloons on Main Street, a Wells Fargo office, four daily newspapers, and a murder rate that earned it a reputation as the most violent town in California. When a family from San Francisco announced they were moving there, their young daughter wrote in her diary: "Goodbye God, I'm going to Bodie."
Prospector W.S. Bodey found gold in the Bodie Hills in 1859, but he died in a November blizzard before the real boom hit. The rush didn't materialize until 1876, when the Standard Company sank a shaft through a hard-rock vein, and by 1879 the town was producing close to 100,000 ounces of gold a year. By 1882 the easy ore was playing out, and Bodie spent the next sixty years in slow decline, pivoting to lower-grade ore, then to a small revival in the 1930s, then finally closing for good when the federal War Production Board ordered all non-essential gold mines shut in 1942. A fire in 1932 had already destroyed much of the northern part of town.
California took the site in 1962 and adopted a preservation philosophy it calls "arrested decay": just enough structural maintenance to keep the 110 surviving buildings from collapsing outright, but zero reconstruction, zero repainting, zero period costuming. Interiors are left exactly as the last residents abandoned them. Schoolbooks are open on the desks at the one-room schoolhouse. Bottles still sit on the shelves of the drugstore. A 1927 Dodge truck sits in a garage off Main Street exactly where it was parked the last time someone drove it. The Standard Consolidated Mine headframe stands in the dry hills above town, the headframe that once lowered the buckets into the ore.
Bodie lore has it that any artifact removed from the town will bring the curse of Bodie down on the thief, and the park rangers maintain a drawer full of letters from people who mailed back rocks, nails, and glass shards after experiencing car accidents, divorces, health scares, and general misfortune. The rangers call it the Curse of Bodie file. Whether or not the curse is real, the no-removal policy is enforced and carries a fine. This is the gold standard of American ghost town preservation, and Bodie State Historic Park draws roughly 200,000 visitors a year to walk through what amounts to a walk-in time capsule the size of a small city.
The town is also remarkable for what the records show about daily frontier life. Bodie's court records and newspaper archives document 65 shootings, a murder almost every week at peak, and a red-light district on Bonanza Street that ran around the clock. The Methodist Church still stands on Fuller Street. The schoolhouse still has chalk on the blackboard. The juxtaposition of the church and the saloons, the schoolhouse and the gun collection, is exactly the American frontier as it actually was, not as the mythology cleaned it up.
Read more in the US 50-States Urbex Pillar.
4. Picher, Oklahoma
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In the far northeastern corner of Oklahoma, on the edge of the Ozark Plateau where Kansas and Missouri press in close, there's a town that the federal government declared too poisonous to inhabit. Picher was the center of the Tri-State Mining District, which produced more lead and zinc ore between 1917 and 1945 than any other mining region on earth, supplying more than half the lead and zinc used by the Allied forces in World War I and contributing enormously to the metal supply in World War II. Beneath the soil, an enormous network of mine shafts and stopes ran for hundreds of miles, hollowing out the bedrock under entire neighborhoods. The price was catastrophic in ways that took decades to fully register. Decades of mine drainage laced Tar Creek with so much cadmium, lead, and zinc that the water ran bright orange. The "chat piles," the gray-white waste mountains of crushed limestone tailings mixed with mine waste, rose 30 and 40 feet above the surrounding landscape, and children played on them, as children play on any hill available to them. Blood lead tests later revealed neurological damage levels across the pediatric population that pediatricians described as among the worst they had ever documented in a non-industrial setting.
The EPA designated Tar Creek as one of the nation's original Superfund sites in 1983, one of the first 406 placed on the National Priorities List. The cleanup costs were projected at hundreds of millions of dollars and the contamination was too embedded in the geology to remove. A federal buyout program began in 2006 and had evacuated most of the remaining residents by 2009. Then, on May 10, 2008, a violent EF-4 tornado struck the area, killing six people and destroying most of the structures that had been left standing. The disaster accelerated what was already nearly complete. The 2010 census recorded 20 residents. The chat piles still tower over the empty streets, gray-white against the Oklahoma sky, and the groundwater in Tar Creek still runs orange with mine drainage decades after the last mine closed. Picher is both the largest and most contaminated Superfund ghost town in the United States, a category that didn't exist when the town was a working city.
Read the full story: Picher, Oklahoma: Tar Creek and the Superfund Town That Couldn't Be Saved
5. Elkmont, Tennessee
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Hidden in the crease of the upper Little River Valley, tucked so far back into the blue ridges of the Great Smoky Mountains that the average visitor to the park drives right past the turnoff, Elkmont is one of the most quietly strange abandoned places in the American South. It began as two things at once: a logging railroad camp and an Appalachian resort town, and it was the tension between those two identities, and then between the resort families and the National Park Service, that determined its fate over the following century.
The Little River Lumber Company, owned by Colonel Wilson B. Townsend, extended its logging railroad up into the high coves of the Smokies in 1908, chasing the last old-growth stands of yellow poplar, eastern hemlock, and American chestnut. Ten Shay locomotives with their distinctive stuttering gait hauled 750 million board feet of timber out of the mountains over the next three decades, stripping the ridges bare and leaving the creek beds choked with slash and sawdust. Even while the loggers were still cutting, a second Elkmont was forming alongside the first. In 1910 a group of wealthy Knoxville businessmen founded the Appalachian Club and built a cluster of summer cottages along a side stream, naming the area Daisy Town for the wildflowers in the meadow. The cottages weren't grand by national standards, but they were grand enough for Knoxville, comfortable frame houses with deep porches and river-rock chimneys, nestled under the hemlocks a few hundred yards above the railroad tracks.
Across the Little River, the Wonderland Hotel opened in 1912, a long wooden three-story building with a wraparound porch that became the most fashionable summer address in East Tennessee within a few seasons. Guests rocked in chairs and watched the water slide over the boulders below. In 1934, when Great Smoky Mountains National Park was formally established, the Appalachian Club families and the Wonderland Hotel were told they had a choice: sell at full appraised value and leave immediately, or accept half the appraised value and stay on a lifetime lease. About 75 families took the lease. The Wonderland Hotel stayed open. The leases were extended once, and then again, generation to generation, as the families handed the cottages down to children and grandchildren who had grown up spending summers here.
The National Park Service finally refused to renew the leases in 1992. The families packed out what they could carry and left the rest. The Wonderland Hotel, which had grown increasingly derelict through the 1980s, was finally condemned. An extreme snow load caused the roof to collapse in 2005, taking most of the interior floors with it. A fire of undetermined origin burned the annex in November 2016. After years of debate about whether to demolish everything or preserve what was left, the Park Service settled on a compromise in 2018: 19 of the original 74 structures, including the Appalachian Clubhouse and 17 Daisy Town cottages, were stabilized and listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Elkmont Historic District. The remaining 55 structures were demolished.
What survives today is the strangest kind of ghost town in the National Park system: a cluster of empty vacation cottages along quiet gravel lanes, their porches sagging gently into the rhododendron, their paint peeling in long papery strips, their screen doors swinging in the mountain air. The Appalachian Clubhouse at the end of the lane is the most intact building, its porch boards going silver with age, its stone foundation built for a century. The Spence Cabin just above it's the oldest structure in the historic district. Just across the road, the most popular campground in Great Smoky Mountains National Park fills up every weekend from May to October, and most campers have no idea the ghost town is a five-minute walk from their site.
The firefly season is the seasonal spectacle that draws the most attention. Every June, the synchronous fireflies of the species Photinus carolinus spend roughly two weeks lighting up the forest floor in coordinated waves, each male flashing in a specific pattern, the females responding from the grass below. The display runs from about 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. and is visible throughout the Elkmont area. Great Smoky Mountains National Park runs a lottery for the timed-entry vehicle passes during the firefly window; demand is enormous and spots go fast. Outside firefly season, the Elkmont Historic District is open year-round, daylight hours, free access.
6. Bannack, Montana
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On July 28, 1862, a Colorado prospector named John White rinsed his gold pan at White's Bar on Grasshopper Creek and saw color in the bottom. By the end of that summer several thousand men had swarmed up the creek bed, and a ramshackle town of cottonwood log cabins, brothels, and saloons had risen out of the sagebrush on the east side of the Beaverhead Mountains. The founders named it Bannack, a deliberate respelling of "Bannock," the name of the Indigenous people whose traditional territory this was. Within a year the population hit roughly 3,000. Montana Territory was officially created by Congress on May 26, 1864, and Bannack was named the first territorial capital.
The boom also drew Henry Plummer, a former California sheriff with a conviction for murder on his record who talked his way into the sheriff's job in Bannack in May 1863. What happened next is one of the most contested episodes in the entire history of the American West. According to the dominant historical account, Plummer was the secret leader of a gang called the Innocents, road agents who robbed and murdered travelers on the gold trails across southwestern Montana, accumulating a body count that the Montana vigilantes later put at 102. According to a revisionist school of thought advanced by historian Frederick Allen, Plummer was an effective lawman railroaded by a vigilante mob operating on rumor and class resentment. The Wikipedia entry on Henry Plummer covers both positions thoroughly.
What isn't disputed: on January 10, 1864, a body of self-appointed Montana Vigilantes pulled Plummer and two of his deputies, Buck Stinson and Ned Ray, out of a cabin in Bannack and hanged all three from a gallows Plummer himself had ordered built the previous year. The vigilante executions continued across the region through the winter of 1864, with at least 22 men hanged or shot. By the time the noose tightened around Plummer's neck, the territorial capital had already shifted to Virginia City, Montana. Bannack hung on for decades more, shifting from placer to hard-rock mining as dredges chewed up the creek bottom, but the population never recovered its early peak.
The Hotel Meade, built in 1875 as the original Beaverhead County Courthouse, is still the grandest building in town, a two-story frame structure with a long second-floor balcony overlooking the main street. The last residents left in 1970. The site had already been donated to the state of Montana in 1954 and established as Bannack State Park, making it one of the earliest preserved ghost towns in the country. The park's preservation philosophy is similar to Bodie's: stabilize what's there, reconstruct nothing. More than 60 original structures still stand along the dust main street, including Skinner's Saloon (Cyrus Skinner was allegedly a leader of the Innocents), the 1877 Methodist Church with its hand-lettered interior, the reconstructed gallows, and the two-room brick jail. Every July, Bannack Days fills the town with living history demonstrations, stagecoach rides, and reenacted blacksmithing. The gallows is included in the tour.
7. Thurmond, West Virginia
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At the bottom of New River Gorge, where the canyon walls drop nearly 900 feet from the plateau rim to the river below, there's a town that has no conventional streets. The Chesapeake and Ohio Railway main line runs down the middle of the business district. Locomotives still pass between the brick storefronts close enough to clip a sideview mirror off a parked car, if anyone still parked cars there, which they mostly don't. Thurmond, West Virginia had a 2020 census population of five people and is entirely owned by the National Park Service. It's, by almost any measure, the smallest and most thoroughly abandoned incorporated town in the country that still technically exists as a municipality.
Captain William Dabney Thurmond, a former Confederate Ranger turned land surveyor, accepted a 73-acre tract in a tight bend of the New River as payment for a surveying job in 1873 and named the place after himself. The town didn't amount to much until 1888, when the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway built a depot at the river's edge and the coal-hauling economy began. By the early 1900s, Thurmond was handling more freight tonnage than either Richmond, Virginia or Cincinnati, Ohio, processing the coal output of more than 60 mines in the surrounding hollows. The town had a bank, a hotel, a general store, several restaurants, and a main street of brick commercial buildings with elaborate corbeled cornices. Captain Thurmond was a strict Baptist who banned alcohol from the West Virginia side of the river, which meant that the saloons, gambling halls, and brothels all clustered across the trestle bridge at the rival township of Glen Jean.
The Dunglen Hotel, a 100-room luxury resort that opened at Glen Jean in 1901, supposedly hosted what Ripley's Believe It or Not certified as the longest continuous poker game in history: 14 years without a break, with players rotating in and out around the clock. The Dunglen burned to the ground on July 22, 1930, and the Great Depression arrived at roughly the same moment. After World War II the C&O switched from steam to diesel locomotives, eliminating the need for the coal-washing and water-stop infrastructure that had kept Thurmond alive. By 1980 the population had fallen below 50. The National Park Service acquired most of the properties in 1995 and restored the 1904 depot as a visitor center for what became, in December 2020, New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, the 63rd national park in the United States.
The five residents of Thurmond live in a handful of structures the Park Service hasn't yet acquired. The brick storefronts of Main Street, the Mankin-Cohen Building, and the National Bank of Thurmond stand essentially as they were built, their empty windows looking out over the C&O tracks and the river. Atlas Obscura covers Thurmond in detail, including the logistical peculiarity that getting to the town still requires either a narrow bridge over the gorge or a boat. There's no road access from the plateau above.
8. St. Elmo, Colorado
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At 9,961 feet in Chalk Creek Canyon, hemmed in by the granite walls of the Sawatch Range with Mount Antero's 14,269-foot summit filling the view at the upper end of the valley, St. Elmo is the kind of place that looks like a movie set. Half a dozen Hollywood productions have used it as one, but the 43 wooden buildings standing along its dusty main street are the real thing, built between 1880 and the mid-1890s, maintained by periodic private ownership but never substantially reconstructed. St. Elmo is consistently ranked by historians and travel writers as the best-preserved ghost town in Colorado, a distinction it has held for decades.
The town was founded in 1880 as Forest City, but renamed when postal authorities objected to a duplicate name on the Front Range. It grew up to serve the Mary Murphy Mine on the south slope of Mount Antero, the most productive silver, gold, and copper operation in the entire Sawatch Range. At its peak around 1890, St. Elmo had nearly 2,000 residents, five hotels, a school, a telegraph office, a newspaper called the Mountaineer, more than 150 active mine claims, and a brothel district along Poplar Street. The Denver, South Park and Pacific Railroad arrived in 1881 over the Alpine Tunnel, the first railroad tunnel bored through the Continental Divide, and the trains kept the town connected to Denver and the outside world for the next 40 years.
The three Stark siblings ran the town through its long slow death. Anton, Tony, and Annabelle Stark took over the general store and the Home Comfort Hotel from their parents and kept operating them long after everyone else had left, dressing in clothes cut from patterns their parents had used in the 1890s and treating the town as their personal domain. Tony Stark (not the Marvel character) served as both postmaster and general store operator until his death in 1952. Annabelle, the youngest, stayed on alone in a building without electricity or running water until 1956, when she was found in a confused state and committed to the state hospital at Pueblo. She died there in 1960. Atlas Obscura's Elkmont entry profiles the Starks' story in detail, one of the most haunting keeper-of-the-flame narratives in American ghost town history.
After the Starks left, the Mary Murphy Mine equipment was removed and the Denver South Park and Pacific had already pulled its tracks in 1922. The post office closed in 1952. A fire in April 2002 destroyed the town hall and several adjacent buildings; Buena Vista Heritage undertook a faithful reconstruction based on period photographs by 2008. The St. Elmo Historic District was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979 and has been privately owned in various configurations since then. The working general store (open summers) sells cold drinks and candy bars to hikers. The boardedup Home Comfort Hotel across the street has Annabelle's lace curtains still hanging in the upper windows. Chipmunks have taken over the old railroad bed. The Mary Murphy Mine headframe still stands two miles up the gulch, and the drive up from Nathrop on Chalk Creek Road is one of the most scenic approaches to any ghost town in America.
9. Rhyolite, Nevada
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Frank "Shorty" Harris was a desert prospector of the old school, brown as boot leather, never flush, never defeated. On August 9, 1904, he and his partner Ed Cross were resting in the shade of a creosote bush in the Bullfrog Hills on the eastern edge of Death Valley when Harris chipped at a green-stained outcrop with his pick and held up a chunk of quartz so thick with visible gold that he later told reporters it looked like green cheese. Within six months the town of Rhyolite had materialized two miles from the strike, and within two years it had everything a boomtown needed: electricity piped in from a hydroelectric plant 100 miles away, telephone and telegraph service, three railroad lines, an opera house, a stock exchange, 53 saloons, a public swimming pool, an ice plant, and somewhere between 3,500 and 5,000 people living in tents, shacks, and freshly poured concrete houses.
The three-story Cook Bank Building opened in 1908 as the most expensive single structure between Denver and San Francisco, finished with marble floors, imported mahogany, and Italian stained glass. Charles M. Schwab, the industrialist, bought the Montgomery-Shoshone Mine in 1906 and poured money into the infrastructure of a town he clearly expected to last. It didn't last. The Panic of 1907 dried up investment capital from New York and San Francisco. The ore turned out to be shallow, distributed in pockets rather than following a continuous vein. The Montgomery-Shoshone closed on March 14, 1911. Electricity was shut off in 1916. The population fell to about 14.
What the salvage crews left behind has the bleached, dignified quality of ancient ruins: the gutted three-story facade of the Cook Bank, windowless against the desert sky; the iron skeleton of the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad depot; the three-room adobe jail; and the Tom Kelly Bottle House, built in February 1906 out of approximately 50,000 beer and patent medicine bottles set in adobe. Kelly built the whole structure in about 6 months, living in it afterward, and it has become one of the most photographed buildings in Nevada. Just outside the ruins, the Goldwell Open Air Museum displays Belgian artist Albert Szukalski's 1984 installation "The Last Supper," twelve life-sized plaster ghost figures arranged in the Mojave heat, bleached almost colorless by four decades of desert sun. The Bureau of Land Management manages the ruins site; there's no admission fee and it's open year-round.
10. Glenrio, Texas and New Mexico
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The strangest thing about Glenrio isn't that it's split exactly down the middle by the Texas-New Mexico state line, with the post office in New Mexico, the gas pumps in Texas, the schoolhouse in New Mexico, and the dance hall in Texas (because Deaf Smith County, Texas was dry while Quay County, New Mexico was wet). The strangest thing is that you can feel precisely when it died. At 11:30 a.m. on September 28, 1973, Interstate 40 opened a bypass three miles to the south. Within two years the State Line Bar was boarded up. Within five years, almost everyone was gone.
The Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railway had built a section camp here in 1903 and called it Rock Island. The post office arrived in 1908 with the bilingual name Glenrio, from the Spanish for "river valley." The Ozark Trail came through in 1917, and on November 11, 1926, that trail was reborn as U.S. Route 66. For the next 47 years Glenrio was a classic Mother Road stop, the place where westbound drivers crossed into Texas with its Lone Star wind and eastbound drivers had their last New Mexico green-chile fix before the High Plains stretched out ahead of them.
The Texas Longhorn Motel and its yellow neon sign reading "First Motel in Texas" (or "Last Motel in Texas," depending on direction) became one of the iconic photographs of Route 66 culture. The State Line Bar, the Brownlee Diner, the Texaco station, the Little Juarez Cafe, the neat wood-frame houses where the railroad workers and diner operators lived: all of it still stands, gray and dry, along the original concrete ribbon of the old Mother Road. The Glenrio Historic District, 31.7 acres straddling the state line, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2007. Seventeen structures survive. The NPS Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program covers Glenrio's story in detail. Pixar's production designers used Glenrio as one of the visual references for the abandoned Radiator Springs in Cars (2006). Access is free and open, the old Mother Road runs right through the middle of the site, and you can park and walk the whole district in 20 minutes.
11. Vulture City, Arizona
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Henry Wickenburg was an Austrian-born prospector who had come out of California into the Sonoran Desert in 1863 chasing rumors of gold. According to the story he told and retold for the rest of his life, he was tracking a stray burro through the creosote when a chunk of quartz under his boot caught his eye. The chunk was studded with free gold. The vein he had stumbled across, in a low ridge crowned by basalt that the local Yavapai people associated with a roosting vulture, became the most productive gold mine in Arizona history. The Vulture Mine produced roughly 340,000 ounces of gold and 260,000 ounces of silver between 1863 and 1942, and the town that grew up around the mill on the Hassayampa River wash was called Vulture City.
At its peak in the 1880s, Vulture City held perhaps 5,000 people: boarding houses, an assay office built in 1884 that still stands today, a mess hall, a brothel called the Glory Hole, and a small school. The mine had a persistent problem with high-grading, miners smuggling out ore in their boots, lunch pails, and body cavities. The company's response was extreme: anyone caught with stolen gold was hanged from a large ironwood tree near Henry Wickenburg's adobe house. By the time the practice ended, 18 men had been strung up from that single tree. The tree is still there, leafless and gnarled, in the desert behind the assay office. The official Atlas Obscura entry for Vulture City documents the hanging tree's current condition.
Wickenburg himself sold most of his interest in the mine in 1866 for what later proved to be a fraction of its value. He watched the Vulture become one of the most profitable mines in the Southwest while he struggled to scratch out a living on a small farm nearby. On May 14, 1905, broke and despondent at age 85, he shot himself. The mine ran intermittently through the early 20th century and finally closed in October 1942 when the federal War Production Board issued Executive Order L-208, shutting down all non-essential gold mining in the United States. New owners acquired the property in 2012 and reopened Vulture City as a guided tour attraction, covering the assay office, the schoolhouse, Wickenburg's original adobe, the mine headframe descending 2,100 feet into the desert below, and the hanging tree. It's one of the few ghost towns in the Southwest that's both historically significant and fully accessible without a 4x4.
12. Garnet, Montana
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Garnet sits in a high saddle of the Garnet Range, 35 miles northeast of Missoula, at the dead end of a steep, rutted dirt road that's closed to vehicles in winter and only passable to high-clearance vehicles in summer. That inaccessibility is precisely why Garnet is in better shape today than most Montana ghost towns twice its size. When the Bureau of Land Management took over administration in 1972, they found a town that hadn't been seriously picked over, because the road in was simply too bad for casual salvagers. The BLM's policy since then has been to stabilize without restoring: fix the roofs, reinforce the floors, but touch nothing else.
Placer miners had worked the gulches around First Chance, Bear, and Elk creeks since the 1860s, but it was the construction of Sam Ritchey's stamp mill in 1895 that turned the loose collection of prospectors into an actual town. They first named it Mitchell, then renamed it Garnet in 1897 for the semi-precious red stones that wash out of the surrounding ridges. The town grew to roughly 1,000 people by 1898, with four hotels (the J.K. Wells Hotel still stands, its wallpaper peeling in the guest rooms), 13 saloons, a meat market, a doctor's office, an assay office, a school, and a small Chinatown of placer workers behind the main street. The easy ore played out within five years. A major fire ripped through the business district in 1912 and burned about half the town. Mining limped on through the 1920s, and a brief Depression-era revival in the 1934 to 1942 period brought some life back after President Roosevelt doubled the price of gold, but by 1960 the last full-time resident, Marion Dahl, had left.
What the BLM preserved at Garnet is more authentically frozen in time than any other ghost town in Montana, including Bannack. Schoolbooks are still piled on the desks in the one-room schoolhouse. The bar at Frank Davey's saloon still has its original woodwork. The Wells Hotel has four rooms with original iron bedframes and, in some cases, the original bedding. In winter, when the road closes to motor vehicles, the BLM rents the two cabins at the edge of town to skiers and snowmobilers who make the 12-mile approach across the Garnet Range backcountry. There's no experience quite like staying in a ghost town in January, with the snow piled against the saloon windows and the wind working through the planks of the empty hotel.
13. Animas Forks, Colorado
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Few ghost towns in America sit higher than Animas Forks. The town occupies a windswept basin 12 miles northeast of Silverton in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado, at exactly 11,185 feet above sea level, where the Animas River, the West Fork, and Cinnamon Creek converge in a treeless bowl of tundra grass and scattered spruce. Prospectors built the first log cabin here in 1873 following silver and gold veins up out of the Animas Canyon. Within two years the camp had a post office (opened February 8, 1875), a saloon named the Lucky Strike, a hotel, a general store, and its own weekly newspaper, the Animas Forks Pioneer, which ran from 1882 to 1886 and was one of the highest-altitude newspapers ever published in the United States.
By 1883, when the population peaked at about 450 people, Animas Forks had become the highest incorporated town in the United States. The winters were catastrophic. Between January 27 and February 19, 1884, a 23-day blizzard buried the entire town under 25 feet of snow. Residents tunneled between buildings through underground passages and dug down through the snowpack to reach second-story windows. When the storm broke, the whole town was essentially a single igloo with buildings inside it. The architectural showpiece of Animas Forks is the Duncan House, a two-story frame home with a distinctive hexagonal bay window built in 1879 for businessman Walter Duncan, who never actually moved in. It has been standing at 11,000 feet for 145 years.
Otto Mears, the Colorado road and railroad builder known as the "Pathfinder of the San Juans," extended his Silverton Northern Railroad up the gulch in 1904 to serve the Gold Prince Mill, briefly the largest ore concentrating mill in Colorado. By 1910 the silver price had collapsed far enough to make even the Gold Prince unviable. The post office closed on November 30, 1915, and within five years the town was fully empty. Unlike many San Juan mining camps, Animas Forks was never seriously ransacked. The BLM began stabilizing the structures in 1997, and today nine buildings stand intact above timberline: the Duncan House, the Gustavson House, the Eckard House, the original jail, the post office, the William Duncan store, and three log cabins. Visitors on the Alpine Loop scenic byway can walk freely inside every structure. The Colorado Encyclopedia's entry on Animas Forks covers the town's mining history in scholarly detail. In July the surrounding meadows are covered in wildflowers. By September, the first snows arrive. By November, the basin is closed under four to eight feet of snow and stays that way until late May.
# PART 2: WILD WEST TOURIST TOWNS
These seven towns were genuine ghost towns or near-ghost towns at various points in their histories. Today they have permanent residents, operating businesses, and tourism infrastructures built around their wild west heritage. They belong on this list because their history is real, their original architecture is substantially intact, and no serious treatment of ghost towns USA can ignore them. That said, the experience you get at these towns is substantially different from the frozen, empty quality of the abandoned sites above.
14. Deadwood, South Dakota
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In April 1876, a whisper spread through Dakota Territory that gold had been found in a gulch in the Black Hills. Within weeks the gulch had a name, Deadwood Gulch, and within months it had a town: roughly 5,000 people living in tents, canvas lean-tos, and clapboard saloons jammed along a single muddy main drag cut into the steep walls of the draw. There was no law, no county government, no courts. The Black Hills were still legally part of the Great Sioux Reservation under the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, and the US Army had been ordered to keep prospectors out. The Army tried and failed. The gold rush happened anyway.
On August 2, 1876, exactly four months after the rush began, Wild Bill Hickok sat down to a game of five-card draw at Nuttal and Mann's Saloon No. 10 on Main Street. He was a former US Marshal, a veteran of Abilene and Hayes City, famous enough that people paid to look at him. He sat with his back to the door, unusual for a man with his history, either because the seat with a wall behind it was already taken or because he had grown complacent. A drifter named Jack McCall, twenty-five years old, crossed the room and shot him in the back of the head at close range. Hickok's hand, held at the moment of death, contained black aces and eights, a combination of cards that has been known as the Dead Man's Hand in American poker culture ever since. He was 39 years old. His shooting is the founding myth of Deadwood, the event that hardened the town's legend before the year was even out.
Ten days after Hickok died, a smallpox epidemic swept through the camp. Calamity Jane, the frontier scout and performer whose actual biography was so tangled with her self-mythology that even contemporary journalists couldn't separate the two, reportedly nursed the sick in a makeshift pesthouse on the edge of town. She was buried next to Hickok in 1903, on Mount Moriah Cemetery above the town, at her own request. The graves draw visitors by the thousands every year.
The Homestake Mine, opened in 1877 in the nearby town of Lead by George Hearst (father of William Randolph), became the longest-running gold mine in the western hemisphere over its 125-year life, producing more than 40 million ounces of gold. The mine's payroll and supply demands kept Deadwood alive long after the initial placer gold was exhausted. A catastrophic fire in September 1879 burned more than 300 buildings. The town rebuilt in brick and stone. A spring flood the following year scoured the gulch. The town rebuilt again.
By the 1980s the Victorian commercial district was crumbling for want of preservation funding. In November 1989, South Dakota voters approved limited-stakes gambling in Deadwood specifically to generate revenue for historic preservation. The gamble worked in every sense. Casinos moved into the restored Victorian facades along Main Street. The revenue funded the restoration of streets, facades, and major landmarks. The No. 10 Saloon was rebuilt and re-opened as a casino-bar where reenactors stage the Hickok shooting multiple times daily in summer. The 1961 National Historic Landmark designation is what anchors the whole enterprise legally; the gambling license was just the economic engine. Seth Bullock, the sheriff who brought law to Deadwood in 1876 after Hickok's death, has his own hotel still operating on Main Street, and Al Swearengen, the saloon owner whose methods were memorably portrayed in HBO's Deadwood series, ran the Gem Theater at the corner of Main and Wall for more than 20 years.
15. Virginia City, Nevada
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Perched on the steep eastern face of Mount Davidson at 6,200 feet, Virginia City was born in June 1859 when two Irish prospectors, Peter O'Riley and Patrick McLaughlin, struck a vein of blue-black ore while digging a water trench and threw the dark stuff aside as useless. A passing Californian named Henry Comstock looked at the pile, recognized silver sulphide, claimed a share of the partners' dig through sheer bluster, and gave his name to one of the richest single ore deposits ever discovered on earth. The Comstock Lode would yield close to 400 million dollars in gold and silver over the next 20 years: enough money to build San Francisco's first downtown, fund much of the Union cause in the Civil War, and bankroll the first transcontinental railroad. Mark Twain arrived in 1862 to write for the Territorial Enterprise on C Street, signed an article "Mark Twain" for the first time in February 1863, and spent two years covering the town's mayhem before the altitude, the blasting, and the general lawlessness drove him to California.
By 1876 the population had reached roughly 25,000, making Virginia City one of the largest cities between Chicago and San Francisco. The Big Bonanza, struck in 1873 at a depth of 1,200 feet in the Consolidated Virginia Mine, produced 105 million dollars in three years and created four instant multi-millionaires: John Mackay, James Fair, James Flood, and William O'Brien, the so-called Bonanza Kings. The Great Fire of October 26, 1875 destroyed about two-thirds of the town and cost 12 million dollars; the town rebuilt within months. After 1878 the ore began to play out, and by 1920 fewer than 1,500 people remained.
The bust froze Virginia City in remarkable amber. Piper's Opera House, the Bucket of Blood Saloon, the Fourth Ward School (1876), the Delta Saloon with its Suicide Table (a faro layout supposedly associated with three owners' deaths), and dozens of board-front businesses still line C Street exactly as they stood in the 1870s. The 1961 National Historic Landmark designation cemented the town's identity as a preserved heritage site. Today the Virginia and Truckee Railroad (restored), the Mackay Mansion, and the International Hotel draw about 2 million visitors a year. The Mark Twain Museum occupies the original Territorial Enterprise building on C Street. The mines under the town are still technically open for tours, which gives a visitor the eerie experience of standing in Victorian buildings above tunnels that run for hundreds of miles underground.
16. Bisbee, Arizona
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Tucked into a narrow canyon in the Mule Mountains 90 miles southeast of Tucson, Bisbee is the kind of town that doesn't make spatial sense until you stand in it. Victorian houses climb the canyon walls on near-vertical slopes, connected to the road below by hundreds of steps cut directly into the rock face. The main commercial street runs along the canyon floor for about four blocks before the canyon pinches off. Above everything, the terraced walls of the Lavender Pit open-pit copper mine glow in shades of pink and purple in the afternoon light, a bowl a mile wide and 950 feet deep cut into the mountain by 70 years of blasting. The town's founding anomaly was that Judge DeWitt Bisbee, a San Francisco financier whose name is on every road sign and museum label in town, never once set foot in Arizona.
Lieutenant Jack Dunn discovered copper ore in the Mule Mountains in 1877 while scouting for Apache raids. The Copper Queen Mine opened in 1880, Phelps Dodge Corporation acquired it in 1885, and by 1908 Bisbee was the largest city between St. Louis and San Francisco, with more than 20,000 residents, 47 saloons along Brewery Gulch, the first community library in Arizona Territory, and a newspaper, the Bisbee Daily Review, covering everything from labor trouble to Apache raids. The Copper Queen Hotel, opened in 1902 and still operating today, is one of the few continuously operating hotels in the American Southwest from that era, and one of the most convincingly haunted, with an entire floor of documented ghost activity that has made it a staple of paranormal travel guides.
The darkest chapter of Bisbee's history is the Bisbee Deportation of July 12, 1917. At dawn that morning, Cochise County Sheriff Harry Wheeler and a deputized posse of 2,200 armed vigilantes, organized by Phelps Dodge management, rounded up approximately 1,286 striking miners and their sympathizers at gunpoint, herded them to the Warren Baseball Park, loaded them into cattle cars, and shipped them to Hermanas, New Mexico, where they were dumped in the desert with nothing and told never to return. The strike was an IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) action demanding safer conditions and equal treatment for Mexican and Eastern European miners. A federal investigation condemned the deportation as illegal but no one was ever prosecuted. The event remains the largest mass deportation of American workers in United States history.
Phelps Dodge ended all mining operations in July 1975. Instead of collapsing, Bisbee reinvented itself through the 1970s and 1980s as an artist colony, cheap enough for painters, potters, writers, and back-to-the-landers to afford the steep Victorian houses. The Queen Mine Tour, opened in February 1976, takes visitors 1,500 feet into the mountain on the original mining rail cars, wearing hard hats and carbide lamps. The Bisbee Mining and Historical Museum tells the full story of the copper era and the deportation. Today the town has around 5,000 residents and a main street mix of galleries, wine bars, and vintage clothing stores occupying the same brick buildings where the 47 saloons once ran.
17. Tombstone, Arizona
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In 1877, a prospector named Ed Schieffelin rode out alone from Camp Huachuca to look for silver in the San Pedro Valley. The Army soldiers he left behind told him the only stone he'd find out there would be his own tombstone. He found silver and named his first claim Tombstone in their honor. The field he had found turned out to be the richest silver district in Arizona history, eventually producing 32 million troy ounces of silver, and the town that grew up around it lived up to its name in almost every respect. By 1881 Tombstone had 7,000 residents, four churches, two newspapers, a bowling alley, an ice cream parlor, and more than 100 saloons and gambling houses lining Allen Street. It also had the Earps.
At approximately 3 p.m. on October 26, 1881, Marshal Virgil Earp, his brothers Wyatt and Morgan deputized as his assistants, and the consumptive dentist John Henry "Doc" Holliday walked west on Fremont Street to confront the Clanton and McLaury brothers in a narrow lot behind the O.K. Corral livery stable. Witnesses later disagreed about almost every detail except the outcome. Approximately 30 shots were fired in roughly 30 seconds. When the smoke cleared, Billy Clanton and Tom and Frank McLaury were dead, and Virgil and Morgan Earp were both wounded. Doc Holliday had a graze on his hip. Wyatt was untouched. The Clantons and McLaurys were the "Cowboys," a loosely organized faction of ranchers and rustlers who had a running feud with the Earps over law enforcement jurisdiction and cattle. Wyatt was technically a deputy US Marshal in addition to serving as Tombstone's deputy sheriff. The legal argument over who was the aggressor in those 30 seconds ran through the Tombstone courts for months, resulted in the Earps being charged with murder, and ended without conviction. The gunfight, which lasted less than a minute, became the single most analyzed 30 seconds in the history of the American West, the subject of hundreds of books, dozens of films, and more legal proceedings than any other frontier incident. The most recent major scholarly reassessment is Jeff Guinn's "The Last Gunfight" (2011), which attempts to strip away the mythology and describe what actually happened in that vacant lot.
The aftermath was equally violent. Morgan Earp was shot through a billiard hall window on March 18, 1882. Wyatt responded with his Vendetta Ride, hunting down the men he held responsible across the Arizona Territory and beyond. Two massive fires in 1881 and 1882 burned out the business districts. And then the mines hit water. The pumping station burned down in 1886, the mines flooded, and the boom collapsed. The population fell from nearly 10,000 to a few hundred within a decade.
Tombstone survived on stubbornness and mythology. The self-proclaimed "Town Too Tough to Die" was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1962. Allen Street was closed to cars. Daily reenactments of the O.K. Corral gunfight fill the original lot through the tourist season. The Boothill Graveyard, where Billy Clanton and the McLaurys are buried alongside Dutch Annie, George Johnson (hanged by mistake, according to his headstone), and about 300 others, draws a half-million visitors a year. The reenactments and the souvenir shops are relentless and unapologetic, which is exactly in keeping with the Tombstone spirit. The Crystal Palace Saloon still operates on Allen Street in its 1880 building.
18. Calico, California
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Calico sits on a chalky ridge in the Mojave Desert 10 miles northeast of Barstow, backed by a range of mountains striped in red, pink, yellow, and white like a bolt of printed cloth (calico cloth, specifically, which is how everything here got its name). Four prospectors hit a silver vein at the Silver King Mine in 1881, and within four years the town had more than 1,200 people, 500 working mines, three hotels, five general stores, a Chinatown, and the only school for 50 miles in any direction. At its peak between 1883 and 1885, Calico was the largest silver producer in California, pulling roughly 86 million dollars worth of ore (in modern equivalent) out of the surrounding canyon walls.
Then the federal government blinked. The Sherman Silver Purchase Act was repealed in 1893, the silver price crashed from around a dollar to 57 cents an ounce by 1896, and within two years the mines were economically worthless. The post office shut in 1898, the last borax operations wound down around 1907, and Calico became a genuine ghost town, left to the desert wind and periodic vandals. A semi-precious stones collector named Lucy Lane became the last holdout before she too left.
In 1951, Walter Knott purchased the entire site. Knott was already famous as the founder of Knott's Berry Farm in Buena Park, but his connection to Calico was personal: he had worked in the mines as a young man, his uncle had driven a stagecoach through the town, and he felt a preservation obligation. He poured approximately 700,000 dollars and several years into rebuilding the place from period photographs, preserving five original structures and reconstructing the rest in period-correct style. Calico Historical Landmark No. 782 was registered in November 1962. Knott donated the whole operation to San Bernardino County in 1966, which still runs it as a regional park. In 2005 the state declared Calico California's Official State Silver Rush Ghost Town.
The honest visitor note is this: Calico is fun, accessible, family-friendly, and has a genuinely impressive mining history. The mine train ride into Maggie Mine is worth doing. But a significant portion of what you see was built in the 1950s from photographs, not from original timber. This is stated clearly by the county park itself. If you want arrested decay authenticity, go to Bodie. If you want a well-organized Mojave Desert ghost town experience with good facilities and a legitimate silver rush backstory, Calico delivers.
19. Wallace, Idaho
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Wallace, Idaho makes a series of claims that sound like boosterism until you look them up and discover they're all true. Every building in the downtown district is on the National Register of Historic Places, making it the only town in the United States where 100 percent of the downtown is federally recognized historic property. The last stoplight on Interstate 90, which runs from Seattle to Boston, was removed from the middle of Wallace's main street in 1991, making Wallace technically the center point of the entire interstate highway system. And on September 25, 2004, Mayor Ron Garitone climbed onto a downtown manhole cover, declared the exact spot the Center of the Universe on the grounds that anything which can't be disproved must be accepted as true, and had a commemorative plaque installed. The plaque is still there.
Colonel William R. Wallace built a cedar cabin in a marshy flat where four creeks meet on the South Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River in 1884, and the silver strike that followed (the Tiger and Poorman lodes, the same year) opened up the richest silver district in American history. Over the following century, the Silver Valley produced more than 1.2 billion ounces of silver, plus enormous tonnages of lead and zinc, making it the most productive silver region in the world. The town burned twice: once in 1890 when a wood-stove fire took out most of the business district, and again, massively, on August 20, 1910, when the Big Burn, the largest wildfire in American history, roared out of the surrounding Bitterroot forest and destroyed about a third of Wallace before a freak rainstorm killed it. Forest Ranger Ed Pulaski saved 45 of his men by driving them at gunpoint into the Nicholson mine adit and holding the door shut while the fire passed overhead; the multi-use firefighting tool he invented afterward, combining an ax and a hoe, bears his name and is still standard issue for federal wildland firefighters.
Actress Lana Turner was born here on February 8, 1921, above a saloon. Brothels operated openly on Cedar Street under an arrangement between the owners and the city government from 1884 through January 1988, when a federal pressure campaign finally shut down the Oasis Rooms. The owners left everything behind: pin-up calendars from 1988, furniture, cigarette cases, bed linens. The Oasis Bordello Museum has been open for tours since the early 1990s, maintained in exactly the state of the final morning. Wallace today is a genuine small town with real residents, a ski resort at Silver Mountain nearby, and a main street of 1910-era brick buildings that survived both fires and all subsequent development because no one had the money to tear them down and rebuild. The Wallace Historic District organizes walking tours year-round.
20. Jerome, Arizona
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Jerome is built on a 30-degree slope on the side of Cleopatra Hill, hanging more than 5,000 feet above the Verde Valley on a mountainside so steep that the streets are essentially switchbacks and several buildings share the same roof level from different sides. The first mining claims on the hill were filed in 1876 on what became the United Verde Mine, but the town didn't get its permanent name until 1883, when the backers persuaded New York financier Eugene Murray Jerome (a first cousin of Winston Churchill's mother, though neither of them ever knew the town existed) to invest in the company in exchange for naming rights. Jerome himself never visited Arizona.
Senator William A. Clark of Montana bought the United Verde Mine in 1888 and turned it into one of the richest copper operations in the world. His son-in-law, James "Rawhide Jimmy" Douglas, developed the competing Little Daisy Mine starting in 1912 and pulled 10 million dollars in copper out of it in 1916 alone. At peak in the early 1920s, Jerome had more than 10,000 residents, four newspapers, a Chinatown with its own main street, opium dens, a red-light district called Husband's Alley, and a reputation the New York Sun had labeled, in a famous 1903 dispatch, as "the wickedest town in America." The mines kept blasting the orebody directly underneath the city. Massive open-pit blasting in 1925 destabilized the slope and set off a slow-motion slide that moved the 1898 jail 200 feet downhill across Hull Avenue, where it came to rest, intact, leaning against another building. You can still see the jail from the main street, slightly canted, visibly displaced from its original location. It has become Jerome's signature image.
The United Verde Mine closed in 1953 after 77 years of continuous production and approximately 33 million tons of ore. The population crashed to around 50 people within five years. The National Historic Landmark designation in 1967 prevented most of the demolitions that had already begun. Then, through the early 1970s, artists, potters, glassblowers, and back-to-the-landers drawn by spectacularly cheap Victorian real estate began moving in, and Jerome slowly reinvented itself as an arts community. Today it has around 464 residents, a main street of galleries, wine tasting rooms (rock musician Maynard James Keenan of Tool runs a winery in the valley below called Caduceus Cellars), and ghost tour operations centered on the Jerome Grand Hotel, which occupies the 1926 United Verde Hospital building at the top of the hill and has been rated one of the most haunted hotels in the United States by multiple paranormal investigation programs.
FAQ: Ghost Towns USA
Which is the best ghost town to visit in the USA?
- ●Bodie, California is the consensus choice among historians, photographers, and urban explorers for the purest "arrested decay" experience. It's a State Historic Park with no admission-time restrictions, legally accessible, and preserved to a standard that no other American ghost town matches. Plan for a full half-day: the site is large enough that a rushed hour-long visit misses most of it. The 13-mile unpaved access road is worth every mile.
- ●For first-time ghost town visitors who want accessibility and period atmosphere without the rough road, St. Elmo, Colorado and Bannack, Montana are strong alternatives with original structures, free or low-cost access, and enough interpretive material to orient non-specialists. St. Elmo has a working general store for supplies and a paved main road to within two miles.
- ●For the wild west tourist experience, Deadwood, South Dakota combines authentic history, preserved Victorian architecture, working casinos, and Mount Moriah Cemetery with Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane's graves.
- ●For the most dramatic visual setting, Animas Forks, Colorado wins: nine stabilized buildings at 11,185 feet with the San Juan Mountain peaks rising above them on three sides. The approach on the Alpine Loop byway is itself one of the best scenic drives in Colorado.
- ●For most haunted atmosphere, the Jerome Grand Hotel in Jerome, Arizona or the Copper Queen Hotel in Bisbee, Arizona both combine genuine heritage architecture with well-documented paranormal reputations.
Which American ghost town is the most completely abandoned?
Centralia, Pennsylvania is the most dramatically abandoned in terms of its original function being entirely gone: the streets exist, the infrastructure grid exists, but almost every structure has been demolished under federal eminent domain, and a mine fire has been burning underground for 64 years. Among towns with standing buildings still intact, Animas Forks, Colorado and Garnet, Montana come closest to total abandonment: zero permanent residents, seasonal road access only, and original interiors preserved without restoration. Thurmond, West Virginia technically has five residents but is managed by the National Park Service and has no functioning economy. North Brother Island is the most inaccessible, with no public access whatsoever.
Can I camp at a ghost town?
Several legal camping options exist within the ghost towns USA circuit. Bannack State Park in Montana has a developed campground adjacent to the historic district, open May through October, with vault toilets and fire rings. The Bureau of Land Management land surrounding Garnet, Montana and Animas Forks, Colorado allows dispersed camping on BLM land outside the established historic district boundaries, typically within the broader wilderness area rather than directly adjacent to the buildings. Two BLM-managed cabins at Garnet are available for winter rental through Recreation.gov, offering the experience of sleeping in a ghost town under feet of Garnet Range snow. Great Smoky Mountains National Park's Elkmont campground, consistently the most requested campground in the national park system, sits immediately adjacent to the Elkmont Historic District, and many campers walk the quarter-mile to the Daisy Town cottages at dusk. Always check the most current regulations for each site; federal ghost towns typically prohibit camping within the historic district boundaries themselves, and fire rules vary by season and drought level.
Are ghost towns dangerous?
The hazards vary significantly by site and deserve specific attention rather than generic warnings. At Centralia, Pennsylvania, ground temperatures above active fire zones can exceed the surface on contact, and sinkholes have opened without warning at multiple points over the past 40 years. The area around steam vents should be approached only from established paths and never at night. At Picher, Oklahoma, the soil throughout the Tar Creek Superfund zone contains dangerous concentrations of lead, zinc, and cadmium from a century of mine drainage. The EPA recommends that children avoid any contact with bare soil in the area. At most western ghost towns with standing wooden structures, the four primary hazards are unstable floors, rotted roof timbers and ceiling joists that may give way without visible warning, open mine shafts in the surrounding hills (never marked, never fenced, sometimes covered with rotted boards), and the absence of cell service for emergencies. The open-shaft danger can't be overstated: mine shafts in the San Juan Mountains, the Mojave Desert, and the Bitterroot Range have killed experienced hikers who stepped through apparently solid ground. Bring a hiking partner, tell someone your destination and expected return, carry water for the desert sites, and carry warm layers for the high-altitude Colorado sites where afternoon thunderstorms can roll in with 30 minutes' notice.
What's the best season to visit ghost towns?
Season matters enormously at several entries on this list. For western ghost towns above 8,000 feet, including Bodie (8,375 feet), St. Elmo (9,961 feet), and Animas Forks (11,185 feet), the practical visiting window is late June through early October. Snow closes the access roads from November to late May or early June depending on the year. Bodie State Historic Park maintains the last three miles of access road and is technically open year-round, but the 13-mile unpaved approach from Highway 395 becomes impassable for two-wheel-drive vehicles in winter and the park itself doesn't plow. Call ahead if visiting after October. For Mojave and Sonoran desert sites (Rhyolite, Calico, Glenrio, Vulture City), spring from mid-March to late May and fall from mid-September to mid-November offer the most comfortable temperatures. Summer visits to these desert sites are possible but should begin before 8 a.m., carry extra water, and end by noon. The Elkmont Historic District in the Smokies is pleasant year-round; the firefly lottery window is June only.
Are any of these ghost towns actually haunted?
The honest answer is that several of them have well-documented paranormal reputations that have been investigated formally and informally by multiple teams over many years. The Jerome Grand Hotel in Jerome, Arizona, which occupies the 1926 United Verde Hospital building at the top of Cleopatra Hill, is consistently rated among the three most haunted hotels in the United States by paranormal research organizations. The Copper Queen Hotel in Bisbee has been the subject of paranormal investigations going back to the early 1990s, with specific phenomena attributed to specific rooms. Bannack, Montana's Hotel Meade has a persistent history of reported apparitions on the upper floors, and the annual Bannack Days events include ghost tours after dark. Garnet, Montana's isolation and the specific quality of its arrested decay (original curtains, original bottles, original wallpaper) make it one of the most psychologically powerful ghost town interiors in the country, regardless of one's position on the supernatural. Most seasoned urbex visitors report that the most authentic "haunting" in any of these places is simply the pressure of specific, documented history in a confined space: standing in the saddle of Animas Forks basin with the wind coming off the tundra and nine intact buildings from the 1880s surrounding you on every side, or in the general store at St. Elmo where Annabelle Stark rang up her last customer sometime in 1952, produces its own category of temporal vertigo that photographs rarely capture.
Why do ghost towns survive better in the American West than in the East?
Several structural factors favor preservation in the West, and they compound each other. Western ghost towns were typically built in arid or semi-arid environments where wood decays slowly in the absence of moisture. The dry air of the Mojave Desert, the Great Basin, and the high-altitude Rockies is hostile to the mold, fungus, and wood-boring insects that destroy wooden structures in humid eastern climates within decades. Western ghost towns were also frequently built in remote locations with poor road access, which protected them from the salvage crews and casual vandalism that stripped most eastern ruins of anything reusable within five to ten years of abandonment. A third factor is land ownership: western gold and silver rush towns were often built on federal land managed by the Bureau of Land Management or the Forest Service, which gave government agencies a legal basis to preserve the sites once the mining economy collapsed and private owners had left. In the eastern United States, most industrial ghost towns were on private land that was sold, subdivided, and developed as soon as the original industry departed, or demolished for the insurance value of the building materials. The handful of genuine eastern ghost towns that survive (North Brother Island is the most dramatic example) typically survived through extreme inaccessibility rather than deliberate preservation.
What's the largest ghost town in America?
The answer depends on the metric. By original population at peak, Virginia City, Nevada (around 25,000 people in 1876) was the largest genuine western ghost town by residents, larger than many state capitals of the era. Deadwood, South Dakota peaked at roughly 5,000 at the 1876 rush, and Tombstone, Arizona had perhaps 7,000 to 10,000 at the 1881 peak. By current area of surviving infrastructure, Centralia, Pennsylvania covers the most ground for a site classified as a ghost town, with a full street grid, utility infrastructure, and fire hydrants across a borough footprint of roughly 1.5 square miles. By building count, Bodie, California with 110 surviving structures is the largest preserved ghost town in the country. By dramatic visual impact, Rhyolite, Nevada's collection of concrete ruins spread across a flat desert basin reads as more "city-like" at first glance than any other fully abandoned American site.
Go Further
The spots and stories in this guide connect to a wider network of American and international urbex research on Urbex Maps. Every entry above has a free GPS pin on the interactive atlas, and the full atlas covers hundreds of additional sites not featured here, including Ruby, Arizona; Two Guns, Arizona; Mossmans ghost town in Wyoming; the original Panamint City ruins in Death Valley; the Six-Shooter Siding stop in Utah; and dozens of abandoned mining camps across the Colorado Rockies that never made any top-20 list but are extraordinary in person.
- ●Abandoned and Haunted Places in the USA: 16 Paranormal Urbex Spots covers Centralia, Picher, North Brother Island, and 13 other sites where the boundary between ghost town and haunted ruin dissolves entirely. Several of the entries overlap with this guide, with a different editorial angle: the paranormal pillar approaches each site through its documented history of reported phenomena rather than its social and economic history.
- ●Abandoned Places USA: 50 States, 50 Iconic Urbex Spots is the thorough atlas with one anchor spot per state, including Bodie, Bannerman Castle on the Hudson, the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, Michigan Central Station in Detroit, and Ellis Island's sealed south wing. Ghost towns appear throughout but share the stage with asylums, industrial ruins, and military sites.
- ●Centralia, Pennsylvania: Inside America's Burning Ghost Town is the full deep-dive on the mine fire that has been burning since 1962, with historical photographs, a timeline of the evacuation, and the current legal situation for the five remaining residents.
- ●North Brother Island: Typhoid Mary's Abandoned Hospital covers the 13-acre island ghost town in the New York City East River, with the General Slocum disaster, the full history of Mary Mallon's confinement, and the current bird sanctuary situation.
- ●Picher, Oklahoma: Tar Creek and the Superfund Ghost Town covers the most contaminated abandoned American town in full, including the lead testing data, the federal buyout program, and what the chat piles look like today.
- ●Luoghi Abbandonati Italia: I 20 Posti Piu Iconici explores the Italian counterpart to the American ghost town tradition, from abandoned Apennine hill villages like Craco and Pentedattilo to the industrial ruins of the postwar economic miracle. The Italian approach to abandonment differs profoundly from the American one: fewer legal protections, more aggressive reclamation by nature, and a completely different relationship between the state and its ruined heritage.
- ●The Interactive Map has free GPS pins, access notes, legal status flags, and photo galleries for every spot in this guide and thousands of others worldwide. No account required. Bookmark it before your next road trip.
The ghost towns of America are not memorials to failure. They're snapshots of ambition at the precise moment the ground dropped out from under it: the day the ore ran out, the day the railroad bypassed the town, the day the federal government declared the water too poisonous to drink. Standing in any of the 20 places described above, you're standing in the exact location where American optimism hit its limit. That's an experience worth the drive, the rough road, and the altitude sickness. The spots are here. The GPS pins are free. Go find them.
