A ghost town is an abandoned village, town
or city, usually one which contains substantial
visible remains. A town often becomes a ghost
town because the economic activity that supported
it has failed, or due to natural or human-caused
disasters such as floods, government actions,
uncontrolled lawlessness, war, or nuclear
disasters. The term can sometimes refer to
cities, towns, and neighborhoods which are
still populated, but significantly less so
than in years past; for example those affected
by high levels of unemployment and dereliction.
Some ghost towns, especially those that preserve
period-specific architecture, have become
tourist attractions. Some examples are Bannack,
Montana; Calico, California; Centralia, Pennsylvania;
and Oatman, Arizona in the United States;
Barkerville, British Columbia in Canada; Craco
in Italy; Elizabeth Bay and Kolmanskop in
Namibia; and Pripyat in Ukraine. Visiting,
writing about, and photographing ghost towns
is a minor industry. A recent modern-day example
is Ōkuma, Fukushima, which was abandoned
due to the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami
incident.
There is a ghost town that is an incumbent
de jure capital: Plymouth in Montserrat.
Definition
The exact definition of a ghost town varies
between individuals, and between cultures.
Some writers discount settlements that were
abandoned as a result of a natural or human-made
disaster, using the term only to describe
settlements which were deserted because they
were no longer economically viable; T. Lindsey
Baker, author of Ghost Towns of Texas, defines
a ghost town as "a town for which the reason
for being no longer exists". Some believe
that any settlement with visible tangible
remains should not be called a ghost town;
others say, conversely, that a ghost town
should contain the tangible remains of buildings.
Whether or not the settlement must be completely
deserted, or may contain a small population,
is also a matter for debate. Generally, though,
the term is used in a looser sense, encompassing
any and all of these definitions. The American
author Lambert Florin's preferred definition
of a ghost town was simply "a shadowy semblance
of a former self".
Reasons for abandonment
Factors leading to abandonment of towns include
depleted natural resources, economic activity
shifting elsewhere, railroads and roads bypassing
or no longer accessing the town, human intervention,
disasters, massacres, wars, and the shifting
of politics or fall of empires. A town can
also be abandoned when it is part of an exclusion
zone due to natural or man-made causes.
Economic activity shifting elsewhere
Ghost towns may result when the single activity
or resource that created a boomtown is depleted
or the resource economy undergoes a "bust".
Boomtowns can often decrease in size as fast
as they initially grew. Sometimes, all or
nearly the entire population can desert the
town, resulting in a ghost town.
The dismantling of a boomtown can often occur
on a planned basis. Mining companies nowadays
will create a temporary community to service
a mine site, building all the accommodation
shops and services, and then remove it as
the resource is worked out. A gold rush would
often bring intensive but short-lived economic
activity to a remote village, only to leave
a ghost town once the resource was depleted.
In some cases, multiple factors may remove
the economic basis for a community; some former
mining towns on U.S. Route 66 suffered both
mine closures when the resources were depleted
and loss of highway traffic as US 66 was diverted
away from places like Oatman, Arizona onto
a more direct path.
The Middle East has many ghost towns that
were created when the shifting of politics
or the fall of empires caused capital cities
to be socially or economically non-viable,
such as Ctesiphon.
Human intervention
Railroads and roads bypassing or no longer
accessing a town can create a ghost town.
This was the case in many of the ghost towns
along Ontario's historic Opeongo Line, and
along U.S. Route 66 after motorists bypassed
the latter on the faster moving highways I-44
and I-40. Some current ghost towns were originally
founded along railways where steam trains
formerly stopped at periodic intervals to
take on water. Amboy, California was part
of one such series of villages along the Atlantic
and Pacific Railroad across the Mojave Desert.
River re-routing is another factor, one example
being the towns along the Aral Sea.
Ghost towns may be created when land is expropriated
by a government and residents are required
to relocate. One example is the village of
Tyneham in Dorset, England, acquired during
World War II to build an artillery range.
A similar situation occurred in the U.S. when
NASA acquired land to construct the John C.
Stennis Space Center, a rocket testing facility
in Hancock County, Mississippi. This required
NASA to acquire a large) buffer zone because
of the loud noise and potential dangers associated
with testing such rockets. Five thinly populated
rural Mississippi communities, plus the northern
portion of a sixth, along with 700 families
in residence, had to be completely relocated
off the facility.
Sometimes the town might cease to officially
exist, but the physical infrastructure remains.
For example, the five Mississippi communities
that had to be abandoned to build SSC still
have remnants of those communities within
the facility itself. These include city streets
and a one-room school house. Another example
of infrastructure remaining is the former
town of Weston, Illinois, which voted itself
out of existence and turned the land over
for construction of the Fermi National Accelerator
Laboratory. Many houses and even a few barns
remain, used for housing visiting scientists
and storing maintenance equipment, while roads
that used to cross through the site have been
blocked off at the edges of the property,
with gatehouses or simply barricades to prevent
unsupervised access.
Flooding by dams
Construction of dams has produced ghost towns
that have been left underwater. Examples include
the settlement of Loyston, Tennessee, U.S.,
inundated by the creation of Norris Dam. The
town was reorganised and reconstructed on
nearby higher ground. Other examples are The
Lost Villages of Ontario flooded by Saint
Lawrence Seaway construction in 1958, the
hamlets of Nether Hambleton and Middle Hambleton
in Rutland, England, which were flooded to
create Rutland Water, and the villages of
Ashopton and Derwent, England, flooded during
the construction of the Ladybower Reservoir.
Mologa in Russia was flooded by the creation
of Rybinsk reservoir. Many ancient villages
had to be abandoned during construction of
the Three Gorges Dam in China, leading to
displacement of many rural people. In the
Costa Rican province of Guanacaste, the town
of Arenal was rebuilt to make room for the
man-made Lake Arenal. The old town now lies
submerged below the lake. Old Adaminaby was
flooded by a dam of the Snowy River Scheme.
Massacres
Some towns become deserted when their populations
are massacred. The original French village
at Oradour-sur-Glane was destroyed on 10 June
1944 when 642 of its 663 inhabitants, including
women and children, were killed by a German
Waffen-SS company. A new village was built
after the war on a nearby site, and the ruins
of the original have been maintained as a
memorial. No ghost towns exist however at
the massacred Czech villages of Lidice and
Ležáky; there, both villages were systematically
levelled to the ground to leave no trace of
their existence.
Disasters, actual and anticipated
Natural and man-made disasters can create
ghost towns. For example, after being flooded
more than 30 times since their town was founded
in 1845, residents of Pattonsburg, Missouri,
decided to relocate after two floods in 1993.
With government help, the whole town was rebuilt
3 miles away.
Craco, a medieval village in the Italian region
of Basilicata, was evacuated after a landslide
in 1963. Nowadays it is a famous filming location
for many movies, to name a few The Passion
of The Christ by Mel Gibson, Christ Stopped
at Eboli by Francesco Rosi, The Nativity Story
by Catherine Hardwicke and Quantum of Solace
by Marc Forster.
In 1984, Centralia, Pennsylvania was abandoned
due to an uncontainable mine fire, which began
in 1962 and still rages to this day; eventually
the fire reached an abandoned mine underneath
the nearby town of Byrnesville, Pennsylvania,
which caused that mine to catch on fire too
and forced the evacuation of that town as
well.
Ghost towns may also occasionally come into
being due to an anticipated natural disaster
– for example, the Canadian town of Lemieux,
Ontario was abandoned in 1991 after soil testing
revealed that the community was built on an
unstable bed of Leda clay. Two years after
the last building in Lemieux was demolished,
a landslide swept part of the former town-site
into the South Nation River. Two decades earlier,
the Canadian town of Saint-Jean-Vianney, Québec,
also constructed on a Leda clay base, had
been abandoned after a landslide on 4 May
1971, which swept away 41 homes, killing 31
people.
Following the Chernobyl disaster of 1986,
dangerously high levels of nuclear radiation
escaped into the surrounding area, and nearly
200 towns and villages in Ukraine and neighbouring
Belarus were evacuated, including the cities
of Chernobyl and Pripyat. The area was, and
still is, so contaminated with nuclear radiation
that many of the evacuees were never permitted
to return to their homes. Pripyat is the most
famous of these abandoned towns; it was built
for the workers of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power
Plant and had a population of almost 50,000
at the time of the disaster. A similarly large-scale
evacuation followed the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi
nuclear disaster in Japan, and some towns
within the exclusion zone, such as Tomioka,
remain abandoned.
Disease and contamination
Significant fatality rates from epidemics
have produced ghost towns. Some places in
eastern Arkansas were abandoned after over
7,000 Arkansans died during the Spanish Flu
epidemic of 1918 and 1919. Several communities
in Ireland, particularly in the west of the
country, were wiped out due to the Great Famine
in the latter half of the 19th century, and
the years of economic decline that followed.
Catastrophic environmental damage caused by
long-term contamination can also create a
ghost town. Some notable examples are Times
Beach, Missouri, whose residents were exposed
to a high level of dioxins, and Wittenoom,
Western Australia, which was once Australia's
largest source of blue asbestos, but was shut
down in 1966 due to health concerns. Treece
and Picher, twin communities straddling the
Kansas-Oklahoma border, were once one of the
United States' largest sources of zinc and
lead, but over a century of unregulated disposal
of mine tailings led to groundwater contamination
and lead poisoning in the town's children,
eventually resulting in a mandatory Environmental
Protection Agency buyout and evacuation.
Revived ghost towns
A few ghost towns get a second life, often
due to heritage tourism generating a new economy
able to support residents. For example Walhalla,
Victoria, Australia, became almost deserted
after its gold mine ceased operation in 1914,
but owing to its accessibility and proximity
to other attractive locations it has had a
recent economic and holiday population surge.
Alexandria, the second largest city of Egypt,
was a flourishing city in the Ancient era,
but declined during the Middle Ages. It underwent
a dramatic revival during the 19th century;
from a population of 5,000 in 1806, it grew
into a city of over 200,000 inhabitants by
1882, and is now home to over four million
people.
In Algeria, many cities became hamlets after
the end of Late Antiquity. They were revived
with shifts in population during and after
French colonization of Algeria. Oran, currently
the nation's second largest city with 1 million
people, was a village of only a few thousand
people before colonization.
Foncebadón, a village in León, Spain that
was mostly abandoned and only inhabited by
a mother and son, is slowly being revived
owing to the ever-increasing stream of pilgrims
on the road to Santiago de Compostela.
Ghost towns around the world
Africa
Wars and rebellions in some African countries
have left many towns and villages deserted.
Since 2003, when President François Bozizé
came to power, thousands of citizens of the
Central African Republic have been forced
to flee their homes as a result of the escalating
conflict between armed rebels and government
troops. Villages accused of supporting the
rebels, such as Beogombo Deux near Paoua,
are ransacked by government soldiers; those
who are not killed have no choice but to escape
to refugee camps. The instability in the region
also leaves organized and well-equipped bandits
free to terrorize the populace, often leaving
villages abandoned in their wake. Elsewhere
in Africa, the town of Lukangol was burnt
to the ground during tribal clashes in South
Sudan. Before its destruction, the town had
a population of 20,000.
Many of the ghost towns in mineral-rich Africa
are former mining towns. Shortly after the
start of the 1908 diamond rush in German South-West
Africa, now known as Namibia, the German Imperial
government claimed sole mining rights by creating
the Sperrgebiet, effectively criminalizing
new settlement. The small mining towns of
this area, among them Pomona, Elizabeth Bay
and Kolmanskop, were exempt from this ban,
but the denial of new land claims soon rendered
all of them ghost towns.
Asia
In most countries, ghost towns are towns which
were occupied and then abandoned. In China,
there are ghost cities that have never been
occupied.
Many abandoned towns and settlements in the
former Soviet Union were established near
Gulag concentration camps to supply necessary
services. Since most of these camps were abandoned
in the 1950s, the towns were abandoned as
well. One such town is located near the former
Gulag camp called Butugychag. Other towns
were deserted due to deindustrialisation and
the economic crises of the early 1990s attributed
to post-Soviet conflicts.
A recent example of a ghost town is Ōkuma,
Fukushima in Japan after the 2011 Tōhoku
earthquake and tsunami.
Antarctica
The oldest ghost town in Antarctica is on
Deception Island, where in 1906, a Norwegian-Chilean
company set up a whaling station at Whalers
Bay, which they used as a base for their factory
ship, the Gobernador Bories. Other whaling
operations followed suit, and by 1914 there
were thirteen factory ships based there. The
station ceased to be profitable during the
Great Depression, and was abandoned in 1931.
In 1969, the station was partially destroyed
by a volcanic eruption. There are also many
abandoned scientific and military bases in
Antarctica, especially in the Antarctic Peninsula.
The Antarctic island of South Georgia used
to have several thriving whaling settlements
during the first half of the 20th century,
with a combined population exceeding 2,000
in some years. These included Grytviken, Leith
Harbour, Ocean Harbour, Husvik, Stromness
and Prince Olav Harbour. The abandoned settlements
have become increasingly dilapidated, and
remain uninhabited nowadays except for the
Museum curator's family at Grytviken. The
jetty, the church, and dwelling and industrial
buildings at Grytviken have recently been
renovated by the South Georgian Government,
becoming a popular tourist destination. Some
historical buildings in the other settlements
are being restored as well.
Europe
Urbanization – the migration of a country's
rural population into the cities – has left
many European towns and villages deserted.
An increasing number of settlements in Bulgaria
are becoming ghost towns for this reason;
at the time of the 2011 census, the country
had 181 uninhabited settlements. In Hungary,
dozens of villages are also threatened with
abandonment. The first village officially
declared as "dead" was Gyűrűfű in the late
1970s, but later it was repopulated as an
eco-village. Some other depopulated villages
were successfully saved as small rural resorts,
such as Kán, Tornakápolna, Szanticska, Gorica,
and Révfalu.
In Spain, large zones of the mountainous Iberian
System and the Pyrenees have undergone heavy
depopulation since the early 20th century,
leaving a string of ghost towns in areas such
as the Solana Valley. Traditional agricultural
practices such as sheep and goat rearing,
on which the mountain village economy was
based, were not taken over by the local youth,
especially after the lifestyle changes that
swept over rural Spain during the second half
of the 20th century.
In the United Kingdom, thousands of villages
were abandoned during the Middle Ages, as
a result of Black Death, climate change, revolts,
and enclosure, the process by which vast amounts
of farmland became privately owned. Since
there are rarely any visible remains of these
settlements, they are not generally considered
ghost towns; instead, they are referred to
in archaeological circles as deserted medieval
villages.
Sometimes, wars and genocide end a town's
life. In 1944, occupying German Waffen-SS
troops murdered the population of the French
village Oradour-sur-Glane. A new settlement
was built nearby after the war, but the old
town was left depopulated on the orders of
President Charles de Gaulle, as a permanent
memorial. In Germany, numerous smaller towns
and villages in the former eastern territories
were completely destroyed in the last two
years of the war. These territories later
became part of Poland and the Soviet Union,
and many of the smaller settlements were never
rebuilt or repopulated. Some villages in England
were also abandoned during the war, but for
different reasons. Imber and Tyneham, along
with several villages in the Stanford Battle
Area, were commandeered by the War Office
for use as training grounds for British and
US troops. Although this was intended to be
a temporary measure, the residents were never
allowed to return, and the villages have been
used for military training ever since.
Disasters have played a part in the abandonment
of settlements within Europe. After the Chernobyl
disaster of 1986, the cities of Pripyat and
Chernobyl were evacuated due to dangerous
radiation levels within the area. As of today,
Pripyat remains completely abandoned. Whereas
Chernobyl has around 500 remaining inhabitants.
North America
Canada
There are ghost towns in parts of British
Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, Saskatchewan,
Newfoundland and Labrador, and Quebec. Some
were logging towns or dual mining and logging
sites, often developed at the behest of the
company. In Alberta and Saskatchewan, most
ghost towns were once farming communities
that have since died off due to the removal
of the railway through the town or the bypass
of a highway. The ghost towns in British Columbia
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. Among the most
notable are Anyox, Kitsault, and Ocean Falls.
Some ghost towns have revived their economies
and populations due to historical and eco-tourism,
such as Barkerville. Barkerville, once the
largest town north of Kamloops, is now a year-round
Provincial Museum. In Québec, Val-Jalbert
is a well-known tourist ghost town; founded
in 1901 around a mechanical pulp mill which
became obsolete when paper mills began to
break down wood fibre by chemical means, it
was abandoned when the mill closed in 1927
and re-opened as a park in 1960.
United States
There are many ghost towns, or semi-ghost
towns, in the American Great Plains, the rural
areas of which have lost a third of their
population since 1920. Thousands of communities
in the northern plains states became railroad
ghost towns when a rail line failed to materialize.
Hundreds more were abandoned when the US Highway
System replaced the railroads as the United
States' favorite mode of travel. Ghost towns
are common in mining or old mill town areas:
Arizona, California, Colorado, Minnesota,
Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington
in the western United States and West Virginia
in the eastern USA. Some unincorporated towns
become ghost towns due to flooding for man
made lakes, such as Oketeyeconne. They can
be observed as far south as Arkansas, Florida,
Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. When the resources
that had created an employment boom in these
towns were consumed, the businesses ceased
to exist, and the people moved to more productive
areas. Sometimes a ghost town consists of
many old abandoned buildings; elsewhere, there
remain only foundations of former buildings.
Old mining camps that have lost most of their
population at some stage of their history,
such as Aspen, Central City, Crested Butte,
Cripple Creek, Deadwood, Marysville, Oatman,
Park City, St. Elmo, Tombstone, and Virginia
City, are sometimes included in the category,
although they are active towns and cities
today.
Some of the earliest settlements in the US,
though they no longer exist in any tangible
sense, once had the characteristics of a ghost
town. Jamestown, the first permanent English
settlement in the Americas, was abandoned
in 1699 when Williamsburg became the new capital
of the colony; the Zwaanendael Colony became
a ghost town in 1632, when every one of the
colonists were massacred by Indians; and in
1590, mapmaker John White arrived at the Roanoke
Colony in North Carolina to find it deserted,
its inhabitants having vanished without a
trace.
Starting in 2002, an attempt to declare an
"official ghost town" in California stalled
when the adherents of the town of Bodie, in
Northern California, and those of Calico,
in Southern California, could not come to
an agreement as to which of their favorites
was more deserving. A compromise was eventually
reached – Bodie became the "official state
gold rush ghost town", while Calico was named
the "official state silver rush ghost town".
Latin America
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
a wave of European immigrants arrived in Argentina
and 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.
Other ghost towns were created in the aftermath
of dinosaur fossil rushes.
A number of ghost towns throughout Latin America
were once mining camps or lumber mills, such
as the many saltpeter mining camps that prospered
in Chile from the end of the Saltpeter War
until the invention of synthetic saltpeter
during World War I. Some of these towns, such
as the Humberstone and Santa Laura Saltpeter
Works in the Atacama Desert, have been declared
UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Another former
mining town, Real de Catorce in Mexico, has
been used as a backdrop for Hollywood movies
such as The Mexican, Bandidas, and The Treasure
of the Sierra Madre.
See also
Notes
References
Further reading
Daniel R. Curtis, 'Pre-industrial societies
and strategies for the exploitation of resources.
- A theoretical framework for understanding
why some settlements are resilient and some
settlements are vulnerable to crisis.'
External links
Russian journalist explores the lives of illegal
residents in the ghost town in the far-flung
Russian Arctic
Ten classic ghost towns worldwide
Ghost Town Gallery
Ghosts of North Dakota
Abandoned towns, villages and other communities
in Great Britain
Satellite images of ghost towns in China
Ghost towns in Italy and worldwide
Ontario Abandoned Places
Ghost towns and historic locations in Colorado
Ghost towns of Arizona and surrounding states
New Day - Any Ghost Towns or abandoned structures
from the 1800's or earlier near where you
live?, blog on DailyKos, 18 July 2013.
Yahoo Travel article on ghost towns and other
abandoned places
