A ghost town is an abandoned village, town,
or city, usually one that 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, prolonged droughts,
government actions, uncontrolled lawlessness,
war, pollution, or nuclear disasters.
The term can sometimes refer to cities, towns,
and neighbourhoods that are still populated,
but significantly less so than in past years;
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, Calico, Centralia,
Oatman, and South Pass City in the United
States, Barkerville in Canada, Craco in Italy,
Elizabeth Bay and Kolmanskop in Namibia, Pripyat
in Ukraine, and Danushkodi in India.
The town of Plymouth on the Caribbean island
of Montserrat is a ghost town that is the
de jure capital of Montserrat.
It was rendered uninhabitable by volcanic
ash from an eruption.
== Definition ==
The 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 or other causes using the term only
to describe settlements that 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 (e.g.,
nearby mine, mill or resort) is depleted or
the resource economy undergoes a "bust" (e.g.,
catastrophic resource price collapse).
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
required, and then remove them once the resource
has been extracted.
Modular buildings can be used to facilitate
the process.
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.
In other cases, the reason for abandonment
can arise from a town's intended economic
function shifting to another, nearby place.
This happened to Collingwood, Queensland in
Outback Australia when nearby Winton outperformed
Collingwood as a regional centre for the livestock-raising
industry.
The railway reached Winton in 1899, linking
it with the rest of Queensland, and Collingwood
was a ghost town by the following year.
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 unviable, such
as Ctesiphon.
The rise of condominium investment caused
for real estate bubbles also leads to a ghost
town, as real estate prices rise and affordable
housing becomes less available.
Such examples include China and Canada, where
housing is often used as an investment rather
than for habitation.
=== Human intervention ===
Railroads and roads bypassing or no longer
reaching 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 ghost towns were founded along railways
where steam trains would stop 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 (SSC), a rocket testing
facility in Hancock County, Mississippi (on
the Mississippi side of the Pearl River, which
is the Mississippi–Louisiana state line).
This required NASA to acquire a large (approximately
34-square-mile (88 km2)) buffer zone because
of the loud noise and potential dangers associated
with testing such rockets.
Five thinly populated rural Mississippi communities
(Gainesville, Logtown, Napoleon, Santa Rosa,
and Westonia), plus the northern portion of
a sixth (Pearlington), 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, now overgrown
with forest flora and fauna, and a one-room
school house.
Another example of infrastructure remaining
is the former town of Weston, Illinois, that
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, and in France the Tignes
Dam flooded the village of Tignes, displacing
78 families.
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.
Construction of the Aswan High Dam on the
Nile River in Egypt submerged archaeological
sites and ancient settlements such as Buhen
under Lake Nasser.
Another example of towns left underwater is
Tehri by the constructruction of the Tehri
Dam in the Indian state of Uttarakhand.
==== 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.
=== 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 (4.8 km) 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, including 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 Pripyat and Chernobyl.
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.
=== Disease and contamination ===
Significant fatality rates from epidemics
have produced ghost towns.
Some places in eastern Arkansas were abandoned
after more than 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.
Contamination due to ammunition caused by
military use may also lead to the development
of ghost towns.
Rerik West, an area of Rerik, Germany, had
been home to a Group of Soviet Forces in Germany
barracks during the German Democratic Republic,
but following German reunification it was
abandoned due to ammunition contamination
from the barracks.
Located on a peninsula separated from Rerik
by a small isthmus, in 1992 it was turned
into a restricted area while the rest of the
town remained populated.
== 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 more than 200,000
inhabitants by 1882, and is now home to more
than 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.
== 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.
The Libyan town of Tawergha had a population
of around 25,000 before it was abandoned during
the 2011 civil war, and it has remained empty
since.
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 (forbidden zone), 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 ===
China has many large urban property developments,
sometimes referred to as "ghost cities", that
have remained mostly unoccupied since they
were built.The town of Dhanushkodi, India
is a ghost town.
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 (also called Lower
Butugychag).
Other towns were deserted due to deindustrialisation
and the economic crises of the early 1990s
attributed to post-Soviet conflicts.
=== 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 (operating 1904-64),
Leith Harbour (1909–65), Ocean Harbour (1909–20),
Husvik (1910–60), Stromness (1912–61)
and Prince Olav Harbour (1917–34).
The abandoned settlements have become increasingly
dilapidated, and remain uninhabited nowadays
except for the Museum curator's family at
Grytviken.
The jetty, the church, and dwelling and industrial
buildings at Grytviken have recently been
renovated by the 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,
for example Kłomino (Westfalenhof), Pstrąże
(Pstransse), and Janowa Góra (Johannesberg).
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,
and 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 Quebec, Val-Jalbert is a well-known tourist
ghost town; founded in 1901 around a mechanical
pulp mill that 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 abandoned communities
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 of Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota
and South Dakota became railroad ghost towns
when a rail line failed to materialize.
Hundreds more towns were abandoned when the
US Highway System replaced the railroads as
the favored mode of travel.
Ghost towns are common in mining or mill towns
in all the western states, and many eastern
and southern states as well.
Residents are compelled to leave in search
of more productive areas when the resources
that had created an employment boom in these
towns were eventually consumed.
Some unincorporated towns become ghost towns
due to flooding caused by dam projects that
created man–made lakes, such as Oketeyeconne.
Ghost towns are particularly numerous in the
southwestern state of New Mexico.
Sometimes a ghost town consists of many abandoned
buildings as in Bodie, California, or standing
ruins as in Rhyolite, Nevada, while elsewhere
only the foundations of former buildings remain
as in Graysonia, Arkansas.
Old mining camps that have lost most of their
population at some stage of their history
such as Aspen, Deadwood, Oatman, Tombstone
and Virginia City are sometimes referred to
as ghost towns although they are presently
active towns and cities.
Many U.S. ghost towns, such as South Pass
City in Wyoming are listed on the National
Register of Historic Places.
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.
In 1590, mapmaker John White arrived at the
Roanoke Colony, North Carolina to find it
deserted, its inhabitants having vanished
without a trace.
The Zwaanendael Colony became a ghost town
when every one of the colonists was massacred
by Indians in 1632.
Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement
in the Americas, was abandoned when Williamsburg
became the new capital of the colony in 1699.
Starting in 2002, an attempt to declare an
"official ghost town" in California stalled
when the adherents of the town of Bodie and
those of Calico, in Southern California, could
not agree on the most deserving settlement
for the recognition.
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 Treasure of the
Sierra Madre (1948), The Mexican (2001), and
Bandidas (2006).
=== Oceania ===
The boom and bust of gold rushes and the mining
of other ores has led to a number of ghost
towns in both Australia and New Zealand.
Other towns have become abandoned wither due
to natural disasters, the weather, or the
drowning of valleys to increase the size of
lakes.
In Australia, the Victoria gold rush led to
numerous ghost towns (such as Cassilis and
Moliagul), as did the hunt for gold in Western
Australia (for example, the towns of Ora Banda
and Kanowna).
The mining of iron and other ores has also
led to towns thriving briefly before dwindling.
In New Zealand, the Otago gold rush similarly
led to several ghost towns (such as Macetown).
New Zealand's ghost towns also include numerous
coal mining areas in the South Island's West
Coast Region, including Denniston and Stockton.
Natural disasters have also led to the loss
of some towns, notably Te Wairoa, "The Buried
Village", destroyed in the 1886 eruption of
Mount Tarawera, and the Otago town of Kelso,
abandoned after it was flooded repeatedly
after heavy rainstorms.
Early settlements on the rugged southwest
coast of the South Island at Martins Bay and
Port Craig were also abandoned, mainly due
to the inhospitable terrain.
== See also
