20 Ghost Towns Where Time Simply Stopped

In 1908, a worker called Zacharias Lewala discovered diamonds in the sand of what was then German South-West Africa and is now Namibia. Railway inspector August Stauch staked the claims that turned Kolmanskop into a boomtown, which by the 1910s produced over 10% of the world’s diamonds. But colonial law meant that Lewala did not get his share. Once richer fields were found near the Orange River in 1928, the town began to lose its miners. The last residents finally left in 1956, but desert sand has been flowing into the empty mansions ever since.

Prospector William S. Bodey found gold in California’s Bodie Hills in 1859; the town that sprang up later spelled his name, Bodie. Between 1877 and 1881, the gold rush pulled in 8,000 to 10,000 people. Fires in 1892 and 1932 burned away more than 90% of Bodie’s 2,000 or so buildings, and in 1942 the federal government stopped all gold mining during World War II. California State Parks took over in 1962. The state parks department maintains the town in what it calls arrested decay, where no structures are allowed to fall down, but they’re not restored either.

Henry Ford’s car company built Fordlândia, an American-style industrial town on the Tapajós River in Brazil, in 1928, with plans to grow rubber for its factories in Michigan. Leaf blight wiped out the rubber trees, which were planted in a dense block, and in December 1930, workers rioted over the American food and regulations imposed on them. Ford directed operations from Michigan and never visited Brazil. Ultimately, synthetic rubber made the whole venture moot, and the Ford Motor Company sold the site to Brazil in 1945 with a loss of about $20 million.

Oradour-sur-Glane was a village in the Haute-Vienne region of France. On June 10, 1944, soldiers from a Waffen-SS division killed 642 civilians there, days after the Allied D-Day landings, and only six residents survived. French President Charles de Gaulle later ordered the burned ruins left as a memorial, while survivors built a new village nearby. Burned 1930s cars and rusted household goods still sit exactly where they were left. Historians still debate why Oradour, rather than a neighboring town, was targeted.

In 1903, engineer Clarence Birch staked copper claims in Alaska’s Wrangell-St. Elias Wilderness. Financiers J.P. Morgan and Daniel Guggenheim funded the mine that became Kennecott, which finally shut down in November 1938 because the ore ran out at about the same time Depression-era copper prices plummeted. It had produced more than $200 million in copper before closing. Today, the National Park Service maintains the 14-story wooden ore mill, which remains at the site. Its distinctive red coating was simply cheap iron-oxide paint. As for the town’s name, it came from a clerk who misspelled the nearby Kennicott Glacier, a mistake that no one bothered to correct.

Kayaköy (Levissi in Greek), a town in what is now southwestern Turkey, had been entirely Greek Orthodox until 1923, when Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and Greek prime minister Eleftherios Venizelos signed the Treaty of Lausanne to swap 6,000 Greek Orthodox residents with Muslim families from Greece. They found the hilly ground unsuitable for agriculture and mostly left. Since the Greek residents hadn’t demolished their houses before leaving, most of the buildings are intact, although weather and, particularly, the severe earthquake of 1957 have caused many to cave in. Today, hundreds of stone houses remain, forming an open-air museum.

In August 1904, prospectors Shorty Harris and E.L. Cross discovered gold in Nevada’s Bullfrog Hills, igniting the rapid growth of the town of Rhyolite. But because lumber was virtually nonexistent in the region, in 1906, saloon owner Tom Kelly erected a house made of roughly 50,000 discarded glass bottles. The town’s brief economic boom was soon over as ore deposits proved smaller than anticipated, and the 1907 national financial panic led to mine closures and power outages. By 1920, the town was deserted. Now only the bottle house and a three-story concrete building façade from the old Cook Bank remain in the arid expanse.

Henry Wickenburg, an Austrian prospector, discovered gold in what became Vulture City in 1863, and by 1866 a mine was up and running there, producing over 340,000 ounces that helped support the fledgling city of Phoenix. A federal order in 1942 closed all nonessential gold mines during World War II, bringing an abrupt end to life in Vulture City. Assay offices, mess halls, and stamp mills remain. According to legend, 18 robbers were hanged from a mesquite tree next to Wickenburg’s cabin, but no court record substantiates this.

Belchite is a small farming town in Spain’s Aragon region that was largely overlooked until the Spanish Civil War came to its doorstep. Republican forces took on the Nationalist-controlled town. After two weeks of street fighting between August 24 and September 7, 1937, the town was reduced to rubble, leaving between 3,000 and 5,000 combatants and civilians dead. Dictator Francisco Franco ordered Republican POWs to construct a new town near the old one and left the original town’s ruins intact as a propaganda monument. Pockmarked stone archways and the ruined Church of San Martín remain inside the gated ruins today.

Silver turned up in the Calico Mountains in 1881, and a mining town rose in the Mojave Desert. When the federal government demonetized silver in the 1890s, prices plummeted, and Calico was deserted by 1907. In 1951, Walter Knott, founder of Knott’s Berry Farm, purchased the ghost town, restored it, and donated it to San Bernardino County for use as a park. About five original buildings from the 1880s remain, such as the adobe store and saloon. Most of the other buildings date from the 1950s and were constructed on their original foundations.

In 1867, gold was discovered along the Carissa Lode, establishing South Pass City in present-day Fremont County, Wyoming. Two years later, a bill introduced by William H. Bright made Wyoming Territory the first government in the country to let women vote and hold office, and it was signed into law on December 10, 1869. Weeks later, a local resident named Esther Hobart Morris became the first female justice of the peace in the United States. The thin gold veins disappeared quickly, and the town was largely deserted by the early 1900s. Wyoming now maintains over 30 of its historic wooden structures.

Prospector John White discovered gold on Grasshopper Creek on July 28, 1862. Bannack became the site of a boomtown and, in 1864, was designated Montana’s first territorial capital. In that same year, vigilantes lynched the local sheriff, Henry Plummer, accusing him of heading an outlaw gang. Plummer was never tried, and scholars continue to argue over his guilt. When the gold played out and power moved to Virginia City, Bannack died, with its last resident departing in the 1950s. Today, Montana conserves more than 60 of Bannack’s original timber structures.

In 1903, Chicago businessman Howard E. Perry incorporated the Chisos Mining Company and built Terlingua into a quicksilver, or mercury, mining town near Texas’s Big Bend. Its cinnabar ore accounted for a substantial portion of the mercury used to produce American munitions during World War I. Declining ore grades and a subsequent drop in mercury prices led the company to declare bankruptcy in 1942, and most of its population of some 2,000 departed in the following years. Today, the roofless adobe walls of the abandoned buildings, the old company store, Perry’s mansion, and the historic Terlingua Cemetery remain.

In Colorado’s Sawatch Range, St. Elmo was a silver-mining town that dates back to 1880. The Stark family ran the general store until the town’s last days. Depletion of silver and the 1922 closing of a railroad tunnel effectively isolated St. Elmo from regular freight. When the post office closed in 1952, it wasn’t because the postmaster died, as the myth goes. Rather, the population was too small, and successive postmasters had gotten too old to keep it going. A fire in 2002 burned down the town hall and jail, but most of the wooden buildings and the main street and boardwalks remain.

Located at an elevation of 11,200 feet in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains, the first cabins at Animas Forks were constructed in 1873. In 1879, mine owner William Duncan built the camp’s grand two-story Duncan House. The altitude and climate took their toll on mining residents. A blizzard in 1884 lasted for 23 days, covering cabins with snow so deep that residents had to dig tunnels between buildings just to navigate the town. High transportation costs combined with declining ore values forced miners to abandon Animas Forks by the 1920s. Today, several well-preserved log cabins still stand above the timberline, maintained by the Bureau of Land Management.

Garnet was a gold camp of about 1,000 residents in 1898, thanks to the construction of several stamp mills by physician and mine developer Dr. Peter Mussigbrod. Though a 1912 fire destroyed roughly half the commercial district, the cabins, hotel, and schoolhouse remained intact. Garnet enjoyed another heyday in the 1930s as higher gold prices lured miners back to the area, until wartime measures put an end to mining altogether in the 1940s. Federal and local preservationists have kept more than 30 original wooden buildings standing since 1972, but have never rebuilt any of them.

Shaniko, Oregon, began as a stop on the Columbia Southern Railway in 1900. Its unusual name came about due to a mispronunciation of the first postmaster’s last name, August Scherneckau. By 1901, the town shipped a then-record 4 million pounds of wool annually, giving rise to the moniker “Wool Capital of the World.” A competing railroad opened a route through the Deschutes River Canyon in 1911, diverting freight from Shaniko and destroying its economic viability. The town was deserted by the 1940s and ’50s. Today, its wooden hotel, city hall, water tower, and cast-iron jail remain.

West Virginia’s Confederate vet, W.D. Thurmond, incorporated his railroad town in 1903, using land he’d acquired a generation before. By the 1910s and ’20s, the town’s coal depot was moving more rail tonnage than Cincinnati and Richmond combined, but there were barely any automobiles in town. A 1930 fire consumed the Dun Glen Hotel across the river, accelerating the town’s decline, and when the railroads transitioned from steam to diesel in the 1950s, Thurmond became obsolete. Today, the brick main street, bank, and restored depot remain.

Prospectors Michael Jordan and Marion More found silver along Jordan Creek in May 1863 and established the town of Silver City in Idaho’s Owyhee Mountains. By the 1870s, the town boasted the state’s first newspaper, telegraph service, and electric power. But falling silver prices, a 1934 decision to relocate the county seat to nearby Murphy, and wartime mine closures all but eliminated year-round life by the 1940s. It took not policy but its remote location in the Owyhee Mountains to keep Silver City from dying out completely. Today, more than 70 original 19th-century structures remain, maintained each summer by caretakers.

On February 20, 1943, a farmer called Dionisio Pulido saw a brand-new volcano erupt from his cornfield in the Mexican state of Michoacán. Volcano Parícutin was active until 1952, though its lava flowed slowly enough that everyone was able to escape the town of San Juan Parangaricutiro without being killed by the molten rock. A new settlement was built in the vicinity, and by 1944 houses and streets of the old village were completely covered. Today, only the stone towers and the altar of the San Juan Bautista Church can be seen on top of the black volcanic crust.

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