Ransom Riggs, over at the mental_floss blog, has a great pictorial tour of Bodie, California–America’s quintessential ghost town. I remember reading about Bodie in my Childcraft Encyclopedias back in the day, and I’m excited to finally see the whole thing up close…
A mining boomtown, it was the third most populous city in the state of California in 1880. By the 1940s sickness, wars, bad weather and exhausted mines had led to the town’s desertion, and its isolated, inhospitable location made certain that it stayed that way; no one eyed this high desert waste, 8,000 feet above sea level between Yosemite and the lonely Nevada border, and imagined a shopping mall in its place.
Only five percent of Bodie’s structures are still standing, but considering how large Bodie was, that’s still a lot for a ghost town — more than two hundred. And unlike Tombstone, Calico or any number of other “preserved” ghost towns in the West, it’s not a tourist trap where you can buy cotton candy from gunfight-staging actors playing oldey-timey cowboys; the town is kept in a state of “arrested decay,”
Gloriously haunting photos (pardon the pun) and some nifty history await. Check it out.
Image courtesy Flickr user mulmatsherm, via CC