Bodie sits at roughly 8,375 feet in the high desert east of the Sierra Nevada, in Mono County, California. It originated with a gold discovery in 1859 by a prospecting party that included Waterman S. Bodey (also spelled Body), who died in a blizzard later that winter and never saw the camp that bore a misspelled version of his name. For nearly two decades the site remained a marginal placer and lode prospect, but a profitable strike in 1876 and the consolidation of holdings under the Standard Consolidated Mining Company transformed it almost overnight into one of the most notorious boomtowns of the American West.
At its 1879–1880 peak, Bodie held somewhere between 7,000 and 10,000 residents in an estimated 2,000 buildings, served by a main street roughly a mile long lined with some 65 saloons, along with breweries, gambling halls, opium dens, a red-light district, two banks, several newspapers, a Chinatown, and dozens of mining companies. The district’s mines ultimately produced on the order of $34 million in gold and silver over their working life. Bodie’s reputation for violence — frequent shootings, stage robberies, and barroom killings — made “the Bad Man from Bodie” a stock figure in period journalism, though much of the lurid imagery was exaggerated for distant readers.
The boom was brief. The richest near-surface and shallow ore was largely worked out by the early 1880s, and the mobile mining population began draining toward newer strikes almost as quickly as it had arrived. A fire in 1892 destroyed a large share of the business district, and a far more devastating fire in 1932 — reportedly started by a young boy playing with matches — leveled most of what remained of the commercial center. Mining continued intermittently on a reduced scale until the federal War Production Board’s Order L-208 closed nonessential gold mines in 1942, ending Bodie as a functioning community.
California acquired the surviving townsite and made it Bodie State Historic Park in 1962; it had been designated a National Historic Landmark in 1961. Today the state maintains roughly 110 surviving structures in a deliberate condition called “arrested decay” — stabilized against collapse but neither restored nor cosmetically improved — and the park draws on the order of 200,000 visitors a year, making it one of the best-preserved authentic ghost towns in the United States.
Centralia, in Columbia County in the anthracite coal region of eastern Pennsylvania, was incorporated as a borough in 1866 and grew into an ordinary mining town built directly atop some of the richest hard-coal seams in the country. Its population peaked at roughly 2,700 around 1890 and had settled to about 1,000 by 1980, supporting churches, schools, a business district, and the close-knit institutions typical of Pennsylvania coal country. For nearly a century it was unremarkable — until the ground beneath it caught fire.
In May 1962 a fire, most widely attributed to the burning of trash in a former strip-mine pit being used as the borough landfill, reached an exposed anthracite seam and spread underground into the abandoned network of mines that honeycombed the area. Anthracite burns slowly, hot, and persistently, and the fire found a virtually unlimited fuel supply in the very coal that had given the town its livelihood. Repeated attempts to extinguish or contain it — flushing, trenching, and excavation — failed or were judged too costly, and the fire continued to spread for years beneath homes, streets, and the cemetery.
The consequences turned lethal and visible over time. Ground temperatures rose, steam and smoke vented from cracks in roads and yards, and dangerous levels of carbon monoxide and other gases seeped into basements. The crisis reached the national consciousness in February 1981, when a 12-year-old boy named Todd Domboski nearly fell to his death into a sudden, steaming sinkhole that opened beneath him; he was saved by a cousin. Faced with an underground fire that could not be put out at any acceptable cost, the federal government acted not to fix the town but to remove it.
In 1984 Congress appropriated roughly $42 million to relocate residents, and most accepted buyouts and left. In 1992 Pennsylvania condemned the remaining properties under eminent domain, and in 2002 the U.S. Postal Service revoked the town’s ZIP code, 17927. A handful of holdouts fought to stay, and a 2013 legal settlement allowed the last few residents to live out their lives in their homes. The mine fire is still burning and may continue for many decades — by some estimates more than a century — making Centralia a rare case of a town destroyed not by depletion or economic shift but by its own resource turned permanently hazardous.
Garnet sits in the Garnet Range of western Montana, northeast of Missoula, where prospectors had worked placer gold along the gulches since the 1860s before the hard-rock boom of the mid-1890s gave rise to the town. The settlement coalesced in 1895 around a stamp mill built at First Chance Gulch — reportedly by Dr. Armistead Mitchell, for whom the camp was first named Mitchell — and was renamed Garnet in 1897 after the garnet stones found in the surrounding range. Within a few years it became the commercial center for a cluster of hard-rock mines high in the timbered mountains.
The town’s growth was rapid. The rich strike made by prospector Sam Ritchey at his Nancy Hanks Mine — named for Abraham Lincoln’s mother — west of town helped touch off the rush, and by January 1898 nearly a thousand people lived in Garnet. The town carried four stores, four hotels, three livery stables, a school, a doctor’s office, an assay office, a union hall, and some thirteen saloons. The merchant Frank A. Davey, whose store opened around 1898 and sold everything from dry goods and jewelry to mining tools and meat, became one of the town’s enduring figures. For a brief period Garnet was a busy, family-oriented mining community rather than a rough transient camp.
Garnet’s gold, however, was relatively shallow and the rich ore did not last. By 1900 the population had fallen to about 300, and by 1905 many of the mines were abandoned and only around 150 people remained; in all, roughly $950,000 in gold was recovered from the district’s mines by about 1917. A fire in 1912 destroyed much of the commercial district, and with the town already shrinking there was little will or money to rebuild what had burned. Garnet slipped toward ghost-town status well before the First World War.
A brief revival came in the 1930s, when higher Depression-era gold prices drew a small number of miners back to rework the old ground, but the resurgence was modest and short-lived, and the town was largely empty again by the 1940s as remaining residents left for wartime jobs. Since 1970 Garnet has been administered by the federal Bureau of Land Management together with the volunteer Garnet Preservation Association; more than thirty structures survive, the site draws on the order of 16,000 visitors a year, and it is promoted as Montana’s best-preserved ghost town.