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.
Hashima — universally known as Gunkanjima, or “Battleship Island,” because its high seawalls and ranked concrete towers resemble a warship riding at anchor — is a roughly 6.3-hectare (about 16-acre) rock some 15 kilometers off Nagasaki that the Mitsubishi company turned into one of the most concentrated industrial settlements ever built. Coal had been worked on the island in a small way since the early nineteenth century, but it was Mitsubishi’s purchase in 1890 and the sinking of deep undersea shafts that transformed Hashima into a self-contained mining city of high-rise apartment blocks, a school, a hospital, shops, a shrine, and even a rooftop garden, all wedged onto an artificially enlarged outcrop.
At its 1959 peak the island held 5,259 residents on its 6.3 hectares — an overall density on the order of 83,500 people per square kilometer, and far higher still in the residential quarter — among the highest figures ever recorded anywhere on Earth, roughly nine times the contemporary density of Tokyo. The buildings that made this possible were pioneering: Building 30, completed in 1916, is generally cited as Japan’s first large reinforced-concrete apartment block, a typhoon-resistant design later replicated across the island. For decades the operation ran continuously, with coal hauled up from shafts that descended hundreds of meters below the seabed and ferried to the mainland.
Hashima’s existence was bound entirely to a single fuel in a single market. As Japan’s postwar economy shifted decisively from coal to imported petroleum through the 1960s, the island’s high-cost undersea mine became uneconomic. Mitsubishi announced closure in 1974; the mine ceased operation in January, and the last residents departed by April 20, leaving apartments full of furniture, televisions, and personal effects to the salt air. The island stood sealed and empty for thirty-five years.
Hashima’s modern fame is shadowed by its wartime history: from the late 1930s through 1945, Korean laborers and, from 1943, Chinese prisoners were conscripted to work the mine under harsh and often deadly conditions, with deaths variously estimated from roughly 130 to well over a thousand — a history central to disputes that accompanied the island’s 2015 inscription as part of UNESCO’s “Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution.” Tours resumed in 2009, and the crumbling towers — battered by typhoons and corrosion — now stand as one of the world’s most studied monuments to industrial obsolescence.
St. Elmo was platted in 1880 by Griffith Evans and Charles Seitz high in Chalk Creek Canyon in the Sawatch Range, about 20 miles southwest of Buena Vista in Chaffee County, Colorado, at an elevation near 10,000 feet. Prospecting in the canyon dated to the early 1870s, and the discovery of the rich Mary Murphy lode south of the future townsite gave the Chalk Creek mining district its anchor. The town was first surveyed as “Forest City,” but the U.S. Post Office rejected the name because a Forest City already existed in California; Evans, reportedly reading the popular novel “St. Elmo,” supplied the substitute.
The town’s fortunes were bound to the Denver, South Park & Pacific Railroad, a Colorado narrow-gauge line that reached Chalk Creek in 1881 and continued up the canyon toward the Alpine Tunnel beneath the Continental Divide. With rail service, St. Elmo became a busy outfitting point — at its 1880s peak the community held roughly 2,000 people, with a main street of five hotels, mercantiles, saloons, dance halls, a telegraph office, a schoolhouse, and a newspaper. The Mary Murphy Mine, the district’s richest producer — extracting between 70 and 100 tons of ore daily and employing more than 250 men at its height — was the economic backbone, and St. Elmo prospered as the place miners came to resupply, ship ore, and spend their wages.
Decline tracked the mines. Output in the Chalk Creek district fell through the early 1900s, and the dwindling traffic could not sustain the railroad. When the line up Chalk Creek was discontinued in 1922 — residents fought the closure unsuccessfully as far as the U.S. Supreme Court, and the last train ran in 1926 — St. Elmo lost the lifeline that had justified its existence as a supply town. The Mary Murphy itself closed in 1925, and residents departed in the years that followed, leaving the Stark family — Anton, Anna, and their children, who ran the Home Comfort Hotel, store, telegraph office, and post office — among the last to keep the lights on.
Unlike camps that burned or collapsed entirely, St. Elmo survived largely intact because a small number of caretakers stayed on and later owners and a preservation group maintained the wooden buildings. The townsite and surrounding district were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. Today St. Elmo is widely cited among the best-preserved ghost towns in Colorado, with dozens of original structures still lining the street and a general store that reopens seasonally for the many visitors who reach it by the Chalk Creek road.
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.
Cahawba — the spelling later standardized as Cahaba — was laid out beginning in 1819 by Governor William Wyatt Bibb at the confluence of the Alabama and Cahaba rivers in Dallas County, and by 1820 was functioning as the first permanent capital of the new state of Alabama. The site was chosen for its central location and river access, but the very feature that made it a natural port also made it dangerously prone to flooding, a defect that shadowed the town from its earliest years.
The town grew quickly as the seat of state government, with a statehouse, public buildings, and a grid of streets laid out on an ambitious plan. Its tenure as capital was brief: persistent flooding — the rivers reached the town’s outskirts as early as 1822 — combined with political maneuvering, led the legislature to vote in January 1826 to move the seat of government to Tuscaloosa, only about six years after Cahawba was established. The loss of the capital was an early and serious blow to a town that had been planned around its role as the center of state affairs.
Cahawba did not die with the loss of the capital. Through the antebellum decades it reinvented itself as a prosperous cotton-shipping town on the river, a major distribution point for cotton floated down the Alabama River to the Gulf port of Mobile. The arrival of a railroad in 1859 sparked a building boom; the 1860 census recorded roughly 2,000 residents — about two-thirds of them enslaved African Americans — and on the eve of the Civil War the population approached three thousand. During the war the town became the site of Castle Morgan, a Confederate prison housed in a converted cotton warehouse that held more than 3,000 captured Union soldiers by March 1865, sixfold its intended capacity, and the town’s name became associated with the suffering recorded there.
After the war the foundations of Cahawba’s prosperity collapsed. The destruction of the plantation cotton economy, a devastating flood in February 1865, the relocation of the Dallas County seat to Selma in 1866, and the departure of much of the population left the town in steep decline — only 431 people remained by 1870. By the early 1900s Cahawba was largely abandoned; most of its buildings were gone by 1903, dismantled, moved, or left to decay. Today the site is preserved as Old Cahawba Archaeological Park, managed by the Alabama Historical Commission, where street grids, cemeteries, ruins, and foundations survive among interpretive trails as one of the South’s most significant abandoned-town sites.