8,000 people used to live here, now it’s a ghost town… Is a ghost town still a ghost town if thousands of people visit it every year?
That’s a question for the philosophers to decide, if there even are any left these days, but the town in question has been virtually empty for decades after once boasting around 8,000 occupants.
If you journey up into the hills of California you can find the ghost town of Bodie, named after a man who found gold in the area back in the 19th century.
The discovery of gold brought people to Bodie and for a short while it was one of the American west’s boomtowns.
At one point the place had about 2,000 buildings and roughly 8,000 people living there, but as you can imagine it wasn’t to last.
A rich vein of gold was discovered in Bodie in 1875 but the town went ‘bust’ in 1881 and most of the inhabitants moved away for pastures new.
The place went from boomtown to ghost town pretty quickly as people moved to other settlements, though a few stayed and plodded on.
Many of the ghost town’s 2,000 buildings were destroyed by fires in 1892 and 1932, while in 1942 (dates ending with two don’t seem to be lucky for this place) mining efforts were officially ended and that was pretty much it for the place.
It had no raison d’être any longer, a bit like Burnley if it didn’t have a football club.
So what’s to be done with an abandoned ghost town? Obviously the answer is to make it into a National Historic Site and turn it into a tourist hotspot where people could come and visit a genuine Wild West mining town.
While it gets loads of visitors each year, Bodie is kept in a state of ‘arrested decay’ so things will look the way they used to.
It’s been over 50 years since any significant amount of people actually lived in the town and everything has pretty much been left where it was put.
As you can imagine the place is spooky enough to visit by itself, but you can imagine the number of ghost stories that plague such a town.
Being a ghost town, it has the common curse that anyone who tries to disturb the place or take anything with them will suffer misfortune.
People who’ve visited Bodie and decided to pilfer a little piece of it for themselves have made the creepy discovery that their lives seem to be cursed afterwards.
Those who run the town as a tourist attraction and maintain it as it was have met people returning to the ghost town to give back what they’ve stolen and hopefully lift the curse.
It’s not dissimilar from the ‘Pompeii Curse’, where many people took a souvenir from the ruins only to return what they’d taken and repent in the hopes that they would no longer be plagued by rotten luck.
Remember, if you ever find yourself in a ghost town resist the urge to start stealing things, or the vengeful ghosts of the past might decide to inconvenience your life.