Ever been to a Ghost Town?

[happiestmferoutthere]

I live in Northern California, in "The Gold Country". There are oodles of old abandoned mining towns, every couple of miles. Very cool. I'm a history nut so I can spend hours exploring them, and then go home and research them on the internet. (A VERY colorful history those miners had)
Some of the old mining towns are restored very beautifully and some stand the way they stood when the miners left after the gold "ran out" 100 years ago.
One of my very favorite things to do is jump in the car and go find old towns.There are sooooo many here.

[dragonrider]

Dragonrider- you write beautifully.

Thank you. I can have my moments. Although I have to admit that I stole the phrase "detritus of lives let go" from an article in a recent National Geographic. The rest is all mine, but that phrase stuck with me, and I had to use it. The article is about abandoned towns in the northern Plains. It is very well written, and does a good job of capturing the sorrow of these emptied places. It is one of the things that got me thinking about ghost towns.

The other thing that got me thinking about abandoned and dying places was The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I saw No Country for Old Men, and decided I should read a book by Cormac McCarthy. It's very depressing and a hard one to recommend, but it is probably going to be counted among the great books. It's more about how the human spirit deals with hopelessness than about ghost towns per se, but it is set in a dying world, and the descriptions of the doomed and wasted places are very moving. The difference I suppose is that when a ghost town is abandoned, nature comes to take it back, but in this book, nature is dying too.

I've had doomed places on my mind lately.

Ghost Town by the Specials is a track worth listening to it can be dowloaded from various sites if anybody is interested.

Ghost Town is a great song and one that takes me back to my youth. Thanks for remiding me of it. If I knew how to properly insert a YouTube video I would, but here is the link:

YouTube - The Specials - Ghost Town

The sadness of a ghost town penetrates everything. The memories that are left behind are always sad.. the happy ones are rarely left behind, but the sad ones... they permeate more than just our 4 dimensions of space-time. It is this residual low-frequency energy that draws me the most. I dont know if I feed on it, or what, but it is compelling all the same.

Grazi, I knew you would have something interesting to say about ghost towns...

[dragonrider]

I never mentioned the ghost towns I have visited. I've mostly been to the dead mining towns of California and Nevada --- booms towns gone bust when the mines played out. I've been to a lot of abandoned towns in and around Death Valley and into the old mines as well. I've also been to the ruins of the Anasazi in the southwest and to the amazing Mayan and Aztec ruins of Mexico, which are far more impressive than the old clapboard buildings of the abandoned boom towns here in the west, but somehow you don't FEEL the ghosts in those places the way you do in these western ghost towns --- maybe they are too far removed in time and culture. I want to visit the ruins of Europe and Asia, I want to see the ancient monuments of Stonehenge and the pyramids of Egypt, the remnants of Greek and Roman temples, and I want to see the places that were incinerated in an instant like Pompei, but I also think that they will not connect with me in the same way the ghost towns of the west do.

[BudGrower]

That sounds like a great place to herbalize, in a Ghost Town. Imagine, especially if you are all alone and nobody around.

[dragonrider]

The Ghost Town is also a great meatphor. You hear the term "Ghost Town" used figuratively a lot lately.

[stinkyattic]

I can't say these towns have given up the ghost quite yet, but the depressed mill towns of rural New England are like an old creature too sad to live but not quite too sick to justify euthanizing. The grand Victorian and Italianate mill owners' mansions have been tar-shingle-sided and chopped into studio apartments, their ornate woodwork covered or gone. The wide main streets, lined with vacant shops displaying nothing but dusty 'for rent' signs in their cracked windows, are quiet save for the occasional elderly person in faded clothes walking slowly along the worn sidewalks of his hometown. The mills themselves sit dark and silent. There's no clacking of a mechanical loom or squeaking of large wood and steel gears powering dozens of lathes and presses. Graffiti decorates their crumbling brick, the freshest paint they've seen in nearly a century. Pigeons flutter in and out through missing panes. And still the rivers flow by that once powered the mills, which themselves are now nothing more than a feature of the landscape to someone watching from the other side.

[dragonrider]

Now, who's being poetic? That was very well done!

The kinds of places you are describing are almost sadder than those that have already been abandoned. There are a few former lumber mill towns in California like that. And there are a couple of towns have were bypassed by the highway only 10 or 15 years ago and they are slowly dwindling.

[DreadConches]

You guys are depressing me.
Has anyone ever seen Silent Hill? The movie setting is based on a PA town called Centralia. The town was inhabited until and coal fire started and it had to be evacuated. The fire eventually spread and they have been unable to put it out (the fire started in 1962). The fire will burn on for a long time. There used to be many homes although they have almost all been demolished. I have not been there myself but am going sometime in 2008.

[Frickr]

well the entire underground of london is a ghost town,

hundreds of tunnels the size of the average train tunnel spanning out all other the place,

lots of unused world war bunkers, aswell as used and sealed up ones (for unknown reasons)

lots of unused tube stations too built ready for use then never used and left to stand unseen for years and years shutters never opened ticket offices never used,

for some reason i find myself fucking intrested in this stuff i mean what under me right now? i read on a website a guy explored 19 underground unknown bunkers and found in one a case of gas masks and a case of single shot rifles, but due to the moisture the metal of the rilfes had fused together.

i was watching a show on the london underground. there is one place down there, where they have a whole room full of bones. i think they call it the room of death. but when they ran out of room in the graveyards they just piled all the bodies in there. people go down there and stack the sskulls and different bones into these big works of art. pretty cool shit i think. be creapy but i think it would be cool.

but the town on either side of me is all but abandond, one has 14 the other has 25 i think. its fun to go through all the old farm houses around the area, you can find alot of cool shit.

[apocolips31]

Yea I had to drive through one in North Carolina to get to a cabin we were staying in. It was really dark and spooky.