A ghost town, deserted city, extinct town, or abandoned city is an abandoned settlement, usually one that contains substantial visible remaining buildings and infrastructure such as roads. A town often becomes a ghost town because the economic activity that supported it (usually industrial or agricultural) has failed or ended for any reason (e.g. a host ore deposit exhausted by mining). The town may have also declined because of natural or human-caused disasters such as floods, prolonged droughts, extreme heat or extreme cold, government actions, uncontrolled lawlessness, war, pollution, or nuclear and radiation-related accidents and incidents. The term can sometimes refer to cities, towns, and neighborhoods that, though still populated, are significantly less so than in past years; for example, those affected by high levels of unemployment and dereliction.[1]
Some ghost towns, especially those that preserve period-specific architecture, have become tourist attractions. Some examples are Bannack, Montana and Oatman, Arizona in the United States; Barkerville, British Columbia in Canada; Craco and Pompeii in Italy; Aghdam in Azerbaijan; Kolmanskop in Namibia; Pripyat and Chernobyl in Ukraine; Dhanushkodi in India; Fordlândia in Brazil and Villa Epecuén in Argentina.
Use of the term "ghost town" varies between individuals, and between cultures.[2] Some writers discount settlements that were abandoned as a result of a natural or human-made disaster or other causes. They restrict the term to settlements that were deserted because they were no longer economically viable; T. Lindsey Baker, author of Ghost Towns of Texas, defines a ghost town as "a town for which the reason for being no longer exists."[1] Some believe that any settlement with visible tangible remains should not be called a ghost town;[3] others say, conversely, that a ghost town should contain the tangible remains of buildings.[4] Whether or not the settlement must be completely deserted, or may contain a small population, is also a matter for debate.[3] Generally, though, the term is used in a looser sense, encompassing any and all of these definitions. American author Lambert Florin defined a ghost town as "a shadowy semblance of a former self."[5]
Factors leading to the abandonment of towns include depleted natural resources, economic activity shifting elsewhere, railroads and roads bypassing or no longer accessing the town, human intervention, disasters, massacres, wars, the shifting of politics or fall of empires, and volcanic eruptions.[6] A town can also be abandoned when it is part of an exclusion zone due to natural or human-made causes.
Ghost towns may result when the single activity or resource that created a boomtown (e.g., nearby mine, mill or resort) is depleted or the resource economy undergoes a "bust" (e.g., catastrophic resource price collapse). A gold rush often brought intensive but short-lived economic activity to a remote village, only to leave a ghost town once the resource was depleted.
Boomtowns can often decrease in size as quickly as they grew. Sometimes, all, or nearly all, of the population can desert the town, resulting in a ghost town. The dismantling of a boomtown can often occur on a planned basis. Mining companies nowadays will create a temporary company town to service a mine site, building all the accommodations, shops and services required, and then remove them once the resource has been extracted. Modular buildings can be used to facilitate the process.
In some cases, multiple factors may remove the economic basis for a community; some former mining towns on U.S. Route 66 suffered both mine closures when the resources were depleted and loss of highway traffic as US 66 was diverted from places like Oatman, Arizona, onto a more direct path. Mine and pulp mill closures have led to many ghost towns in British Columbia, Canada, including several relatively recent ones: Ocean Falls, which closed in 1973 after the pulp mill was decommissioned; Kitsault, whose molybdenum mine shut down after only 18 months in 1982; and Cassiar, whose asbestos mine operated from 1952 to 1992.
In other cases, the reason for abandonment can arise from a town's intended economic function shifting to another, nearby place. This happened to Collingwood, Queensland, in Outback Australia when nearby Winton outperformed Collingwood as a regional centre for the livestock-raising industry. The railway reached Winton in 1899, linking it with the rest of Queensland, and Collingwood was a ghost town by the following year. More broadly across Australia, there has been a shift towards fly-in fly-out arrangements over building a company town, in order to avoid the development of ghost towns once a mining resource has been fully extracted.[7]
The Middle East has many ghost towns and ruins that were created when the shifting of politics or the fall of empires caused capital cities to be socially or economically unviable, such as Ctesiphon.
The rise of real-estate speculation and the resulting possibility of real-estate bubbles (sometimes due to outright overbuilding by land developers) may also trigger the appearance of certain elements of a ghost town, as real-estate prices initially rise (whereupon affordable housing becomes less available) and then later fall for a variety of reasons that are often tied to economic cycles and/or marketing hubris. This has been observed to occur in various countries, including Spain, China, the United States, and Canada, where housing is often used as an investment rather than for habitation.
Railroads and roads bypassing or no longer reaching a town can also create a ghost town. This was the case in many of the ghost towns along Ontario's historic Opeongo Line, and along U.S. Route 66 after motorists bypassed the latter on the faster moving highways I-44 and I-40. Some ghost towns were founded along railways where steam trains would stop at periodic intervals for repairs or to take on water. Amboy, California, was part of one such series of villages along the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad across the Mojave Desert.
River re-routing is another factor, one example being the towns along the Aral Sea.
Ghost towns may be created when land is expropriated by a government, and residents are required to relocate. One example is the village of Tyneham in Dorset, England, acquired during World War II to build an artillery range.
A similar situation occurred in the U.S. when NASA acquired land to construct the John C. Stennis Space Center (SSC), a rocket testing facility in Hancock County, Mississippi (on the Mississippi side of the Pearl River, which is the Mississippi–Louisiana state line). This required NASA to acquire a large (approximately 34-square-mile or 88-square-kilometre) buffer zone because of the loud noise and potential dangers associated with testing such rockets. Five thinly populated rural Mississippi communities (Gainesville, Logtown, Napoleon, Santa Rosa, and Westonia), plus the northern portion of a sixth (Pearlington), along with 700 families in residence, had to be completely relocated away from the facility.
Sometimes the town might cease to officially exist, but the physical infrastructure remains. For example, the five Mississippi communities that had to be abandoned to build SSC still have remnants of those communities within the facility itself. These include city streets, now overgrown with forest flora and fauna, and a one-room schoolhouse. Another example of infrastructure remaining is the former town of Weston, Illinois, that voted itself out of existence and turned the land over for construction of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Many houses and even a few barns remain, used for housing visiting scientists and storing maintenance equipment, while roads that used to cross through the site have been blocked off at the edges of the property, with gatehouses or barricades to prevent unsupervised access.
Construction of dams has produced ghost towns that have been left underwater. Examples include:
Some towns become deserted when their populations were massacred, deported, or expelled. Examples include Kayaköy, an ancient Greek city abandoned in 1923 as result of population exchange between Greece and Turkey and the original French village at Oradour-sur-Glane which was destroyed on 10 June 1944 when 642 of its 663 inhabitants were killed by a German Waffen-SS company. A new village was built after the war on a nearby site, and the ruins of the original have been maintained as a memorial. Another example is Aghdam, a city in Azerbaijan. Armenian forces occupied Aghdam in July 1993 during the First Nagorno-Karabakh War. The heavy fighting forced the entire population to flee. Upon seizing the city, Armenian forces destroyed much of the town to discourage Azerbaijanis from returning. More damage occurred in the following decades when locals looted the abandoned town for building materials. It is currently almost entirely ruined and uninhabited.
Natural and human-made disasters can create ghost towns. For example, after being flooded more than 30 times since their town was founded in 1845, residents of Pattonsburg, Missouri, decided to relocate after two floods in 1993. With government help, the whole town was rebuilt 3 miles or 5 km away.
Craco, a medieval village in the Italian region of Basilicata, was evacuated after a landslide in 1963. Nowadays it is a filming location for many movies, including The Passion of The Christ by Mel Gibson, Christ Stopped at Eboli by Francesco Rosi, The Nativity Story by Catherine Hardwicke and Quantum of Solace by Marc Forster.[26]
In 1984, Centralia, Pennsylvania, was abandoned due to an uncontainable mine fire, which began in 1962 and still rages to this day; eventually the fire reached an abandoned mine underneath the nearby town of Byrnesville, which caused that mine to catch on fire too and forced the evacuation of that town as well.
Ghost towns may also occasionally come into being due to an anticipated natural disaster – for example, the Canadian town of Lemieux, Ontario, was abandoned in 1991 after soil testing revealed that the community was built on an unstable bed of Leda clay. Two years after the last building in Lemieux was demolished, a landslide swept part of the former town-site into the South Nation River. Two decades earlier, the Canadian town of Saint-Jean-Vianney, Québec, also constructed on a Leda clay base, had been abandoned after a landslide on 4 May 1971, which swept away 41 homes, killing 31 people.
Following the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, dangerously high levels of nuclear contamination escaped into the surrounding area, and nearly 200 towns and villages in Ukraine and neighbouring Belarus were evacuated, including the cities of Pripyat and Chernobyl. The area was so contaminated that many of the evacuees were never permitted to return to their homes. Pripyat is the most famous of these abandoned towns; it was built for the workers of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and had a population of almost 50,000 at the time of the disaster.[27]
Significant fatality rates from epidemics have produced ghost towns. Some places in eastern Arkansas were abandoned after more than 7,000 Arkansans died during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 and 1919.[28][29] Several communities in Ireland, particularly in the west of the country, were wiped out due to the Great Famine in the latter half of the 19th century, and the years of economic decline that followed.
Catastrophic environmental damage caused by long-term contamination can also create a ghost town. Some notable examples are Times Beach, Missouri, whose residents were exposed to a high level of dioxins, and Wittenoom, Western Australia, which was once Australia's largest source of blue asbestos, but was shut down in 1966 due to health concerns. Treece and Picher, twin communities straddling the Kansas–Oklahoma border, were once one of the United States' largest sources of zinc and lead, but over a century of unregulated disposal of mine tailings led to groundwater contamination and lead poisoning in the town's children, eventually resulting in a mandatory Environmental Protection Agency buyout and evacuation. Contamination due to ammunition caused by military use may also lead to the development of ghost towns. Tyneham, in Dorset, was requisitioned for military exercises during the Second World War, and remains unpopulated, being littered with unexploded munitions from regular shelling.
A few ghost towns have managed to get a second life, and this happens through a variety of reasons. One of these reasons is heritage tourism generating a new economy able to support residents.[30][31]
For example, Walhalla, Victoria, Australia, became almost deserted after its gold mine ceased operation in 1914, but owing to its accessibility and proximity to other attractive locations, it has had a recent economic and holiday population surge.[32] Another town, Sungai Lembing, Malaysia, was almost deserted due to closure of a tin mine in 1986 was revived in 2001 and has become a tourist destination since then.[33]
Foncebadón, a village in León, Spain, that was mostly abandoned and only inhabited by a mother and son, is slowly being revived owing to the ever-increasing stream of pilgrims on the road to Santiago de Compostela.
Some ghost towns (e.g. Riace, Muñotello) are being repopulated by respectively refugees and homeless people. In Riace, this was accomplished by a scheme funded by the Italian government which offers the housing to refugees and in Muñotello it was accomplished through an NGO (Madrina Foundation).[34][35]
In Algeria, many cities became hamlets after the end of Late Antiquity. They were revived with shifts in population during and after French colonization of Algeria. Oran, currently the nation's second-largest city with 1 million people, was a village of only a few thousand people before colonization.
Alexandria, the second-largest city of Egypt, was a flourishing city in the Ancient era, but declined during the Middle Ages. It underwent a dramatic revival during the 19th century; from a population of 5,000 in 1806, it grew into a city of more than 200,000 inhabitants by 1882,[36] and is now home to more than four million people.[37]
Wars and rebellions in some African countries have left many towns and villages deserted. Since 2003, when President François Bozizé came to power, thousands of citizens of the Central African Republic have been forced to flee their homes as a result of the escalating conflict between armed rebels and government troops. Villages accused of supporting the rebels, such as Beogombo Deux near Paoua, are ransacked by government soldiers. Those who are not killed have no choice but to escape to refugee camps.[38] The instability in the regio