Ten American Ghost Towns and the Legends That Haunt Them

On July 28, 1862, prospectors struck gold along Grasshopper Creek in what is now southwestern Montana, setting off the region's first major gold rush. Within a year Bannack held more than 3,000 people, and it served as the first capital of Montana Territory. As the easy gold ran out and miners chased richer strikes elsewhere, the population drained away. By the 1940s it was a ghost town, and in 1954 it became a state park. More than 50 log and frame buildings still line Main Street.

Bannack's legend centers on Henry Plummer. Miners elected him sheriff in May 1863. Within months, a vigilante movement accused him of secretly leading a gang of road agents that robbed and murdered travelers. On January 10, 1864, vigilantes hanged Plummer at Bannack without a trial, part of a wave of hangings that killed about two dozen suspected outlaws.

Was the sheriff really a gang boss? The case against him came largely from vigilante supporters, especially the writer Thomas Dimsdale, and some confessions were extracted under threat. Historians still argue over his guilt. In 1993, a mock retrial in Virginia City, Montana, ended with the jury split six to six. Ghost stories also cling to the old Hotel Meade, but those rest on visitors' impressions alone.

In 1904, prospectors Frank "Shorty" Harris and Ed Cross found gold in the hills near the eastern edge of what is now Death Valley National Park. A rush followed, and Rhyolite grew almost overnight. In 1906 the industrialist Charles Schwab bought the Montgomery Shoshone Mine and invested heavily. Within a couple of years the town had electric lights, telephones, newspapers, a hospital, an opera house, and a stock exchange. Tom Kelly built a house out of discarded bottles that still stands.

The collapse was just as fast. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the financial panic of 1907 dried up investment, the rich ore turned out to be limited, and a gloomy engineering report in 1908 sank mine stocks. The 1910 census counted 675 residents, and by 1920 only 14 remained.

The legend is the size of the boom. Popular accounts often say Rhyolite reached 10,000 people. The evidence points lower. The town's own newspapers put the peak at about 3,500, and historians generally estimate 3,500 to 5,000 around 1907 and 1908. Boom towns had every reason to exaggerate, and Rhyolite's promoters were selling stock. Today the ruins share the desert with the Goldwell Open Air Museum, whose shrouded white figures look like the town's ghosts.

Deep in the Wrangell Mountains of Alaska stand the red buildings of one of the richest copper operations ever found. Ore was discovered in 1900. Backed by the Guggenheim and J.P. Morgan interests, investors built a 196-mile railroad from the port of Cordova, with about 44 miles of bridges and trestles, and the first trainload of ore left in April 1911.

At its peak, roughly 500 to 600 men worked around the clock, pulling ore from about 77 miles of tunnels. By the time the mines closed in 1938, they had produced about 591,000 tons of copper, valued at roughly $200 million in 1938 dollars. The reason for the shutdown was simple: the richest ore was nearly gone. The company left, and the mill town was largely abandoned. Today it is a National Historic Landmark inside Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, and the Park Service has worked to stabilize its buildings since 1998.

Kennecott's legend is its origin story. In August 1900, prospectors Jack Smith and Clarence Warner found the green copper mineral malachite exposed on a mountainside. The popular version says they saw a bright green patch and mistook it for grass for their horses. Historians note the accounts of the discovery are confused and contradictory, so the grass story cannot be confirmed.

Few ghost towns started as high as Cahawba. Set on the Alabama River, it served as Alabama's first permanent state capital from 1819 until 1826. Opponents cited its low ground and reputation for flooding to move the capital to Tuscaloosa, though the town's historians say the flooding was exaggerated. Cahawba bounced back as a busy river port for shipping cotton.

The Civil War and the river finished it. During the war the Confederacy pulled up the town's railroad tracks for use elsewhere and set up a prison for captured Union soldiers in the town center. A major flood hit in 1865, and in 1866 the county seat moved to Selma. Residents and businesses followed. During Reconstruction, freed Black Alabamians used the old courthouse as a political meeting place, and formerly enslaved families later farmed the empty town blocks. Within about a decade, houses were being taken apart and hauled away. Today the Alabama Historical Commission manages the site as an archaeological park.

Its best-known legend is the Pegues Ghost. In the spring of 1862, the story goes, a couple walking through the cedar maze at the home of Colonel C.C. Pegues saw a glowing white ball drift and dart around them. Others reported it too. People at the time blamed a will-o'-the-wisp, a light occasionally reported over damp ground.

Terlingua lies in the desert of far West Texas between Big Bend National Park and Big Bend Ranch State Park. In the mid-1880s, miners found cinnabar, the red ore that yields mercury, also called quicksilver. In 1903 the Chicago industrialist Howard Perry formed the Chisos Mining Company, which became for a time the country's largest mercury producer. By the early 1920s the district supplied a large share of the nation's quicksilver, and the company town held more than 1,000 people, many of them Mexican workers and their families.

Working conditions were hard. Critics called the Chisos Mine a death trap, and a company geologist testified that the mine was extremely hot and had no ventilation. Production fell in the 1930s, the company went bankrupt in 1942, and mining in the area ended by the late 1940s. The houses were left to crumble, and the old cemetery, with its rock-covered graves, is still used. Every November 2 residents gather there for Día de los Muertos.

Even the name has a legend. The usual story says Terlingua is a corrupted form of the Spanish phrase tres lenguas, meaning three tongues, perhaps referring to an early mine or some local feature. It is a tidy explanation, but nobody has documented where the name actually came from.