The Last Best Ghost Town: Bodie, California

MentalFloss.com-- There are a thousand ghost towns spread across the western United States — a whole constellation of loss and ruin — but most are little more than foundations, or at best a few tumbledown shacks, or if the people who lived and died there did anything of note, and if they’re lucky, a sun-faded commemorative plaque mounted on a squat stone pillar. The ghost town of Bodie, however, is another story altogether. A mining boomtown, it was the third most populous city in the state of California in 1880. By the 1940s sickness, wars, bad weather and exhausted mines had led to the town’s desertion, and its isolated, inhospitable location made certain that it stayed that way; no one eyed this high desert waste, 8,000 feet above sea level between Yosemite and the lonely Nevada border, and imagined a shopping mall in its place. Count us all lucky.

Only five percent of Bodie’s structures are still standing, but considering how large Bodie was, that’s still a lot for a ghost town — more than two hundred. And unlike Tombstone, Calico or any number of other “preserved” ghost towns in the West, it’s not a tourist trap where you can buy cotton candy from gunfight-staging actors playing oldey-timey cowboys; the town is kept in a state of “arrested decay,” which means the park rangers that patrol its dusty streets focus on making sure what’s left of Bodie doesn’t fall down, but they could care less about painting, weatherizing or cleaning up the decades-old trash that’s heaped everywhere.

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