A
ghost town is a
town or
city that has been completely
abandoned by human inhabitants, usually because the
economic activity that supported it has failed, or due to natural or human-caused disasters such as
flood,
government action, uncontrolled lawlessness or
war. The term is sometimes used in a depreciative sense to include cities, towns, and neighborhoods which, while still populated, are significantly less so than in years past.
Some ghost towns are tourist attractions, among them Tombstone, Arizona; Jerome, Arizona; Oatman, Arizona; Bannack, Montana; Kolmanskop and Elizabeth Bay, outside Lüderitz, Namibia. This is especially true of those that preserve interesting architecture. Visiting, writing about, and photographing ghost towns is a minor industry.
Some ghost towns may be overgrown, difficult to access, and dangerous or illegal to visit.
Factors leading to abandonment of towns include depleted natural resources (as was the case of Smeerenburg and Grytviken), or natural resources such as water no longer being available; railroads and roads bypassing or no longer accessing the town (as was the case in many of the ghost towns along Ontario's historic Opeongo Line); economic activity shifting elsewhere; human intervention such as highway re-routing (as was the case with many towns located along U.S. Route 66, after motorists bypassed the towns on the faster moving I-44 and I-40); river re-routing (the Aral Sea being one example of this), and nuclear disasters such as Chernobyl. Significant fatality rates from epidemics have also produced ghost towns; for example, some places in eastern Arkansas were abandoned after near-total mortality (over 7,000 Arkansans died during the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 and 1919).[1] The Middle East has many ghost towns, created when the shifting of politics or fall of empires caused capital cities to be socially or economically non-viable, e.g., Ctesiphon.
