Touring the Desolate Streets of America’s Ghost Towns
Travel Blog • Joanna Kakissis • 10.31.07 | 2:43 PM ET
Photo by A Halloween question: What are America’s ghost towns really like? Not exactly a trick-or-treater’s technicolor spookfest, writes Hugo Martin of the Los Angeles Times. Martin explored some abandoned towns in the West, offering a not-so-marketable tableau of death, decay, doom and depression. The creepiness includes:
* a headless, twice-lynched Hooch Simpson who wanders the streets of Skidoo, California.
* visitors who steal memorabilia from the sun-bleached remains of Bodie, also in California, and are beset with heartbreak, serious injury and even death.
* a murdered pregnant prostitute who haunts the once-lux, now-dead mining town of Goldfield, Nevada.
* a crazed innkeeper’s daughter, dead since 1960, who patrols tumbleweed-swept St. Elmo, Colorado.