United States[edit]

Bannack, Montana, USA, a well-preserved ghost town that is now a state park.

1881 Assay building in what was once Vulture City, a mining town in Wickenburg, Arizona, USA.

See also: List of ghost towns in the United States

There are many ghost towns, or semi-ghost towns (some of them unincorporated communities), in the American Great Plains, the rural areas of which have lost a third of their population since 1920. Thousands of communities in the northern plains states (such asMontana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota) became railroad ghost towns when a rail line failed to materialize. Hundreds more were abandoned when the US Highway System replaced the railroads as the United States' favorite mode of travel. Ghost towns are common in mining or old mill town areas: in Arizona, California, Colorado, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico,Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming in the western United States and in West Virginia in the eastern USA. Some unincorporated towns become ghost towns due to flooding for man made lakes, such as Oketeyeconne. They can be observed as far south asArkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. When the resources that had created an employment boom in these towns were consumed, the businesses ceased to exist,^{[citation needed]} and the people moved to more productive areas.

Sometimes, a ghost town consists of many old abandoned buildings (as in Bodie, California); elsewhere, there remain only foundations of former buildings (e.g., Graysonia, Arkansas). Old mining camps that have lost most of their population at some stage of their history, such as Aspen, Central City, Crested Butte, Cripple Creek, Deadwood, Marysville, Oatman, Park City, St. Elmo,Tombstone, and Virginia City, are sometimes included in the category, although they are active towns and cities today.^{[citation needed]}Many U.S. ghost towns, such as South Pass City in Wyoming^[22] (also still an active, small community) are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.^[23]

Some of the earliest settlements in the US, though they no longer exist in any tangible sense, once had the characteristics of a ghost town. In 1590, mapmaker John White arrived at the Roanoke Colony, North Carolina to find it deserted, its inhabitants having vanished without a trace; in 1632, the Zwaanendael Colony became a ghost town when every one of the colonists was massacred by Indians; and in 1699, Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, was abandoned when Williamsburgbecame the new capital of the colony.

Starting in 2002, an attempt to declare an "official ghost town" in California stalled when the adherents of the town of Bodie, inNorthern California, and those of Calico, in Southern California, could not agree on the most deserving settlement for the recognition. A compromise was eventually reached – Bodie became the "official state gold rush ghost town", while Calico was named the "official state silver rush ghost town".^[24]

On April 10, 2015, at the West Texas Historical Association's 92nd annual meeting, at Amarillo College in Amarillo, presented a program on ghost towns in Texas. Scheduled participants were James B. Hays of Brownwood, "Walthall and the Early Settlement of Southern Runnels County"; Mildred Sentell of Snyder, "Black Gold and the Ghost Town of Burnham, Garza County", and Christena Stephens of Nazareth, Texas, "How Mortality Records Can Provide a Historical Picture of a German Community."^[25]