Ghost town

"Ghost city" redirects here. For archaeological deserted settlements, see Abandoned village. For other uses, see Ghost city (disambiguation) and Ghost town (disambiguation).

Plymouth, Montserrat is the only ghost town that is the capital of a modern political territory. It was rendered uninhabitable and evacuated in 1995 after being inundated with volcanic ash from the eruption of the Soufrière Hills Volcano.

A ghost town, deserted city, extinct town, or abandoned city is an abandoned or largely depopulated human settlement that usually contains substantial, visible remaining buildings and infrastructure, such as roads. A town often becomes a ghost town because the economic activity that supported it (usually industrial or agricultural) has failed or ended for any reason (e.g. mining has exhausted a local ore deposit). The town may also have declined because of natural or human-caused disasters such as floods, prolonged droughts, government actions, war, pollution, or nuclear and radiation-related accidents and incidents. The term can sometimes refer to cities, towns, and neighbourhoods that, though still populated, are significantly less so than in past years; for example, those affected by high levels of unemployment and dereliction.

The definition of a ghost town is debated amongst writers. Some restrict the term to places deserted for purely economic reasons, while others require visible remains of buildings, and still others allow for a small remaining population. Common causes of abandonment include the exhaustion of natural resources such as minerals or timber, the rerouting of railways or roads, dam construction that isolates or floods a town, armed conflict, forced displacement, and environmental contamination. Epidemics, including the Black Death and the Spanish flu, have also depopulated communities, as has long-term exposure to hazardous materials such as asbestos and lead.

Ghost towns are found on every continent, including Antarctica. Africa and the Middle East have towns abandoned because of conflict and the collapse of empires of which they were a part. In Asia, settlements linked to Gulag labour camps were deserted after the camps closed, while in Europe, urbanisation has led to the emptying of rural villages across Bulgaria, Hungary, and Spain. The Americas contain thousands of former mining and railway towns, particularly in the western United States, British Columbia, and Chile's Atacama Desert. Australia and New Zealand have their own legacy of gold rush ghost towns.

A few ghost towns have been repopulated through heritage tourism, pilgrimage, or resettlement programmes. Walhalla, Victoria, Australia grew and then shrank correlative to gold mining operations but recently has had a tourism-driven revival. Foncebadón in Spain is slowly recovering thanks in large part to Christian pilgrims stopping there on their way to Santiago de Compostela. Some ghost towns that preserve period-specific architecture have become tourist attractions or filming locations: examples include Kolmanskop in Namibia, Craco in Italy, Pripyat in Ukraine, and Bodie in the United States.

Definition

T. Lindsey Baker, author of Ghost Towns of Texas, defines a ghost town as "a town for which the reason for being no longer exists." Some writers restrict the term to settlements that were deserted because they were no longer economically viable, discounting those that were abandoned due to a natural or human-made disaster or other causes. Some believe that any settlement with visible tangible remains should not be called a ghost town; others say, conversely, that a ghost town should contain the tangible remains of buildings. Whether or not the settlement must be completely deserted or may contain a small population is also a matter for debate. Generally, though, the term is used in a looser sense, encompassing any and all of these definitions. American author Lambert Florin defined a ghost town as "a shadowy semblance of a former self."

Reasons for abandonment

Factors leading to the abandonment of towns include depleted natural resources, economic activity shifting elsewhere, railroads and roads bypassing or no longer accessing the town, human intervention, disasters, massacres, wars, the shifting of politics or fall of empires, and volcanic eruptions. A town can also be abandoned if it is located within an exclusion zone due to natural or human-made causes.

Armed conflicts

Nature slowly reclaiming the ruins in Aghdam (2010)

Rafah, destroyed (2025)

Some towns became deserted when their populations were massacred, deported, or expelled.

Examples include Kayaköy, an ancient Greek city abandoned in 1923 as a result of the population exchange between Greece and Turkey, and the original French village at Oradour-sur-Glane which was destroyed on 10 June 1944 when 642 of its 663 inhabitants were killed by a German Waffen-SS company. A new village was built after the war on a nearby site, and the ruins of the original have been maintained as a memorial.

The century-old Israeli–Palestinian conflict and Arab-Israeli conflict have caused a lot of ghost towns as well. In Palestine, the Old City of Hebron has been divided into H1, under Palestinian control, and H2, under Israeli military control since 1997. As a result of this division and the presence of Israeli settlers, the H2 area is subject to strict restrictions, shop closures, and checkpoints that have emptied the historic city centre. As for the Gaza Strip, following the Gaza war, most of its cities have been devastated by the Israeli military, Rafah and Khan Yunis in particular. Another Middle Eastern example is Quneitra, located in the Golan Heights: the city has been occupied by Israeli forces in 1967 and entirely destroyed before Israeli withdrawal in June 1974. The United Nations has condemned Israel for Quneitra's destruction, while Israel blamed Syria for not rebuilding the city.

Another example is Aghdam, a city in Azerbaijan. Armenian forces occupied Aghdam in July 1993 during the First Nagorno-Karabakh War. The heavy fighting forced the entire population to flee. Upon seizing the city, Armenian forces destroyed much of the town to discourage Azerbaijanis from returning. More damage occurred in the following decades when locals looted the abandoned town for building materials. Azerbaijan recaptured the district in November 2020 under a Russian-brokered ceasefire agreement.

In the 21st century, war and conflict continues to bring about the abandonment of human settlements. Examples include villages in Ukraine depopulated and largely destroyed during the Russian invasion such as Bakhmut and AvdiivkaDuring the ongoing Gaza war numerous Palestinian cities in Gaza have been entirely depopulated and razed. Rafah, with a pre-war population of 275,000 has been almost entirely destroyed and the population forcibly transferred.

Economic decline

As farms industrialise, smaller farms are no longer economically viable, leading to rural decay.

Ghost towns may result when the single activity or resource that created a boomtown (e.g., nearby mine, mill or resort) is depleted or the resource economy undergoes a "bust" (e.g., catastrophic resource price collapse). A gold rush often brought intensive but short-lived economic activity to a remote village, only to leave a ghost town once the resource was depleted.

Boomtowns can often decrease in size as quickly as they grew. Sometimes all, or nearly all, of the population can desert the town, resulting in a ghost town. The dismantling of a boomtown can often occur on a planned basis. Mining companies sometimes will create a temporary company town to service a mine site, building all the accommodations, shops and services required, and then remove them once the resource has been extracted. Modular buildings can be used to facilitate the process.

In some cases, multiple factors may remove the economic basis for a community; some former mining towns on U.S. Route 66 suffered both mine closures when the resources were depleted and loss of highway traffic as US 66 was diverted from places like Oatman, Arizona, onto a more direct path. Mine and pulp mill closures have led to many ghost towns in British Columbia, Canada, including several relatively recent ones: Ocean Falls, which closed in 1973 after the pulp mill was decommissioned; Kitsault, whose molybdenum mine shut down after only 18 months in 1982; and Cassiar, whose asbestos mine operated from 1952 to 1992.

In other cases, the reason for abandonment can arise from a town's intended economic function shifting to another, nearby place. This happened to Collingwood, Queensland, in Outback Australia when nearby Winton outperformed Collingwood as a regional centre for the livestock-raising industry. The railway reached Winton in 1899, linking it with the rest of Queensland, and Collingwood was a ghost town by the following year. More broadly across Australia, there has been a shift towards fly-in fly-out arrangements over building a company town in order to avoid the development of ghost towns once a mining resource has been fully extracted.

The Middle East (Southwest Asia) has many ghost towns and ruins that were created when the shifting of politics or the fall of empires caused capital cities to be socially or economically unviable, such as Ctesiphon.

The rise of real-estate speculation and the resulting possibility of real-estate bubbles (sometimes due to outright overbuilding by land developers) may also trigger the appearance of certain elements of a ghost town, as real-estate prices initially rise (whereupon affordable housing becomes less available) and then later fall for a variety of reasons that are often tied to economic cycles and/or marketing hubris. This has been observed in various countries, including Spain, China, the United States, and Canada, where housing is often used as an investment rather than for habitation.

Human intervention and infrastructure

Prior to the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, Varosha, now falling into ruin, was a modern tourist area.

Railroads and roads bypassing or no longer reaching a town can also create a ghost town. This was the case in many of the ghost towns along Ontario's historic Opeongo Line and along U.S. Route 66 after motorists bypassed the latter on the faster-moving highways I-44 and I-40. Some ghost towns were founded along railways where steam trains would stop at periodic intervals for repairs or to take on water, but dieselisation or electrification negated the need for the trains to stop. Amboy, California, was part of one such series of villages along the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad across the Mojave Desert. In other cases, railroads replaced rivers or canals as the primary means of overland transport, causing the decline of towns that depended on river or canal traffic; one such town was Granville, Indiana, located on the Wabash and Erie Canal.

River rerouting is another factor, one example being the towns along the Aral Sea.

Ghost towns may be created when land is expropriated by a government, and residents are required to relocate. One example is the village of Tyneham in Dorset, England, acquired during World War II to build an artillery range.

A similar situation occurred in the U.S. when NASA acquired land to construct the John C. Stennis Space Center (SSC), a rocket testing facility in Hancock County, Mississippi (on the Mississippi side of the Pearl River, which is the Mississippi–Louisiana state line). This required NASA to acquire a large (approximately 34-square-mile or 88-square-kilometre) buffer zone because of the loud noise and potential dangers associated with testing such rockets. Five thinly populated rural Mississippi communities (Gainesville, Logtown, Napoleon, Santa Rosa, and Westonia), plus the northern portion of a sixth (Pearlington), along with 700 families in residence, had to be completely relocated away from the facility.

Akarmara, a mining town in Abkhazia/Georgia, was abandoned in the early 1990s due to the War in Abkhazia.

Sometimes the town might cease to officially exist, but the physical infrastructure remains. For instance, the facility itself still contains remnants of the five Mississippi communities abandoned for the construction of SSC. These include city streets, now overgrown with forest flora and fauna, and a one-room schoolhouse. Another example of infrastructure remaining is the former town of Weston, Illinois, that voted itself out of existence and turned the land over for construction of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Many houses and even a few barns remain, used for housing visiting scientists and storing maintenance equipment, while roads that used to cross through the site have been blocked off at the edges of the property with gatehouses or barricades to prevent unsupervised access.

Flooding by dams

The construction of dams has left ghost towns submerged. Examples include:

• Kensico, New York was replaced by the Kensico Reservoir.
• Loyston, Tennessee, U.S., was inundated by the creation of Norris Dam and reconstructed on nearby higher ground.
• St. Thomas, Nevada, U.S., flooded by up to 70 feet of water by Lake Mead following construction of the Hoover Dam.
• Stiltner, West Virginia, inundated by the creation of East Lynn Lake in 1969.
• The Lost Villages of Ontario, flooded by Saint Lawrence Seaway construction in 1958.
• Nether Hambleton and Middle Hambleton in Rutland, England, which were flooded to create Rutland Water.
• Ashopton and Derwent, England, flooded during the construction of the Ladybower Reservoir.
• The Tignes Dam flooded the village of Tignes in France, displacing 78 families.
• Mologa in Russia was flooded by the creation of Rybinsk reservoir between 1941 and 1947.
• Many ancient villages were abandoned during construction of the Three Gorges Dam in China, leading to the displacement of many rural people.
• In Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica, inhabitants of Arenal and Tronadora were forced to relocate in 1978 to make room for the human-made Lake Arenal.
• Old Adaminaby in New South Wales, Australia, was flooded by a dam of the Snowy River Scheme.
• Construction of the Aswan High Dam on the Nile River in Egypt submerged archaeological sites and ancient settlements, such as Buhen under Lake Nasser.
• Tehri was drowned after the construction of the Tehri Dam in the Indian state of Uttarakhand.
• Aceredo and five other villages in the region of Galicia, Spain, drowned by the construction of Alto Lindoso Dam downstream in Portugal in 1992 (later exposed after extreme drought conditions in early 2022).
• Capel Celyn, Gwynedd, Wales, was lost to the Trywern Flooding of 1965. This was to create a reservoir, Llyn Celyn, in order to supply the English areas of Liverpool and Wirral with water for industry.
• Dana, Enfield, Greenwich, and Prescott, Massachusetts; four towns in the Swift River Valley that were flooded in 1938 to create the Quabbin Reservoir, a water supply for the growing city of Boston and the surrounding suburbs.

Disasters, actual and anticipated

Craco, Italy, was abandoned due to a landslide in 1963. It has since become a popular film set.

Both natural and man-made disasters can lead to the creation of ghost towns. For example, after being flooded more than 30 times since their town was founded in 1845, residents of Pattonsburg, Missouri, decided to relocate after two floods in 1993. With government help, the whole town was rebuilt 3 miles or 5 km away.

Craco, a medieval village in the Italian region of Basilicata, was evacuated after a landslide in 1963. Nowadays it is a filming location for many movies, including The Passion of The Christ by Mel Gibson, Christ Stopped at Eboli by Francesco Rosi, The Nativity Story by