A quick note before we start: nothing on this list is haunted. That is a different article. These are places that earn the word eerie honestly — through abandonment, decline, strange industry, and the kind of isolation that makes you check your rearview mirror. No ghost stories, no “orbs in the photo,” no legends passed off as history. Just real places where the atmosphere does the work.
Eerie towns come in flavors. Some are preserved ghost towns where the furniture is still in the windows. Some are industrial casualties — towns the government had to erase for everyone’s safety. Some are still hanging on with a handful of residents and a main street the world moved past. All twelve are worth the drive if you like your road trips with a little unease.
1. Bodie, California
The gold standard, literally. Gold was discovered here in 1859, but Bodie didn’t explode until the Standard Company’s big strike in 1877. Within a few years it was a full boomtown of 8,000 to 10,000 people with 65 saloons, a reputation for daily violence fueled by all that liquor, and a nickname — “the baddest town in the West” — that California State Parks still prints on its materials. Fires in 1892 and 1932 took most of the town; by 1915 it was a ghost town.
What makes Bodie special is the preservation philosophy. California State Parks keeps it in “arrested decay” — buildings and interiors maintained exactly as they were found, not restored. You can’t go inside (the structures are too fragile), but you peer through windows at stocked general stores, a schoolhouse with books still on the desks and math problems on the blackboard, and workshops full of tools. About 100 buildings remain of the original town. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1961 and became a state park in 1962.
Getting there is part of it: Highway 270 off US 395 near Bridgeport, with the last three miles unpaved and rough. The park sits at 8,400 feet — pack a jacket even in summer, bring food and water (there are no services), and go between spring snowmelt and the return of snow for the best visit. Summer hours run 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.; winter access is limited.
Sources: California State Parks · Wikipedia
2. Centralia, Pennsylvania
A town sitting on a fire that has been burning since May 27, 1962. The story, documented by Pennsylvania’s own Department of Environmental Protection: the borough council hired firefighters to burn the town landfill — located in an abandoned strip-mine pit — as part of the usual pre–Memorial Day cleanup. The fire wasn’t fully extinguished, and an unsealed opening let it spread into the labyrinth of abandoned coal mines beneath the town. It has been burning ever since, at depths up to 300 feet, across roughly an 8-mile stretch.
The consequences played out over decades. Carbon monoxide seeped into homes, the ground subsided, and the main highway buckled and had to be closed. In 1984 Congress appropriated $42 million for voluntary relocation; between 1985 and 1991, 545 homes and businesses were bought out and their residents moved. At the time the fire started, about 1,500 people lived in Centralia. By 2017, the population was five.
If you go, take the state’s warning seriously: the Pennsylvania DEP says the mine-fire area is extremely dangerous — noxious gases, ground prone to sudden and unexpected collapse — and strongly discourages visiting the immediate area. This is one eerie town best appreciated from the road, not the ground.
Sources: PA DEP Centralia Mine Fire Resources · Wikipedia
3. Kennecott, Alaska
The grandest ghost town on this list. Copper was found in the Wrangell Mountains in 1900, and the Kennecott Copper Corporation built a full company town in the wilderness — mines, a 14-story concentration mill, and a railroad to the coast. (Note the spelling: the town is Kennicott, the company Kennecott — a clerical error that stuck.) Between 1911 and 1938 the operation produced nearly 600,000 tons of copper and 9 million ounces of silver, worth roughly $100 million at the time. When the high-grade ore ran out, the company shut everything down in 1938 and left — equipment, dining tables, and all.
Today Kennecott is a National Historic Landmark District inside Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve, the largest national park in America. The National Park Service acquired the town site in 1998 and has been stabilizing the mill and other buildings since. You can walk the town on your own, but the famous 14-story mill is only accessible on a guided tour with the park’s concessionaire. Getting there means the 60-mile gravel McCarthy Road, which is honestly half the adventure.
Sources: St. Elias Alpine Guides / Alaska.org · Wikipedia
4. Old Cahawba, Alabama
Alabama’s first capital, now a ghost town you walk through on paved trails. Cahawba was carved out of the wilderness in 1819 to be the state’s first capital, at the confluence of the Alabama and Cahaba rivers near Selma. It was a beautiful site with one fatal flaw: it flooded, repeatedly. The legislature moved the capital in 1826, but the town held on for decades as a wealthy river port and cotton hub — until an 1865 flood and the loss of the county seat to Selma finished it. Within ten years, houses were being dismantiled and moved away.
The history here is heavy, and it’s documented, not legendary. During the Civil War, a cotton warehouse became Castle Morgan, a prison camp holding some 3,000 Union soldiers — and the rivers flooded the prison with the men inside. Many of the survivors later boarded the riverboat Sultana and perished in the worst maritime disaster in U.S. history. During Reconstruction, the abandoned courthouse became a meeting place for freedmen and the town was called a “Mecca” of the era’s new political movement. By 1900 most buildings were gone; the town wasn’t even unincorporated until 1989.
Today the Alabama Historical Commission runs it as Old Cahawba Archaeological Park — a ghost grid of streets under forest and field, with ruins, cemeteries, a nature trail, and a visitor center. Lonely Planet calls it “an eerie ghost town, faded by time and jungly overgrowth,” which is about right.
Sources: Wikipedia · Alabama Historical Commission
5. Virginia City and Nevada City, Montana
Not to be confused with the Nevada town of the same name — this is the Montana original, and it’s the real thing. Gold was struck in Alder Gulch in 1863, and within two years an estimated 10,000 people were working claims along the gulch. Virginia City became the territorial capital in 1865. It was the only major camp on the gulch to survive the mining decline — the rest were demolished or buried by later industrial mining.
What saved Virginia City was a collector couple, Charles and Sue Bovey, who started buying its abandoned buildings in the 1940s and turned the town into an open-air museum of frontier life. The town became a National Historic Landmark district in 1966, and in 1997 the State of Montana bought the Bovey properties; the Montana Heritage Commission runs them today. Nearly 300 structures stand in Virginia City, about half of them built before 1900, mixing original-condition buildings with active shops and restaurants.
A mile west, Nevada City is the Boveys’ other project: they bought the near-vanished camp in the 1950s and relocated nearly a hundred historic buildings to its empty lots, creating an outdoor museum of over 100 structures (fourteen are original to the site). Don’t miss the Nevada City Music Hall, home to North America’s largest collection of automated music machines. The Alder Gulch Railroad links the two towns, and you can try gold panning.
Sources: Wikipedia — Virginia City · Wikipedia — Nevada City
6. Thurmond, West Virginia
A town with almost no one in it and trains that still run through it. Thurmond sits deep in the New River Gorge — now a national park — and at its peak it was one of the busiest railroad towns on the Chesapeake and Ohio line. In 1910 it generated nearly $5 million in revenue for the C&O, producing more freight tonnage than Cincinnati and Richmond combined. About twenty passenger trains a day passed through. The flip side of the money: the town earned a reputation as the “Dodge City” of West Virginia, a strip town along the tracks built on drinking, gambling, and the rough edges of coal money.
Then the coal era faded, the businesses closed, and Thurmond became a virtual ghost town by the 1950s — down to five residents in the 2010 census. The National Park Service restored the depot in 1995 and turned it into a visitor center, and over 20 structures still stand: the National Bank, the Lafayette Hotel, the commercial row along the tracks. You reach it via a narrow county road ending at a one-lane bridge over the New River, and Amtrak still stops there three times a week — on a request basis. Standing on the platform while a freight train goes through is the whole experience in one moment: the reason the town existed, still running, with nobody left to need it.
Sources: The Vintage News
7. Slab City, California
The only entry on this list that isn’t abandoned — it’s a town that was never supposed to exist. On the east shore of the Salton Sea, near Niland, sits the remains of Camp Robert H. Dunlap, a World War II Marine artillery base with 30 buildings, eight miles of paved streets, and a swimming pool. The base was dismantled in 1956, the land went to the state in 1961, and starting in the late 1960s, squatters began setting up on the leftover concrete slabs. Slab City was born — and it has been going, off the grid, ever since.
There is no local government, no electricity, no running water, no sewers, no trash pickup. Residents call it “the last free place,” and Smithsonian magazine once profiled it as a “Squatters’ Paradise.” The population is seasonal: a few thousand snowbirds in winter, roughly 150 in the brutal summer when temperatures can hit 120 degrees. At the entrance stands Salvation Mountain, the folk-art hill that Leonard Knight spent nearly 30 years building out of adobe and donated paint, emblazoned with “God Is Love.” Nearby, the East Jesus art garden grows sculptures out of desert salvage.
It’s a place people visit partly to gawk and partly to wonder if they’d have the nerve. If you go: the land is state-owned, the sheriff’s office patrols it, and state laws still apply — “last free place” is a vibe, not a legal status. Pack out everything you pack in, and remember this is some people’s home, not a set.
Sources: Smithsonian Magazine · Wikipedia
8. Picher, Oklahoma
A town the ground itself rejected. Picher was the heart of the Tri-State Mining District, a major national center of lead and zinc mining for more than a century. Decades of unrestricted underground excavation undermined most of the town’s buildings and left giant piles of toxic mine tailings — chat piles — heaped across the landscape. In 1983 the EPA folded the area into the Tar Creek Superfund site; a 1994 study found 34% of Picher’s children had lead poisoning. A 2006 Army Corps of Engineers study found 86% of the town’s buildings, including the school, were badly undermined and could collapse at any time. The government ordered a mandatory evacuation and bought out the entire town.
Then, on May 10, 2008, an EF4 tornado tore through what was left, destroying 150 homes and accelerating the exodus of the last holdouts. The mining museum burned down in an arson. Photographer Todd Stewart spent years documenting the ruins — boarded-up houses, abandoned schools, personal belongings scattered at the base of the chat piles.
Almost nothing is left standing now; Picher is a landscape more than a town. The chat piles remain, visible for miles, and sinkholes still open where tunnels collapse. If you visit, stay on public roads and don’t climb the chat piles or enter any remaining structures — the ground here is genuinely unstable, and the contamination is real.
9. Gilman, Colorado
The town you can’t visit — and that’s part of the story. Gilman was founded in 1886 during the Colorado Silver Boom and became a major center of lead and zinc mining, built around the Eagle Mine on a cliffside above the Eagle River. It was a company town for nearly a century: homes, stores, and infrastructure built into the mountainside, hundreds of residents.
In 1984 the EPA ordered the town abandoned. The mines had left arsenic, cadmium, copper, lead, and zinc in the soil, contaminated the groundwater, and caused fish die-offs in the Eagle River. The 235-acre site — eight million tons of mine waste — went on the National Priorities List in 1986. An estimated 90 buildings still stand within the town boundaries, fenced off on private property and strictly off limits to the public.
You can see Gilman from a distance (Highway 24 runs past), which is honestly the right way to see it: a whole town frozen in 1984, visible but unreachable. Cleanup work has improved the river and removed contaminated soils, and the EPA has begun deleting cleaned portions from the Superfund list — but the town itself stays behind its fences.
Sources: Wikipedia · EPA Superfund Reuse
10. Times Beach, Missouri
A town that was erased on purpose — and is now a state park. Times Beach was founded in 1925 as a newspaper promotion: a subscription to the St. Louis Times plus $67.50 bought you a lot along the Meramec River. It never became the resort the paper intended; it grew into a lower-middle-class town of about 2,000, sitting right on Route 66.
In 1972 the town paid a local waste hauler, Russell Bliss, six cents a gallon to spray waste oil on its unpaved roads to keep the dust down. The oil was mixed with chemical waste tainted with dioxin. After horses died at a local stable, the EPA investigated, and in December 1982 residents learned their town was contaminated. Times Beach was evacuated in early 1983, the government bought out every property, and the city was disincorporated in 1985.
The cleanup took years: contaminated soil was excavated and incinerated, and 265,354 tons of dioxin-contaminated material from Times Beach and 26 other eastern Missouri sites were treated. The EPA deleted the site from the Superfund list in 2001. On the former town site now sits Route 66 State Park — opened in 1999 — with trails, a boat ramp, and a visitor center that interprets both the Mother Road and the ecological disaster. Walk the park trails and you’re walking streets that used to have addresses.
11. Bannack, Montana
Montana’s first gold town and its first territorial capital — and one of the most complete frontier towns left anywhere. Gold was discovered on Grasshopper Creek on July 28, 1862, setting off a rush that swelled Bannack to more than 3,000 people by 1863. Richer strikes elsewhere drained it within a few years, and the town declined for a century. Montana acquired it as a state park in 1954, and it’s been a National Historic Landmark since 1961.
What sets Bannack apart from the “look but don’t touch” ghost towns: over 50 historic buildings line Main Street, and most are open to walk through — the hotel, the Masonic lodge, the Methodist church, the old courthouse. The visitor center runs Memorial Day through Labor Day, and there’s a campground on Grasshopper Creek steps from the abandoned buildings. Go during Bannack Days (third weekend in July) for reenactments and crowds; go any other time for the wind and the silence.
Sources: Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks · Wikipedia
12. Cairo, Illinois
The eeriest entry on this list, because it’s not a ghost town — people still live there. Cairo (pronounced “CARE-row”) sits at the windy confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers at the southernmost tip of Illinois. At its peak in 1920, it held 15,203 people — a river port and factory town famous enough to appear in Huckleberry Finn. In 2020, the census counted 1,733: an 89% loss in a century, with population falling in every census since 1950.
The decline is documented and ongoing. River trade dried up. The hospital closed in 1986. The last grocery store closed in 2015. The federal government demolished the Elmwood and McBride housing projects in 2019. Weeds grow through the cracks of old brick streets; whole blocks are condemned; grand old mansions stand with roofs caving in. The town’s history also carries documented racial strife and corruption that compounded the economic collapse.
Cairo isn’t a preserved park or a fenced-off Superfund site. It’s a living town that the economy left behind, and visiting requires a different posture than a ghost town: this is a place where people are trying to rebuild, not a ruin to consume. Go with respect, support what’s open, and understand that the eeriness here is somebody else’s daily life.
Sources: Wikipedia · NPR / CPR
How to do eerie towns right
These places reward a slower pace and a little homework. Check access before you go: some are state parks with posted hours (Bodie, Bannack, Old Cahawba), some are managed by the Park Service (Kennecott, Thurmond), and some are outright off limits (Gilman) or genuinely dangerous (Centralia’s gases, Picher’s collapsing ground). “Abandoned” doesn’t mean “open to the public.”
Leave everything where you find it — at Bodie, the scattered square nails and china shards are part of the exhibit. Don’t climb on masonry, don’t enter fenced or posted structures, and don’t geotag fragile sites for engagement; vandalism follows coordinates. And where a town still has residents — Cairo, Thurmond, Slab City — remember you’re visiting someone’s home, not a theme park. Curiosity, not consumption.
We went deep on Bodie and Bannack’s frontier history in Ep. 52: Gunslingers & Dusty Trails — the episode on the West’s most iconic towns, and why the legends stuck.