A highway bends past a rusted sign, the pavement gives up, and suddenly there it is: a town that used to matter. Not a movie set, not a theme park simulating the past — a real place where people worked, fought, prayed, struck it rich, lost everything, and eventually left.
The best forgotten places in America aren’t empty because they lack stories. They’re empty because the stories got too expensive, too dangerous, or too inconvenient to keep living. These are the places worth building a road trip around. Some are preserved, some are fragile, and some demand you stay behind a fence and let the mystery do its job. That distinction matters: a forgotten place is not an invitation to trespass. It’s a chance to stand near the edges of American history and hear what remains.
(If ghost towns are your thing, don’t miss Ep. 103: Nevada’s 600 Ghost Towns — several of the towns below come up in it.)
1. Bodie, California
The gold standard of ghost towns. Gold was discovered here in 1859, the Standard Company bought in after an 1877 strike, and by the early 1880s roughly 8,000 to 10,000 people lived in a boomtown famous for its saloons and violence. The bust began in 1881; fires in 1892 and 1932 wiped out most of what remained. Since 1962 it’s been a California State Historic Park, preserved in what the state officially calls “arrested decay” — buildings stabilized but not restored, interiors left exactly as they were. You walk the streets and peer through windows at stocked stores, furnished homes, and a schoolhouse with lessons still on the desks. The last three miles of Highway 270 are dirt and can be rough; in winter, access is by skis, snowshoes, or snowmobile only. (California State Parks)
2. Cahaba (Old Cahawba), Alabama
Before Montgomery, there was Cahawba. Alabama’s first permanent state capital (1819–1826) sat at the confluence of the Alabama and Cahaba rivers — a beautiful setting with one fatal flaw: it flooded, repeatedly. The capital moved, but the town hung on for decades as a river port and cotton-shipping hub. During the Civil War, a cotton warehouse became Castle Morgan, a prison for Union soldiers; in 1865 the rivers flooded the prison with some 3,000 men inside. After the war the town faded, its buildings dismantled or swallowed by the landscape. Today the Alabama Historical Commission runs it as Old Cahawba Archaeological Park — a ghost grid of streets under forest and field, with ruins, cemeteries, and a visitor center near Selma. (Alabama Historical Commission / American Battlefield Trust)
3. Rhyolite, Nevada
Rhyolite rose with the Bullfrog district gold strike in 1904 and fell almost as fast as it rose. At its peak it had electric lights, a stock exchange, an opera house, and the three-story John S. Cook Bank building — finished in 1908 with Italian marble stairs, already doomed. The Panic of 1907 gutted the mines; the lights went out for good in 1916. What survives is spectacular: the skeletal bank, the old train depot, and Tom Kelly’s Bottle House, built in 1906 from tens of thousands of discarded beer and liquor bottles because lumber was scarce on the desert. The town sits on BLM land four miles west of Beatty on Highway 374, open for day use — and it pairs perfectly with a Death Valley trip. The adjacent Goldwell Open Air Museum adds a surreal sculpture park to the ruins. (National Park Service / BLM)
4. Terlingua, Texas
Terlingua wasn’t gold or silver — it was mercury. Cinnabar ore in the surrounding canyons fed quicksilver mines starting in the late 1800s; the Chisos Mining Company scaled up during World War I until Terlingua was one of the country’s largest mercury producers, with around 1,000 residents. When demand collapsed after the wars, the company went bankrupt and the town emptied. What’s left is half ghost town, half artist colony: crumbling mining ruins and the company owner’s mansion on the hill, plus the Starlight Theatre, the Trading Company, and a cemetery that’s equal parts photogenic and spooky. It sits between Big Bend National Park and Big Bend Ranch State Park — the ideal base camp for a West Texas trip. (PlanetWare)
5. Kennecott, Alaska
A copper company town abandoned in 1938 and frozen in time. Copper was discovered here in 1900; the Kennecott Copper Corporation built a self-contained town in the wilderness — and when the ore played out, everyone simply left, leaving equipment, buildings, and personal belongings behind. Note the spelling: the town is Kennicott, the company was Kennecott (a clerical error that stuck). Today it’s inside Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, the country’s largest national park. You can walk the town site on your own, but the 14-story concentration mill — the red giant looming over everything — is only accessible on a guided tour with the park’s concessionaire. Getting there means the 60-mile gravel McCarthy Road, which is half the adventure. (Alaska.org)
6. Bannack, Montana
Montana’s first major gold discovery (1862, Grasshopper Creek) built Montana’s first territorial capital (1864) — and then richer strikes elsewhere drained it within a few years. Bannack hung on through booms and busts until the last residents left in the 1970s. The state acquired it in 1954, and today Bannack State Park holds more than 50 historic buildings, most of them open to walk through: the hotel, the Masonic lodge, the Methodist church, the old courthouse. It’s a National Historic Landmark and one of the most complete frontier towns left in the country. Go in July during Bannack Days if you want reenactments and crowds; go any other time if you want the wind and the silence. (Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks)
7. Centralia, Pennsylvania
The one that’s still dying. Centralia was an anthracite coal town until May 1962, when a routine trash burn in a landfill migrated into the abandoned mine workings underneath and ignited a coal seam. The fire has been burning ever since — more than 60 years. Sinkholes, toxic gases, and buckling streets drove everyone out; the state claimed the borough under eminent domain in 1992, and only a handful of residents remain. The famous Graffiti Highway — a closed stretch of Route 61 covered in tags — was buried under dirt in 2020 to discourage visitors, so set expectations accordingly. What remains is a grid of empty streets, a few houses, overgrown lots, and the occasional wisp of smoke from the ground. It’s the closest thing America has to a real-life Silent Hill, and it earned the comparison honestly. (Atlas Obscura)
8. Elkmont, Tennessee
The Smokies’ lost resort town. Elkmont started as a logging community, then became a summer escape for Knoxville’s elite — the Appalachian Club and the Daisy Town cabin colony, with the Wonderland Hotel anchoring it all. When Great Smoky Mountains National Park was created, cabin owners got lifetime leases; the last ones expired in 1992, and the town sat empty. The Wonderland Hotel burned in 2016. But a 2009 preservation agreement changed the plan from “let it rot” to restoration, and after a 15-year effort the Park Service completed the Daisy Town cabin restorations in 2024. You can walk among the preserved cabins today — and if you time it right in early summer, catch the synchronous fireflies that made this valley famous. (WUOT / NPS reporting)
9. Thurmond, West Virginia
A coal-and-railroad town that the railroad built and the diesel engine killed. Thurmond was a booming Chesapeake & Ohio hub — at its height one of the busiest freight points on the line — with banks, hotels, and a round-the-clock railyard in a gorge so narrow the town is basically one street along the tracks. When steam gave way to diesel and the mines mechanized, the jobs vanished. Today it’s part of New River Gorge National Park & Preserve: the restored 1905 depot is a visitor center, a handful of buildings survive along the tracks, Amtrak still makes limited stops, and only a few year-round residents remain. The drive in — six winding miles down into the gorge — is half the experience. Freight trains still rumble through right in front of the old storefronts.
10. Garnet, Montana
One of Montana’s best-preserved gold ghost towns, and one of the easiest to visit properly. About 1,000 people lived here in the 1890s; when the gold ran out some 20 years later — and a 1912 fire took much of the town — Garnet went to sleep. The BLM manages it now: around 30 buildings, a summer visitor center, a $10 adult day-use fee, and, for the committed, two primitive cabins you can rent in winter (wood stove, propane lights, no plumbing, snowmobile or skis only). It’s 11 miles up a mountain road east of Missoula — steep, narrow, and rough enough that trailers and RVs are discouraged. (BLM)
How to visit forgotten places without ruining them
The rule for all ten: these places survived because people left them alone, and they’ll only keep surviving if visitors do the same. Stay on marked paths, don’t enter closed buildings, take nothing, and check access before you go — several of these are seasonal, and a few require real planning to reach. For the full safety rundown, see our guide to visiting abandoned mining towns safely — and for the stories behind the Nevada entries, Ep. 103: Nevada’s 600 Ghost Towns.