Bodie State Historic Park

The miners, store owners, and townsfolk are gone, but there are still signs of life in the ghost town of Bodie, California. Tourists who brave the gravel road into the state park east of the High Sierra are rewarded with a town in a state of “arrested decay.” The houses have been scoured down to bare wood by the wind and sand, and a few tip precariously. Bodie was born in a flash in 1879, boomed to 7,000 souls, and died slowly as the gold ran out, leaving incongruous reminders of the 20th century, such as electric wires and a gas station. Peek around planks into the old firehouse, a room in the schoolhouse with lessons still on the blackboard, or a long-empty outhouse. A museum documents the often violent and tumultuous decline of a place that many claim is cursed.

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Barreling down US 395—that long, lonely highway paralleling the saw-toothed backside of the mighty Sierra Nevada—it’s easy to zip right past the turnoff for Bodie State Historic Park, one of the West’s great ghost towns. It’s as if a neutron bomb hit the place. The town boomed in 1879, soaring nearly overnight to a population of 10,000. Within a year or so, the gold mines went bust and everyone left, abandoning their possessions. This is one creepy place. Countless souls died miserable deaths in Bodie. Shootouts, robberies, and whiskey-fueled, bloody brawls were commonplace. A little binder in the back of the museum shows page after page of hand-written letters from people who have taken, then mailed things back to the park in an effort to undo the curse they wrought. My favorite, "My father is in ICU bleeding from the nose and mouth." Scary.

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