You know, I was looking at a map of the American
West this morning, just scrolling through the
satellite view of Nevada, and I realized something
a little unsettling. Oh, yeah. What was that?
We tend to think of cities as permanent fixtures.
You know, you build a house, you pour concrete,
you lay down pipes. It feels like a statement
of forever. Right. It feels like a promise that
civilization has planted a flag that won't be
moved. Exactly. But when you zoom in on some
of these grids out in the desert, you see the
streets, you see the outlines of foundations,
maybe a crumbling wall. But the people are gone.
The people are gone. The roofs are gone. It's
a skeleton. Today, we are doing a deep dive into
the phenomenon of the ghost town. And I want
to be clear right off the bat, we aren't doing
this spooky campfire story version of this. We
aren't, you know, hunting for poltergeists. No,
absolutely not. Well, the aesthetic is, well,
it's compelling. The swinging saloon doors, the
creeping vines, the dust blowing through a break
-in window. The real story here is much more
clinical and, frankly, much more frightening.
It's a story about economics, environmental collapse,
and the ruthlessness of human decision -making.
So it's a study of failure on a communal scale.
That's it. Exactly. It's a postmortem. We are
performing an autopsy on settlements that died.
Okay. So to start this autopsy, we have to look
at the single weirdest outlier in your research
notes. Because I usually think of a ghost town
as a dusty relic of the 1800s, something firmly
in the past. Right. But you found a ghost town
that is currently legally the capital city of
a modern political territory. Sounds like a riddle,
doesn't it? Is the story of Plymouth. Montserrat.
And it challenges almost every assumption we
have about how a government is supposed to function.
OK, so just to orient everyone, Montserrat is
a British overseas territory in the Caribbean.
Correct. And if you look at the official government
documents for Montserrat today, Plymouth is the
seat of government. It is the capital. It is
where the power resides. But if you actually
go there. If you actually go there, you are entering
a modern day Pompeii. Because of the Soufriere
Hills volcano. That's the one. In 1995, after
being dormant for centuries, the mountain woke
up. And it didn't just puff out some smoke. It
buried the southern half of the island in pyroclastic
flows and just heavy, heavy ash. Plymouth, the
city, was totally evacuated. Today, the town
is buried under meters of hardened volcanic mud.
So you can't even see the streets. In places,
no. The Georgian -era buildings are filled up
to the second floor with rock. The silence is
absolute, apart from the wind. But, and this
is the part I got stuck on, they never moved
the capital. Officially. Not legally. The government
operates out of a village called Braids in the
North, which is the de facto capital. So that's
where the actual work gets done. Right. They
built temporary administrative buildings there.
Yeah. But they never formally stripped Plymouth
of the title. So you have this ghostly buried
city that still holds the legal weight of a capital.
That's bizarre. It creates this bizarre administrative
stasis where the heart of the territory is a
place that would kill you if you stayed there
too long without a mask. It really challenges
the definition of what a town actually is. Is
a town the buildings? Is it the legal charter?
Or is it just the people? I mean, that's the
core question, isn't it? In Plymouth, the charter
remains, the buildings remain, more or less.
Buried. Buried. But the people are gone. And
that brings us to the core definition we need
to settle on before we get into the heavy stuff.
Okay. Historians argue about this constantly.
T. Lindsay Baker, who's a heavyweight in this
field, offers a definition that I find incredibly
poignant. He says a ghost town is a town for
which the reason for being no longer exists.
The reason for being. That implies a town is
a tool. It has a function. Exactly. A town isn't
an accident. It's a solution to a problem. Yeah.
We need to sleep near the mine. Or we need to
water the train here. Or we need a port for these
ships. And when the problem is solved or when
the problem changes. The town loses its purpose.
It becomes a discarded tool. But does it have
to be completely empty? Because I've been to
places called ghost towns that definitely had
a gift shop and a guy selling soda. Right. And
that's the spectrum of abandonment. In archaeological
terms, if there's nothing left but like bumps
in the grass, that's a deserted settlement. I
see. A ghost town usually implies visible remains.
Tangible decay, if you will. Another author,
Lambert Florin, calls it a shadowy semblance
of a former self. A shadowy semblance. That's
poetic. It is, and it allows for the hangers
-on. You often find a ghost town has a population
of six or twelve. Really? Oh, yeah. Usually elderly
residents who refuse to leave, living amidst
500 empty houses, they are... Part of the ghostliness.
They're living in the after image of the community.
So if a town is a tool that has lost its use,
let's look at the most common tool. The moneymaker.
The economic pulse. The boom and bust cycle.
This is the Wild West archetype. The gold rush.
I think we all have that mental image of the
prospector and the mule. But mechanically, how
does a town go from boom to ghost so fast? Is
it just that the gold literally runs out? Rarely.
It almost never just runs out completely. It
comes down to the fragility of a single source
economy. Okay, so give me an example. Let's look
at Bodie, California. In the late 1870s, this
wasn't a village. It was a metropolis of the
Sierras. We're talking 10 ,000 people. 10 ,000,
wow. 65 saloons, a mile long main street. It
had its own Chinatown, its own red light district.
It was there for one reason, gold. And when the
gold is gone, the people leave. Well, it's actually
more nuanced than the gold is gone. Rarely does
a mine run literally dry, where you hit bedrock
and there's nothing left. So what happens? What
happens is the marginal cost of extraction exceeds
the market price of the resource. You might still
have gold on the ground, but if it costs you
$100 to get an ounce out, and you can only sell
that ounce for $80. The mine closes. It's just
a business decision. It's just a business decision.
The spread kills the town. And because body had
no other industry, no agriculture, no manufacturing,
no river trade, the moment the mine whistle stopped
blowing, the town's value dropped to zero. The
reason for being evaporated. And body is fascinating
because of how it was preserved. It wasn't demolished.
It was just left. They call it arrested decay.
That's the state policy for body. They don't
fix it up to look new, but they shore it up so
it doesn't fall down. So you can still see it
as it was. You can walk up to a window in body
today and see a table set for dinner. with dust
from 1940 on it. It's a time capsule. It's amazing
that California has so many of these. They actually
had to, what, categorize them? They did. It was
a battle of the ruins. You had Bodie and you
had Calico, another famous mining town. Both
wanted the title of Steet Ghost Town. A political
fight over ruins. So the legislature, in a very
bureaucratic compromise, split the baby. Bodie
is the official gold rush ghost town, and Calico
is the official silver rush ghost town. It's
good to know that even in death, there's bureaucracy.
But you mentioned something in the notes about
Australia that I found really smart, but also
kind of sad. They basically engineered the ghost
town out of existence. The fly -in, fly -out
model. FIFO. How does that work? Well, mining
companies learned a hard lesson from places like
Boddy or their own Wittenum, which we'll get
to. Building a town is expensive. Right. Schools,
hospitals, sewage. It's a massive sunk cost for
a mine that might only last 20 years. Yeah. So
now in Western Australia, they don't build towns.
They build camps. Modular housing, like trailers.
Shipping containers converted into luxury suites,
essentially. Workers fly in from Perth, work
two weeks on, fly home for one week off. And
when the mine closes. They put the buildings
on flatbed trucks and drive them away. So it's
a ghost town preemptively erased. There's nothing
left behind. It's efficient. But sociologists
argue it strips the region of any development.
You extract the wealth, but you leave nothing
behind. No infrastructure, no community history.
It's a transactional geography. That's a great
way to put it. You treat the land as a vending
machine rather than a place to live. That's a
heavy phrase. Transactional geography. We use
the land and then we discard it. But sometimes
the town doesn't die because the resource runs
out. Sometimes the world just changes direction.
The bypassed phenomenon. This is where geography
loses its value because of technology. The classic
example here is Route 66, the Mother Road. It
is. And we need to understand what Route 66 was.
It wasn't just a road. It was an economy. Before
the interstates, if you drove from Chicago to
L .A., you had to drive through the towns. No
choice. No choice. You stopped at the traffic
lights in Oatman, Arizona. You bought gas in
Amboy, California. You bought a burger in Tucumcari.
You were a captive audience. The highway literally
funneled money into Main Street. Precisely. The
town's export was service to travelers. But in
the 1950s and 60s, the U .S. Interstate Highway
Act changed the philosophy of travel. From connecting
communities to... To bypassing friction. We built
I -40 and I -44. Which are massive, limited access
freeways. No stoplights, no slowdowns. And they
were often built just five or ten miles away
from the old road. So you had these towns in
Arizona where the residents could literally hear
the traffic on the new highway. Thousands of
cars an hour. But nobody was taking the exit.
It's like a severed artery. The blood is flowing
right there, but it's not reaching the limb.
That is the perfect analogy. Oatman, Arizona,
lost its primary customer base overnight. It
didn't run out of water. It ran out of relevance.
The geography of the route shifted, and the town
was left in the cul -de -sac of history. And
this wasn't the first time. The notes mention
that railroads did the exact same thing to canal
towns. Oh, absolutely. Technology is a serial
killer of towns. Look at the steam era. Steam
trains are thirsty. They need water. A lot of
water. They need to stop every, say, 20 miles.
So you had a whole network of water stop towns.
That was their only job. Refill the boiler. That
was their reason for being. Then comes diesel.
Diesel and electric trains don't need to stop
for water. Those towns became obsolete the moment
the engine technology switched. It's a reminder
that many settlements are just infrastructure
support systems in disguise. And when the infrastructure
changes, the support system is abandoned. Now,
there is a weird inversion of this economic death.
Usually we think build town, people come, economy
fails, people leave. Right. But you have a section
here on paper ghost towns. This is building the
ghost town on purpose. Well, not on purpose,
but by speculation. This is speculative urbanization.
This is the if you build it, they will come logic.
Correct. And sometimes they don't come, or they
don't come fast enough. We saw this in the Spanish
property bubble around 2008. Developers built
massive suburban estates. Valdez is a famous
one near Madrid, planning for thousands of commuters.
And the bubble burst? The 2008 financial crisis
hit. The banks collapsed. Construction stopped.
So you had these brand new... gleaming apartment
blocks paved streets street lights that turn
on every night and nobody lives there nobody
it feels more eerie than a ruin a ruin has a
history a brand new empty city feels like a glitch
in the simulation it's distinctively uncanny
now We often hear about Chinese ghost cities
in this context. You've probably seen the headlines.
Yeah, giant cities in Inner Mongolia with zero
people is a huge viral story a few years ago.
We do need to be careful with that narrative,
though. The source material references academic
Kerry Brown, who points out that this is often
a Western misunderstanding of the Chinese planning
model. So it's not a failure. Not in the same
way. In the West, we build as the demand rises
organic growth. In China, the urbanization drive
is so massive, moving hundreds of millions of
people to cities that they build the capacity
first. So it's a pre -town, not a ghost town.
In many cases, yes. A city that looked empty
in 2010 might be fully populated in 2025. It
was just waiting for the population transfer.
So unlike the Spanish example, which was a market
failure, the Chinese examples are often just
a lag in a massive central plan. OK, so that
covers the natural causes of death. economic
failure, old age, irrelevance. But then we have
the murders. The towns that didn't fail but were
executed. Forced eviction. This is where the
story gets incredibly dark. I was shocked by
the drowned towns. I knew we built dams, but
I guess I never did the math on what happened
to the people living in the valley before the
water rose. It is a utilitarian calculation.
A government decides we need electricity for
a million people in the city or water for irrigation.
There are 500 people living in this valley. Sorry,
but you have to go. And the scale of this is
global. Truly. Let's look at St. Thomas, Nevada.
This was a Mormon settlement established in 1865,
a real community with a school, a post office,
farms. Then the Hoover Dam was authorized in
the 1930s. To create Lake Mead. Exactly. The
engineers calculated that the water was going
to rise 70 feet above the highest roof in St.
Thomas. So the government bought the residents
out often for pennies on the dollar and told
them to leave. Did they go? Quietly? Mostly,
yes. But the story goes that one resident, Hugh
Lord, stayed until the water was lapping at his
front porch. He set his house on fire and then
rode away in a boat as it flooded. That is cinematic.
But St. Thomas isn't gone, right? It comes back.
That's the haunting part. It's underwater, but
in the desert, preservation is high. During extreme
droughts, like we've seen recently in the American
West, the water level of Lake Mead drops. The
ruins of St. Thomas reemerge. You can walk there.
You can hike down the mudflats and walk through
the foundations of the schoolhouse. You can see
the stumps, the trees they cut down. It's a town
that refuses to stay drowned. And we saw the
same thing in Spain recently with the village
of Aceredo. Oh, those photos were stunning. You
look like a skeleton rising from the grave. In
2022, The reservoir dropped to 15 % capacity.
The entire village appeared. And because it was
stone, the walls were still standing. Former
residents actually went back to walk through
their old homes. Imagine that emotion standing
in the living room you were evicted from 30 years
ago, smelling the mud and the rot. It's powerful.
Yeah. But it's not just the loss of property,
though. It's the loss of culture. The notes mention
a Welsh village, Cappel Celyn. This one feels
political. Highly political. This was 1965. Liverpool,
a major English industrial city, needed water.
They identified the Triwarren Valley in Wales
as the perfect spot for a reservoir. But there
was a village there. There was. And Capel Celyn
was one of the few remaining communities that
was 100 % Welsh -speaking. It was a stronghold
of the culture. And the English government flooded
it anyway. Despite massive protests, every single
Welsh member of parliament voted against it.
But they were outnumbered by the English MPs.
The valley was flooded. So the ghost town became
a martyr. It fueled the Welsh nationalist movement
for decades. You still see the graffiti Kofitch
Drywarren, remember Drywarren, painted on walls
all over Wales today. It's a ghost town that
functions as a political rallying cry. It symbolizes
the idea that a small community shouldn't be
sacrificed for the convenience of a large one.
Sometimes, though, the government doesn't want
the water. They want the silence. Or rather,
they want to make a lot of noise and they don't
want anyone complaining about it. The buffer
zone concept. This is an eminent domain on steroids.
The most striking example is the John C. Stennis
Space Center in Mississippi. This is the NASA
testing ground. Right. In the 1960s, for the
Apollo program, they needed to test the Saturn
V rockets. These are the most powerful machines
ever built. The noise must have been incredible.
The noise generated by a static fire test is
so loud it can physically damage buildings and
rupture eardrums miles away. So they couldn't
just build a fence. They needed an acoustic buffer.
A huge one. 34 square miles. And there were five
towns inside that circle. Gainesville, Logtown,
Napoleon, Santa Rosa, Wistonia. And NASA just
deleted them. Acquired. is the euphemism. They
moved 700 families. They didn't bulldoze everything,
though. They just removed the people. So what's
left? If you get clearance to go into the buffer
zone today, you can drive down the old paid streets
of Logtown. The street signs are gone. The houses
are gone. But the grid is there, overgrown with
Mississippi vines. There's a one -room schoolhouse
still standing in the silence. It's a ghost town
held in stasis inside a high -security government
facility. That is wildly dystopian. It shows
the absolute priority of national interest over
local community. The moonshot was more important
than lockdown. And I guess the ultimate national
interest is war. We have a whole category here
of towns that died not because they were bombed,
but because the army needed target practice.
The tragedy of Tynem. England, this one breaks
your heart, is 1943. World War II is raging.
The British army needs a place to train for the
invasion of Europe D -Day. So they requisitioned
Tynan in the surrounding valley. But they told
the villagers it was temporary. We just need
to borrow your homes to save the world. Explicitly.
The villagers left a pinned note on the church
door. It's a famous text. It said, please treat
the church and houses with care. We have given
up our homes where many of us lived for generations
to help win the war to keep men free. We shall
return one day and thank you for treating the
village kindly. We shall return, but they didn't.
They never returned. After the war, the army
decided they still needed the training ground.
The temporary eviction became permanent. So the
village is still there. Still there, crumbling
away, surrounded by danger. Unexploded ordinance
signs. That's the betrayal. It's one thing to
lose your home. It's another to lend it to your
country and have them steal it. It creates a
very specific kind of ghost town. One born of
patriotism and betrayal. Ember on the Salisbury
Plain suffered the exact same fate. So we've
had economic death and government mandated death.
Now let's look at the sudden violent death, disaster.
The times when nature just decides. You cannot
live here anymore. Catastrophe is a major creator
of ghost towns. And nature has a lot of weapons
in its arsenal. The first one in the notes is
Krakow, Italy. Now, if you've seen a movie in
the last 20 years, Quantum of Solace, The Passion
of the Christ, you've seen Krakow. It's the ultimate
spooky hilltop village. It's medieval, dramatic,
beautiful. But why is it empty? It looks like
a fortress. It was built on a steep hill for
defense in the Middle Ages. But what makes for
good defense often makes for bad geology. In
1963, a massive landslide occurred. The very
hill the town was perched on began to fail. So
the ground literally rejected the town. Essentially.
The population was evacuated to a new town in
the valley, Cruco Pichera. But the old town remains,
perched up there like a crown of thorns, slowly
sliding down the hill. It's a museum of medieval
architecture that you enter at your own risk.
And then you have Armero in Colombia. If Krakow
is a slow failure, Armero was an apocalypse.
Armero is a site of immense sorrow. In 1985,
the Nevado del Ruiz volcano erupted. It wasn't
just ash, the heat melted the glacier at the
summit. This triggered lahars, massive high -speed
flows of mud. rock, and debris. It's like a concrete
tsunami. That is an accurate description. It
slammed into the town of Armero in the middle
of the night. Approximately 23 ,000 people died.
It wiped the town off the map. And they never
rebuilt. No. How could you? It was declared Holy
Land by Pope John Paul II. It isn't a ghost town
in the sense of empty buildings waiting for residents.
It's a graveyard. The ruins that remain are headstones.
On a slightly less lethal but equally relentless
note, there's Pattinsburg, Missouri. This feels
like a story about human stubbornness. Pattinsburg
is the town that refused to move until it had
no choice. It was built on the flood plains of
the Grand River. Since its founding in 1845,
it was flooded more than 30 times. 30 times.
At what point do you say, maybe the river wants
this spot? This is the sunk cost fallacy in action.
We've already built the bank here. We've already
built the school. But after the great flood of
1993, which was devastating across the Midwest,
the residents finally broke. So what did they
do? With government help, the entire town decided
to pick up and move three miles away to higher
ground. So the old site is a ghost town, but
the community survived by migrating. Yes. If
you go to Old Battensburg today, it's just foundations
and stop signs in a field. But the people are
safe up the hill. It's a rare success story of
retreat. That leads to a weird category. The
anticipated disaster. Towns that were abandoned
before something happened. The town of Lemieux,
Ontario. Lemieux. That means the better in French,
right? Ironically, yes. In 1991, soil testing
revealed the town was built on unstable Lidoclay.
This is a type of soil that is prone to liquefaction.
A meaning. If it gets wet enough or shaken, it
turns from solid to liquid instantly. That sounds
terrifying. The engineers realized the town was
sitting on a ticking time bomb. The government
bought out the residents and demolished the buildings
to prevent a tragedy. And were they right? Did
anything happen? Chillingly so. Two years after
the last building was demolished, a massive landslide
occurred. 17 hectares of the former town site
collapsed and swept into the South Nation River.
Wow. If people had still been there, it would
have been a catastrophe. Instead, it was just
a geological event in an empty field. Good call,
engineers. Usually we wait for the disaster to
happen, but then we have the disasters we make
ourselves, the man -made environmental catastrophes.
Centralia, Pennsylvania is the poster child for
this. The forever fire. This is the inspiration
for the Silent Hill of video games and movies,
isn't it? It is. In 1962, a trash fire in a landfill...
Some say it was the town trying to clean up for
Memorial Day ignited an exposed vein of anthracite
coal. And coal burns hot and slow. Very. Once
it got into the labyrinth of mines beneath the
town, it was impossible to put out. And it's
still burning. Still burning today. It's expected
to burn for another 250 years. As the fire spread
underground, the ground above became hot to the
touch. Sinkholes opened up, swallowing backyards
and spewing carbon monoxide. So the government
had to step in. They condemned the town. They
revoked the zip code. Today, only a handful of
people remain fighting the eviction. But mostly,
it's a grid of streets where nature is taking
over, and smoke still curls up from cracks in
the asphalt. And, of course, the nuclear option.
Chernobyl and Pripyat. This is the ultimate ghost
town. Following the 1986 reactor explosion, nearly
200 towns in Ukraine and Belarus were evacuated
due to radiation. But Pripyat is the famous one.
It was a model city, wasn't it? It was a Soviet
atom grad. A city built for the workers. It had
50 ,000 people, amusement parks, swimming pools,
high -rise apartments. It was the future. And
now it's a time capsule of 1986. It represents
the ultimate failure of technology. The forest
is reclaiming the city. There are wolves hunting
in the city square. It shows how quickly nature
returns when we leave, even if the place is poisoned.
There is also the invisible enemy. Disease and
contamination. We aren't just talking about radiation.
No. Historically, the Black Death emptied hamlets
in England. The Spanish flu depopulated towns
in Arkansas. But the modern version is the toxic
legacy. Look at Whitnum in Australia. This was
an asbestos mining town. Blue asbestos. The most
dangerous kind. The fibers get into your lungs
and cause mesothelioma. The health risks became
undeniable. The town was shut down in 1966. So
it's just an abandoned town. It's worse than
that. The government didn't just abandon it.
They actively degazetted it. What does that mean?
They removed it from the maps. They took down
the road signs leading to it. They cut off the
power grid. They wanted to make it disappear
because the very dust on the ground is lethal.
If you go there, you are breathing poison. And
we have similar stories in the U .S. Times Beach,
Missouri, was evacuated due to dioxin contamination
in the soil. And Pitcher, Oklahoma. Pitcher's
the one with the chat piles, right? Yes. It was
a lead and zinc mining hub. They left behind
mountains of chat -crushed rock residue. The
kids used to play on these hills like sand dunes.
But the chat was full of lead. The groundwater
was toxic. The EPA eventually declared it a Superfund
site and bought everyone out. These are towns
killed by their own industry. They were national
sacrifice zones. It's a heavy list. But we have
one more category of destruction before we get
to the redemption arc. War. War leaves scars.
And sometimes those scars are entire towns. We
mentioned the training grounds, but actual conflict
creates ghost towns, too. Or a dorsal gland.
In France, I remember seeing photos of this.
It looks like it happened yesterday. That is
intentional. On June 10, 1944, a German Waffen
-SS company surrounded the village. They massacred
642 inhabitants, men, women, and children. It
was a brutal atrocity. And after the war? President
Charles de Gaulle made a specific decision. He
ordered that the ruins be preserved exactly as
they were. They built a new village nearby for
the survivors, but the old village stands as
a permanent memorial. So the burned cars are
still in the driveways? Yes. The sewing machines
are still in the windows. It's a ghost town that
serves as a witness. It forces you to look at
the cost of hatred. Then there's Aghdam in Azerbaijan.
This was a victim of the first Nagorno -Karabakh
war in 1993. The population fled heavy fighting.
Armenian forces seized the city, but they didn't
just occupy it, they dismantled it. Over decades,
the buildings were stripped of roofs, windows,
bricks, and pipes to be used as building materials
elsewhere. It became known as the Hiroshima of
the Caucasus, not because of a bomb, but because
of the sheer scale of the ruin. It's a skeleton
city, picked clean. And there's a unique case
in Africa, the Forbidden Zone. Namibia. This
connects back to our resource discussion. In
1908, diamonds were discovered. The German imperial
government created the Spergebiet, the forbidden
zone. To control the diamonds. Absolutely. They
wanted to control the diamond mining completely,
so they kicked everyone out. Well, they criminalized
new settlements. Towns like Kolmanskop and Pomona
thrived for a bit inside the zone, while the
diamonds were easy to get, literally sitting
on the sand. But as the diamonds depleted and
the restrictions tightened... the towns died
coleman's cup is the one with the sand dunes
in the living rooms yes it's a photographer's
dream the desert winds have blown sand through
the windows filling the rooms halfway up the
walls it's a beautiful surreal image we've covered
a lot of death and destruction let's pivot Is
there life after death for a ghost town? Surprisingly,
yes. Resurrection is possible. And the most common
lifeline is tourism. People like us wanting to
see the ruins. The ruins corn phenomenon. Exactly.
We have a fascination with decay. Walhalla in
Australia is a great example. Gold mine closed
in 1914. Town almost emptied. But today, it's
booming because of heritage tourism. So people
want to see the history. They want to walk the
streets of the past. And you see it with Barkerville
in Canada, too. It's preserved as a provincial
museum. It's living history with actors and tours.
And Radicatorche in Mexico. A former mining town
that found a second life as a movie set. The
Mexican with Brad Pitt, Banditas, and now it's
a major tourist spot. The ghost aspect became
the commodity. The emptiness is what they're
selling. But it's not just tourists. Real people
are moving back into some of these places. Repopulation
by new groups. Look at Rias in Italy. It was
a dying medieval hill town, young people leaving
for the cities. The mayor initiated a bold scheme
to house refugees in the abandoned homes. That's
a brilliant match. Empty houses, people needing
homes. It revitalized the town. It kept the school
open, brought life back to the streets, and gave
the refugees a community. It showed that a town's
purpose can change. And the pilgrims? Fonsebadan,
in Spain. It was basically abandoned, just a
mother and son left. But it's on the route of
the Camino de Santiago. As the pilgrimage became
popular again in the 90s and 2000s, the stream
of walkers revived the village. So hostels opened,
cafes opened. It found a purpose in serving the
travelers again. And you have a long -term example
that proves ghost status isn't always permanent.
Alexandria, Egypt. Wait, the massive city? Today,
yes. But we forget that Alexandria, once the
greatest city in the ancient world, declined
massively in the Middle Ages. By 1806, it had
shrunk to a fishing town of about 5 ,000 people.
It was a shadow. A ghost of an empire. But then
it revived in the 19th century due to new trade
routes and canals. Today, it has over 4 million
people. It proves that cities can die and come
back to life if the geopolitical or economic
winds change. A ghost town is just a town that
is currently failing. That's a great way to put
it. Before we wrap up, we have to do the rapid
fire round. the global curiosities, the places
that are just weird. Let's go to the bottom of
the world, Antarctica, Deception Island. Good
name. It was a whaling station abandoned in 1931
during the Great Depression. Later, a volcano
damaged it. So you have rusting industrial tanks,
massive iron boilers sitting in a volcanic crater
in Antarctica. It's incredibly stark. And grit
vikings. South Georgia, another former whaling
station, but it has a museum curator. And they
renovated the church and jetty for tourists visiting
on cruise ships. It's a ghost town with a payroll.
And an Oceania. To Wairoa in New Zealand. The
Buried Village. Buried by the eruption of Mount
Tarawera in 1886. It's an archaeological ghost
town excavated so tourists can see the tops of
the houses. And Port Craig. Also in New Zealand.
Abandoned simply because the terrain was too
inhospitable. Nature just said no. Nature saying
no seems to be a recurring theme here. It is
the ultimate zoning board. So what does this
all mean? We've looked at gold rushes, floods,
wars, and radiation. What's the takeaway? If
we summarize the life cycle of settlements, we
realize that towns are fragile organisms. We
tend to think of our cities as concrete facts,
but they are dependent on complex webs of economics,
environment, and peace. And if you pull one thread...
The mine closes, the river rises, the war starts,
the town unravels. A ghost town isn't just a
ruin, it's a snapshot. Exactly. It's a moment
in history frozen by disaster or economic shift.
It captures the day the music died. It preserves
the way we lived at that exact moment. So here
is the provocative thought to leave you with.
We look at Bodie or Pompeii or Plymouth and think,
wow, look at how they lived. But look around
you. Look at the modern boom towns of today.
We have cities entirely dependent on single industries,
tech hubs, oil cities. We have coastal cities
facing rising sea levels. We have regions that
might become too hot to inhabit due to climate
change. With remote work changing where we need
to be and climate changing where we can be, which
of our current bustling metropolises might be
the tourist attraction ghost towns of the 22nd
century? Will tourists be walking through the
ruins of Miami or Las Vegas, wondering why we
built there? It is a sobering question. History
tells us that nothing is permanent. Every city
is a ghost town in waiting. On that cheerful
note. Look at your own city with fresh eyes today.
You might be seeing history in the making. Thanks
for diving deep with us. Take care.