Ghost Towns

Here and there

Rhyolite: The True Story of a Ghost Town by Diane Siebert

All American media has some tenuous link to stories of the ghost town. Just as all American pop culture has some elements of the roadside attraction. It’s there in the DNA, utterly undeniable.

Ghost town stories are exciting and fun. And they can, in the right hands, be scary.

Think of the disappearance of the colonists on Roanoke, Virginia, for instance.

That was a ghost town, a little earlier than others, and remains of the town have been found.

The colonists, struggling and suffering a famine, bid one of the senior men to travel back to England, in order to ask for more supplies and more labourers. But he was kept in England, unable to travel, for the duration of Elizabeth I’s fears of new war with Spain. When John White (for that was his name) blagged and ship and returned to Roanoke, he discovered the place deserted.

Where had the colonists gone? Had they gone to a different place (either to an island nearby or further inland), or had they been overcome by their starvation? Or, another possibility again, had they met enough resistance from the local Indian populations to make sporadic violence permanent? And was it the local population who then put a quick end, via destruction or captivity, to their small outpost and society?

John White never found out. And nor have we. It’s a ghost town. It’s a mystery.

Think of the towns and trading posts in the old West, the kinds of places the army rode through or reinforced in books like George Custer’s My Life on the Plains. Think of these isolated settlements, in Custer’s telling adrift in a seething, hostile sea. They were often abandoned, those small country stations for the Western companies, for the men attempting to make a living in the years of the Indian wars.

Nothing else but abandonment would have been sane.

Think of the wayward stations, where stagecoaches pulled up. Stagecoaches, covered wagons, teams of mules. Those places were abandoned as soon as a replacement could be built or mapped out. They were functional settlements, only existing for a single purpose. Once that purpose evaporated, so did their reason to remain.

And the forts, constructed across the West of the United States, for one reason or another. Those forts that did not become modern military bases, the centres of billeting and massing men, soon fell empty and into disrepair.

Think of the novels and stories of a hundred years ago about the gold-flecked path to California or the Yukon. Look at the names of those places: how trivial or natural or picturesque! So few of them could remain today. There would be no point, no purpose.

The more modern ghost towns are gold rush towns, or they’re industrial or company towns whose industries and companies moved away. The places that used, once, to mine the iron, or make the steel. The towns that grew up, in the last century, around explosives production and armouries. Some of them used to be big and gorgeous, to have great civic architecture, fine churches, beautiful mayoral and council buildings. All of them empty now, or under different occupation.

For fictional purposes, the best ghost towns are the ones whose remains still stand, in a fashion. The metal has been rusted and eaten away. The wood rots. The glass in every window has either cracked or fallen in. Doors hang unnaturally on their dark orange, oxidising hinges. All rubber has perished. The wells and streams are dry. Formerly useful things, in various states of destruction or decay, crunch underfoot. Perhaps there are mouldering old papers, old records, in a house or office where the sheriff of the county or mayor once did his business.

Writing fiction about these places is difficult. Not because the setting is hard to populate and to give a little something to. Au contraire: the opposite is true. The place is too full of atmosphere, too easy. So many have tried it before.

We may have the band of children looking fearfully but with a little excitement through the mouth of the old mine, and traversing the town beside it. We may have a young couple, off the road and bored, wandering disconsolately through the wreck of other people’s lives, many years before. All of this is possible.

And as for horror, the setting is not hard to use.

But writing ghost town fiction based on fact, calling it a true story, is harder to do than that. And for children especially. Because there’s some boredom in depopulation, people drifting away for reasons of their own; leaving the place for jobs or college, because the family business or a farm somewhere else needs administering. And there’s something depressive, too. The impermanence of all settlement. The messiness of the human presence getting destroyed and taken back and eaten away.

Rhyolite was a real place. A place where the company built houses for the workers to live in. A place with telephones and bars and entertainments. A place where many people lived for not much time. A place that once had a future.

But time does not stand still. Places fall into disfavour. They may exist only as movie sets. As the settings for non-fictional fiction for children. As cautionary tales.