Walking down the street of Rhyolite, Nevada, facades of empty buildings loom over me. Nobody is here but my husband and me — and some wild burros giving me the stink eye. A creepy feeling comes over me as I stand in this empty town that was once full of thousands of gold miners with dollar signs in their eyes. Now, the lights and power have been off for over a century.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a ghost town as “a once-flourishing town wholly or nearly deserted usually as a result of the exhaustion of some natural resource.” Lots of people like me feel the lure of these empty places, which are most common in the spacious western United States. Make the most of Halloween season by exploring these 11 ghost towns in all their spooky glory.