Ghost Town

Basic Information

A ghost town is a town that has been abandoned by its inhabitants for some reason. Following is a list of known ghost towns:

• Centralia, Pennsylvania
• Chernobyl
• Dogtown, Massachusetts
• Dudleytown, Connecticut
• Glastenbury, Vermont
• Midian, Kansas
• Monte Ne, Arkansas
• Salton Sea

• Somerset, Vermont

See Also

• Ghost City
• Ghost Planet
• Mayor Of A Ghost Town
• Nan Madol
• Roanoke Colony
• Thriving Ghost Town
• Urban Prairie

• News: Australia hit hard by mining slump
• News: Hotels In The Afterlife
• News: School's Out Forever

Sources

Bibliography

1. Abandoned Cities, Places and Property - a collection of images from ghost towns and abandoned buildings from around the world.

2. Wikipedia entry

Game and Story Use

• Ghost towns allow for some really impressive firefights and explosions without having to worry about civilian casualties.
• The reason for the abandonment of a ghost town might not be the usual commercial or governmental reasons, but the result of actual ghosts, monsters, or other supernatural hauntings - and this will make such a locale a lot creepier.
  • Especially if the player characters don't know the precise reason, but have the suspicion that it is a nasty one. The game master is then obligated to make it even worse than they could have imagined it.
  • The genius loci of a ghost town is likely to have some "issues" up to and including turning it into a bad place - again, this may be cause or effect: a town built on a pre-existing bad place is likely to end up deserted sooner or later (or having a Joss Whedon series set in it) but a town which dies of something unpleasant may become a bad place.
  • Actually a literal ghost town might be an interesting thing - a town which is actually populated by ghosts, perhaps living out the last day of the town's life (especially if it was wiped out in a single disaster) … or at least the last day before things went bad (if a single event lead to a more drawn out demise).
    • This could lead to a Brigadoon style encounter…
    • Likewise, the ghost of a town, remembering when its buildings were still standing and things were still lively. May or may not somehow pull back the ghosts of those who left it, to help it remember…
• Stumbling across one of these in the wilderness can be suitably eerie.
• England (surprisingly) is full of these … most date from the era of the black death and are virtually undetectable now, others date from the enclosure era and have a little more left. In many cases all that remains is a church, apparently in the middle of nowhere, which has survived because it was the only stone structure.
  • Scotland and Ireland also have a quite a lot from the clearances era and and the great famine respectively.
  • In any of these nations, developers attempting to raise a new village/housing estate on one of these sites could trigger all kinds of hilarity.
• A subset of ghost towns comprises those which have been submerged in reservoirs and only re-appear during severe droughts.