New York Ghost Towns

Explores towns, settlements, forts, and other areas that have been completely deserted or brought back to life as tourist attractions40 ghost towns, including Love Canal, the Oneida Community, Fort William Henry of Last of the Mohicans fame, and Bedloe's Island, which now holds the Statue of LibertyCovers the history of the sites, personal interest stories, what remains today, and how to get thereDivided into geographical sections so readers can plan visits to multiple sites

Explores towns, settlements, forts, and other areas that have been completely deserted or brought back to life as tourist attractions.

This useful guidebook surveys more than eighty ghost towns, grouped by geographic area. First published in 1981 and now available only from the University of New Mexico Press, it has been praised in particular for its instructions on how to reach even the most obscure sites.

From the author of The New England Grimpendium comes a new travelogue and insider’s guide to wicked, weird, wonderful New York. When J. W. Ocker’s first book, The New England Grimpendium, emerged on the scene, Max Weinstein of Fangoria.com called it “a travelogue for those who revel in the glory of their nightmares.” Rick Broussard at New Hampshire Magazine said of it, “I’ve read a dozen books about New England ghosties and weirdnesses, and this one is my favorite. It’s also one of the few that actually came up with stuff I didn’t already know about.” Now the author of that Lowell Thomas Award winner has unearthed hundreds of similarly creepy and colorful places in the Empire State that will make your skin crawl and your hair stand on end! Ocker’s essays on these places, some little known, some area landmarks, include directions and site information along with entertaining anecdotes delivered in his signature wry style. It’s definitely a wild ride from a jar full of the harvested brains of dead killers to horror movie filming sites around the state; from a ships’ graveyard to lake monster sightings. If it’s in New York and it’s bizarrely noteworthy or wonderfully wacky, you’ll find it in The New York Grimpendium.

- Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia -- Ephrata Cloister, Lancaster County.

Depicts the history of more than one hundred Colorado towns abandoned after the end of the mining boom

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Caxton Press Travel through the ghost-town country of the Pacific Northwest, guided by the camera and pen of Norman D. Weis. Both well-known and obscure towns, with intriguing names such as Comeback Mine Camp, Electric, Ruby, Greenback, Disautel, and Old Todora entice you to explore their secrets.

If it is abandoned by all or most of its inhabitants, a settlement becomes a ghost town. The buildings and dirt streets may remain, but the character and soul of the place change entirely. And so it was with mining camps, lumber camps, and cowboy towns scattered across America, particularly in the West: places with names like Gregory’s Diggings, Deadwood, Bodie, Calico, Goldfield, and Tombstone, some of the over 30,000 deserted towns in the United States. Why did people come to these isolated places? Why did they leave? As Raymond Bial’s narrative explores the history of our ghost towns, his well-composed photo-graphs silently tell their stories: of bustling, muddy streets, of large mercantile stores, and, ultimately, of short-lived dreams of gold, fertile land, or simply a good place to call home.

Deserted towns are time capsules of the past, and the 11 places explored in this book all have a past marked by tragedy. The Lost Colony, for example, on Virginia’s Roanoke Island, was the first place the English established residence in the new world. But between 1587 and 1590, something went very wrong. All 115 residents, including women and children, simply vanished. Many theories abound about what happened to them, but no one knows for sure. Tales such as these will keep young readers turning the pages as they learn about a fascinating part of history. Ghost Towns is part of Bearport’s Scary Places series.