Ghost town
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Wikipedia
Featured:  Illustration: Portrait fantaisiste du marquis de Sade (1866) by H. Biberstein |
A ghost town is a town that has been abandoned, usually because the economic activity that supported it has failed or because of natural or human-caused disasters such as war. The word is sometimes used in a deprecative sense to include areas where the current population is significantly less than it once was. It may be a partial ghost town such as Tonopah, Nevada or a neighborhood where people no longer live (like Love Canal). A tourist ghost town has significant economic activity from tourism, such as Oatman, Arizona, or numerous sites in Egypt, but cannot sustain itself except by tourism.
A true ghost town is totally abandoned, such as Bodie, California, but tourists may visit it. A ghost town may be a site where little or nothing remains above the soil surface, e.g. Babylon. Often a ghost town will still have significant art and architecture, e.g. Vijayanagara in India or Changan in China. Most large countries and regions contain locations that can be considered ghost towns.
Some ghost towns are tourist attractions, such as Kolmanskop and Elizabeth Bay, outside Lüderitz, Namibia. This is especially true of those that preserve interesting architecture. Visiting, writing about, and photographing ghost towns is a minor industry. Other ghost towns may be overgrown, difficult to access, and dangerous or illegal to visit.
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