A haunting California ghost town
Bodie, Calif., is “a monument to failure,” said Erin Sherbert in SF Weekly. A ghost town in the Sierra foothills, Bodie has now spent half a century in a state of arrested decay, its old saloons, hotels, and whorehouses maintained by the state parks department just enough to be safe and keep standing. On the day I visited, “it was crowded for a ghost town,” with other tourists milling about silently among the boarded-up buildings. Named after a prospector who struck gold in 1859, Bodie once was one of the Gold Rush’s rare success stories. It boomed on mining riches, then devolved quickly into “real Wild West stuff”—daily murders, gunfights, and holdups. There’s a small museum in Bodie today, but no commercial operations. You just walk around, peeking through windows at the remains of lives past: “faded newspapers on a desk, broken bottles above a bar stool, eerie caskets sprawled unevenly throughout the town mortuary.”
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