Where America left its towns
358 of the archive's 3,516 dossiers are filed as ghost towns — settlements emptied by ore, water, rail or road. Three rankings below ask three different questions of the same record.
Most ghost towns
Towns per million residents
Share of the state's record
What the map actually says
The raw-count leader is not the one the cliché predicts. Pennsylvania files25 ghost towns — more than Arizona (24) or Texas (22) — because eastern abandonment is quieter: coal patches the company closed, lumber camps in the Alleghenies, canal towns the railroad skipped. The West empties dramatically; Pennsylvania emptied by ledger.
Relative to population the crown moves west. Alaska (22 towns per million residents) and Wyoming (21/M) head the table — mining ground where a single played-out seam could erase the only settlement for a hundred miles. Montana, Nebraska and Idaho follow.
Share of record is the strangest lens: in Idaho 55% of everything on file is a dead town, and Oklahoma sits at 54% — a state settled in a single afternoon in 1889 and partly unsettled the same way. Where a state's documented mysteries are mostly empty streets, the folklore itself is about departure.
One caveat, as always: this counts dossiers, not ruins. A ghost town only appears here when someone documented it — the desert keeps plenty that nobody filed. Browse the full set on the western ghost-towns trailor per jurisdiction below.