Bodie

W.S. Bodey and E.S. "Black" Taylor found placer gold in the Mono Basin hills in July 1859; Bodey froze to death on a supply run that winter, and the camp named itself after him, the spelling surrendered to a signpainter's error. It stayed a hamlet until a mine cave-in in 1875 revealed a rich vein and the Standard Company bought in by 1877. By 1879 Bodie counted roughly 10,000 people in over 250 buildings — a mile of Main Street, a Wells Fargo bank, four fire companies, a jail, churches, newspapers, a mortuary, a Miners' Union Hall that still stands, and a saloon-and-shootout reputation that supplied the era's favorite cautionary tale.

The bust began in 1881 and never really stopped. Mining limped on until a wartime closure order shut it in 1942; fires in 1892 and 1932 cut the town to under ten percent of its two thousand structures. California made it a State Historic Park and National Historic Landmark in 1962, kept in a state of "arrested decay" — nothing rebuilt, nothing removed, interiors left as the last occupants left them: tables set, bottles standing, the schoolroom's lessons still up.

The ghost ledger is quiet and specific. Visitors and staff over the years have reported strange lights and music after dark, the ghost of a little girl said to have been killed by a miner's pickax, and — the archive's favorite — the smell of fresh garlic and cooking Italian food in the old Mendocini house, a claim a longtime park employee politely disputed: eleven years on site and he had never smelled it.

The solitude does most of the reporting; rangers note that visitors ask about ghosts after the wind has done its work on the tin roofs. Then there is the curse, the only haunting in the file that arrives by parcel post — returned artifacts with confessions, a bibliography of bad luck written by the cursed themselves.

About 110 buildings stand in arrested decay at 8,375 feet, down a thirteen-mile road whose last three miles are rough dirt — the remoteness is load-bearing. A Canadian firm's plan to strip-mine the hill died with its 1993 bankruptcy, and the state's buyout of the claims secured the quiet permanently.

The record keeps a bonanza, a misspelled founder and a town that died in installments. The legend keeps a girl, a smell of garlic and a curse administered by the U.S. mail. The windows keep their curtains of dust; the archive suggests looking through them and taking nothing home.