Chloride
A ghost town in Chloride, Arizona, Chloride is filed here for what the record attaches to it. Inhabited historic mining town. HauntHunt files it with ghost towns. The dossier holds 1 documented fact — a documented spine with no haunting reports attached. Visitor status is unverified; confirm before making the trip. It is the sort of entry the archive keeps because the ground and the telling both survive.
· in your passport — stamped · open it
Is Chloride haunted?
No claims are filed here — the record keeps this place for its documented history, not for a haunting on file.
The record — long form
Chloride, in the Cerbat Mountains of Mohave County, took its name from the geology that built it — silver chloride ore, the stuff early prospectors could identify in the outcrop. Claims were being worked in the 1860s, but the country belonged to the Hualapai, and full settlement waited until the conflict ended around 1873. After that the camp grew fast: the town's own count runs to seventy-five mines and a peak population near five thousand, enough to support the usual machinery of a western boomtown.
What Chloride never quite did was die. Mines shut, prices fell, county business moved away, but a population remained — small, stubborn, and increasingly artistic. In the 1960s the painter Roy Purcell, then living in a cave outside town, covered a stretch of boulders with the large rock murals that still draw visitors up the graded road.
Oldest, by its own count
Chloride advertises itself as the oldest continuously inhabited mining town in Arizona — a claim the file records as the town's own. Something like two hundred-odd residents remain, enough to keep a general store and the murals maintained, and to staff the mock gunfights staged at Cyanide Springs.
The research notes draw the operative line: Cyanide Springs is a constructed attraction, deliberately distinct from the historic townsite, and the town around it is lived-in rather than abandoned — residents, private property, and working ranches. The file keeps the distinction: a mining camp that survived by becoming a destination, filed as a ghost town with the caveat that the ghosts are outnumbered.
Documented history
Community retains mining heritage alongside working ranches. The town's documented rise and abandonment is the record the rest of the file stands on. It enters the file through media reporting — documented coverage, not folklore. Sources including 'Arizona’s Ghost Town Getaways' carry the record. The entry's timeline holds it; the lore holds the rest.
Media reportedVisit Arizona
Sources on file
- 01Arizona’s Ghost Town GetawaysVisit Arizona · tourism · A3
Field notes & open questions
The constructed Cyanide Springs attraction is distinct from historic Chloride; residents and private property remain.