{"id":223,"slug":"damon-rose-city-michigan","story":[{"heading":null,"paragraphs":["Damon, in the pine country west of Rose City in Ogemaw County, was a lumber settlement founded in 1878 to work the Michigan white pine the state was then cutting at industrial scale. Its surviving profile is unusually literary: James Oliver Curwood, the adventure novelist and Owosso native, spent time in the logging country and used a version of the camp in his novel Green Timber — the file preserves Damon's nickname in that telling, 'the Lost City.'","The material record the account retains is the standard lumber-camp inventory rendered colorful by detail: a hundred-foot general store, a hotel, and a sawdust-insulated icehouse — remembered as 'the Refrigerator' — where beef was kept through the season."]},{"heading":"Gone from the ground, kept on the map","paragraphs":["When the pine was gone, Damon's purpose went with it. The post office closed in 1911, the buildings disappeared into brush and second growth, and the graveyard became the settlement's only physical marker — though the name, the file notes, persisted on maps long after the town below them had emptied.","The research notes set the evidentiary level honestly: earliest attestation, primary history, and precise location all await independent enrichment. What the archive records is a logging camp with an unusual afterlife — killed by the exhaustion of its own commodity, then preserved for a century inside a novel most of its readers never connected to a real clearing in the Ogemaw woods."]}],"name":"Damon","aliases":["Lost City of Damon"],"type":"GHOST_TOWN","type_label":"Ghost Town","cats":["GHOST_TOWN"],"groups":["ghost-towns"],"desc":"Ghost town associated with documented cultural history.","full_desc":"A ghost town in Rose City, Michigan, Damon is filed here for what the record attaches to it. Ghost town associated with documented cultural history. It sits in the archive under 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.","address":null,"city":"Rose City","county":null,"state":"Michigan","postal":null,"region":"Midwest","lat":44.421054,"lon":-84.115409,"coord_kind":"CITY","status":"UNKNOWN","access":"UNKNOWN","access_notes":null,"ownership":null,"website":null,"phone":null,"year_built":null,"year_opened":null,"year_closed":null,"year_demolished":null,"designation":null,"current_use":null,"research_notes":"Discovery pass. Earliest attestation, primary history, precise location and current access require independent enrichment.","stage":"SOURCE_RESEARCH","quality":{"level":"LOW","score":49.3,"dims":{"location_confidence":0.75,"identity_confidence":0.65,"historical_confidence":0.8,"source_quality":0.6,"paranormal_claim_provenance":null,"coordinate_confidence":0,"current_access_confidence":0,"freshness":0.65}},"claims":[],"history":[{"description":"Former logging settlement associated with James Oliver Curwood's Green Timber. A ghost town's file is unusual: the emptiness itself is documented, and this entry is part of that record. It enters the file through media reporting — documented coverage, not folklore. The detail is preserved in 'Spooky Places To Visit This Fall in Michigan'. The date is part of the site's documented spine.","evidence":"MEDIA_REPORTED","date_start":null,"date_end":null,"confidence":null,"source":{"name":"Spooky Places To Visit This Fall in Michigan","url":"https://www.michigan.org/article/spooky-places-visit-fall-michigan","publisher":"Pure Michigan","type":"TOURISM","authority":3}}],"legends":[],"entities":[],"events":[],"investigations":[],"encounters":[],"media":[],"persons":[],"visitor":{"tour_availability":"Verify before visiting","notes":"Access details are unverified; research before visiting.","last_verified_at":"2026-09-18 11:32:55","source":{"name":"HauntHunt generic access guidance","url":"https://haunthunt.com/about#access-guidance","publisher":"HauntHunt editorial","type":"DIRECTORY","authority":2}},"sources":[{"name":"Spooky Places To Visit This Fall in Michigan","url":"https://www.michigan.org/article/spooky-places-visit-fall-michigan","publisher":"Pure Michigan","type":"TOURISM","authority":3}],"conflicts":[],"wiki":null,"counts":{"claims":0,"history":1,"legends":0,"entities":0,"sources":1}}