Ghost towns make up one of the largest shelves in the archive — hundreds of dossiers for places where the town is gone and the paperwork survived it. That is the record's shape: plat maps, census counts, freight revenue, a post office's third-busiest ranking — and then, filed on top of the spreadsheet, the reports that arrive only after the population leaves. An empty building is an argument waiting for a story. These files document both the argument and the story.
Boom, on the record
The velocity is the first thing the record insists on. Rhyolite went from empty desert to a city with a three-story bank, a stock exchange, an opera house and fifty saloons on the bet that the Montgomery Shoshone mine would run forever — and back to desert inside fifteen years, leaving the most photographed ruins in the West, including a house built of fifty thousand bottles because glass was cheaper than lumber. Pithole did it faster: Pennsylvania's oil boom raised a town of fifteen thousand in months — a hotel reportedly built in two days — and falling prices and seventeen fires put it back to grass and cellar holes before its charter was revoked in 1877.
Thurmond, West Virginia, holds the archive's favorite ledger line: a town whose railroad generated more freight revenue for the Chesapeake and Ohio in 1910 than Cincinnati and Richmond combined, which the 2020 census counted at five residents. The local paper once wrote that the only difference between hell and Thurmond was that Thurmond had a river running through it. The New River is still there. The paper is not.
Arrested decay
Bodie is what the record looks like when the state decides not to tidy it. Roughly 110 buildings stand at 8,375 feet in "arrested decay" — nothing rebuilt, nothing removed, interiors left as the last occupants left them — down a road whose last three miles of dirt keep the crowds honest. The town earned its file early: named for a prospector who froze to death on a supply run, misspelled by a signpainter, home to ten thousand by 1879, and called "a sea of sin" by a surveyor of wickedness two years before it started dying. Its most distinctive haunting arrives by parcel post — visitors mail back pocketed nails and bottles with confession letters attributing their bad luck to the Bodie curse. The curse, uniquely in the archive, has an evidence locker.
Bannack keeps the darker version of preserved — sixty buildings along Main Street, a reconstructed gallows, and an open question: Sheriff Henry Plummer, hanged by vigilantes in January 1864 as the alleged leader of a gang historians have never confirmed existed. St. Elmo survives because the Stark family simply refused to leave — they kept the hotel, telegraph office and post office, and discouraged souvenir hunters with shotguns — until the last train came through in 1926 and took the town with it. And Shaniko, once the Wool Capital of the World with four million pounds a year through the largest warehouse in Oregon, was undone in 1911 by a rival railroad up the Deschutes canyon. Its hotel reopened in 2023, run by a nonprofit — eighteen rooms now, proceeds to the volunteer fire department.
What the file cannot say
Old Cahawba — Alabama's first capital, a cotton port that per-capita ranked fourth in national wealth in 1860 — filed its most famous apparition report in the spring of 1862, three years before it finished dying: a white luminous ball over a cedar labyrinth, witnessed by a couple on a promenade and chased by the gentleman until it vanished. The archive notes the neatness: the state's most famous ghost town was reporting ghosts while it was still alive.
That is the honest summary of the whole shelf. The boom is documented in freight revenue and census lines; the bust is a grid of cellar holes; and the hauntings are the genre a town produces once it stops producing anything else. Whether the dead outnumber the living is a census question. Whether they filed a report is the archive's.