About Ghost Town Trails

Ghost Town Trails is an atlas of America's vanished places — the towns that had a post office, a payroll, a school, and then didn't. We map where they were, tell what happened, and report honestly on what's left to find.

The atlas is built on public records: the USGS Geographic Names Information System, historical census counts, the National Register of Historic Places, and state historical archives. Our survey layer holds more than 52,000 candidate sites; towns are charted with full records a few at a time, as the history can be verified. We'd rather chart slowly and be right than paste rumors under a pin on a map.

Ghost Town Trails is made by the team behind rockhounding.org, where we've spent years mapping another kind of overlooked place. Mining ghost towns and rockhounding country overlap constantly — you'll find cross-references between the two atlases where they genuinely help.

One standing principle: we never encourage trespassing, and we never publish access routes onto private land. Many of these places survive precisely because they're hard to reach and lightly visited. Take photographs, leave nails.