Road-trip index
Ghost Towns near Kansas City
The survey records 488 vanished or historical sites within 100 miles of Kansas City, MO. Here's what's closest — and which places have full records worth planning a day around.
Charted towns within range
Vanished Place
A Missouri River ferry town founded by a Métis trader, now living history in a state park.
Vanished Place
A cement company town swallowed by the woods above Elk City Lake.
Vanished Place
Kansas's mirror of Picher: bought out, dissolved, and left to the chat piles.
Vanished Place
America's most toxic town — 14,000 people, dissolved by its own mines.
Vanished Place
A Frisco railroad resort on the Little Piney, cut off and killed by Interstate 44.
Vanished Place
Iowa's Black utopia — a coal town of 5,000 built on rare racial harmony, now bare farmland.
Closest surveyed sites — records pending
Every one of these is on the national atlas map — zoom into the Kansas City area to see them in place.