Late last fall, as the leaves up north were turning to flame and the mornings began to sparkle with frost, I found myself in need of both a jolt of inspiration and an excuse to get the hell out of Dodge (a saying, some claim, from the “wicked little town” of Dodge City, Kansas, now a ghost town). I was finishing up a book about the art of memorial and beginning work on a novel. Just a few months in, I’d already discovered that, in addition to being about swindlers and people who assume a whole host of false identities, this novel was also, in a way, about public memory—about maps and ruins, atlas and empire, dominion and ghosts. It’s a book about California, after all.
“Do you want to go on a road trip for a couple days with me…to visit a bunch of ghost towns?” I texted my friend Salem.
“I am so interested,” she replied. So I left Berkeley on a sunny Thursday and swooped her up at her foothills home in Grass Valley, and we hit the road, northbound.
The plan: We’d spend the night in Redding, then visit the nearby ghost town of Shasta City. From there, we’d retrace our steps and crest the Sierra, rolling into the Mono Basin to visit the infamous ghost town of Bodie, then head back along what was more or less the Donner party’s route and down into the foothills again, where we’d stop in on the old mining town of Malakoff Diggins before I dropped Salem off and turned toward home. It was a whirlwind plan, but it suited us.
Our mutual affection for the open road owes, perhaps, to our Californian-ness. Depending on when you start counting, I’m either a fourth- or a fifth-generation Californian. Salem, too, comes from several generations of pioneer stock. And being white Californians in our 40s, we grew up steeped in the lore and legends of this state and our ancestors. We’ve both long understood that we’re somewhat infected by these mythologies even as we’ve worked hard to exorcise them. Hence our enthusiasm for this road trip.
For ghost towns are perhaps the epitome of the California project: symbols of the failure and depravity of manifest destiny and also evidence of just how much this country loves a good old western tall tale. The ghost town road trip was novel research, yes, but also a further confrontation with the public imagination of California, and with my own.
It was dark by the time we got to Redding and checked into our hotel, where Salem posed in front of the parking lot statue of a giant bald eagle painted with the American flag.
“We’re visiting ghost towns,” Salem told the fellow working the front desk. He shook his head somberly, as if in warning.
“Don’t go looking for anything you aren’t prepared to find,” he replied.
The next morning, we got some breakfast and checked the weather. Flurries up in the Sierra—a cold front headed in, possibly more rain and snow. A few years back, I’d gotten stranded outside of Yosemite because of a freak snowstorm that filled all the hotels and campgrounds, leaving me and my companions no option but to pay a lady in a neighboring town $20 a head to sleep on her basement floor. Did I know anything about the ghost town near Eureka? Salem wondered. I’d never heard of it. Maybe we should go there instead?
We decided to decide later. For now, we paid the bill and scuttled up to Shasta City, the first visitors of the day. The former town, just a 200-meter strip now designated a state historic park, resembles something between a western-movie set and Roman ruins: an old, still-intact courthouse and merchant buildings to the north; to the south, the brick remains of a once-bustling pioneer thoroughfare. The town was founded shortly after a prospector discovered gold in a nearby creek in 1848, which brought the hordes racing to Shasta City, then called Reading’s Springs. The real, sure money to be made in the gold rush wasn’t from gold but from the rush itself. The town was renamed and was soon full of barbershops and mercantiles and a blacksmith, equipping the boom.
Shasta City was a thriving town, but that didn’t last long. In 1872, the new railroad bypassed the town in favor of nearby Poverty Flats, soon to be renamed Redding, and in 1888, the county court was moved there, making it the new county seat. Most merchants moved their businesses; the town dried up and emptied. For a town is like a body: Everything can be going along just fine, and then one single incident—a heart attack, the decision to move a train line—will knock you down dead, rendering you a ghost.
The old Shasta City courthouse is now used as a museum for art and artifacts of the boom era, with a restored courtroom you can visit, a gallows out back, and a dungeon-like jail down a flight of creaky stairs.
“So does anyone ever see any ghosts around here?” Salem asked the ranger at the front desk, a slightly hunched woman who gave the impression that she’d rather disappear via a hatch in the floor, had there been one, than talk to us. The ranger nodded with apprehension.
“Well,” she said, hesitating. “Some people feel like they’ve been touched by a ghost in the jail downstairs. It’s spooky down there.” And, she told us with an air of slight boredom, a little boy once saw a ghost baby in the corner of the courtroom. We beelined in that direction but, sadly, found no little ghost baby that day.
Still, we continued to walk around, taking in the trappings of the olden times: lace gloves and big hoopskirts and menacing muskets and Wanted posters detailing stagecoach robberies and forgeries and murders.
Downstairs, it was echoey and cold. To the left was a darkened set of cells. When Salem stepped across the threshold into the room, a man’s groans boomed.
“Not cool!” she shouted, darting back into the light. It was a recording; she’d tripped some switch to activate it.
This time, we entered the room together, and a ghostly hologram of a mustachioed man in suspenders began to take shape. “I got a story to tell!” the man said in an old-timey accent. For the next eight minutes, the cheesy voice of an actor playing the part told of how he’d been jailed for swindling women. “I can glean information from almost anyone,” he said. “Especially…the ladies.” This last word he drew out like Silly Putty. “They have a foolish fondness for making a wondrous display of their…valuables.”
“I’m offended,” I said.
“Y’all have a nice day now!” the ghost bid us, issuing a mighty guffaw as the projection disappeared again like smoke.
It was time to leave Shasta City and decide: Head east or west? East was Bodie, a sprawling memory of a place near the Nevada border and one of the best-preserved ghost towns in the West. We’d both been there several times before, though, and there was the threat of snow. West was Eureka, on the coast in Humboldt County, tall tree and Sasquatch territory, a place I’d never been to before, a ghost town deep in the redwoods. We poked around the internet: There was also a ghost tour of downtown Eureka. We called the number. Indeed, a woman named Alex could show us around that very night, and she even recommended a haunted old hotel for us to stay in. We looked at each other. Every good road trip involves a detour.
“Eureka?” I said.
“Let’s do it.”
We’d head west to the edge of the continent.
“So what exactly is a ghost town?” Salem asked as we wound our way through the hills outside of Whiskeytown, greener than usual on account of some recent rain. This was a very Salem question. We’d been coworkers for over a decade at a high school, and she was famous for saying things at staff meetings like “I just want to back up for a second and ask: What do we all believe is the purpose of education?”
Such questions were both disarming and crucial. This instance was no exception. Swayed as we had been by the haunted hotel and the ghost tour, it was important to ask ourselves how we were defining our terms. Was a ghost town a town of ghosts, a haunted place—or a town that had, by virtue of going bust, become a ghost of itself? In technical terms, it was the latter. But as we’d seen in the Shasta City jail, it was seemingly impossible to separate one from the other. Ghost towns dripped with eeriness and with past violence, too, and thus with the question of what lingered there. Plus, it was fun to be spooked. The prospect of encountering a ghost was part of the package, the whole ghost town California PR deal.
We had lots of road to travel, so we picked some podcasts, as instructed by Salem’s boyfriend, Jon, a vibemaster and an aficionado of both the weird and the media that adequately catalogs it. The first show was on the mysteries of Mount Shasta, invoked the night before by the “don’t go looking for anything you aren’t prepared to find” front desk attendant—a mountain considerably north of us where, many people believe, higher-order beings purportedly descended from Atlantis live and travel about on spaceships. Then we turned to a series about a cult of winemaker intellectuals not far from where Salem lives who routinely fail to correctly predict the end of the world. Weren’t these, too, quintessential California ghost stories, in the sense that they were about communities that, out of greed and longing, forged mythologies and worlds that didn’t really exist? Our terms were expanding again.
Our drive was long and lonely and serpentine, through hills covered in big-leaf maple and only the occasional small town adorned with Bigfoot iconography (more ghosts?), the sky alternating between the inland’s bright bluebird and sudden gullies of fog so thick the road itself became spectral.
By the time we reached the forest just outside of Eureka, the mist was so thick and particulate that it was practically raining, the world made bright with the green and glisten. We took a long walk through the forest, whose trees loomed above us several times our height. Eureka, too, had been a gold rush boom town, and this forest had helped build much of it. This place had been home to the town of Falk, where 400 people once lived and worked for the Elk River Mill and Lumber Company and the requisite industries to keep the town alive: a post office, a butcher, a general store, a dance hall, orchards, and barns filled with livestock. They’d fell giant redwood and load it up on a steam train to Eureka. Now, there were few giant redwoods left in tree form. Smaller saplings from that era had grown sizable enough in their place, and the moss-covered branches of the big-leaf maples reached skyward like gnarled hands.
In Falk, there weren’t any placards or Wanted posters or old-timey music. The people of that time were dead and buried. The forest had repopulated itself with trees. All we could hear was the sound of our footsteps and the rush of the river as we padded among the ruins, spotting bits of a cracked sink basin and some lengths of rusted pipe among the ferns. Save for a few foundation stones and pieces of sink and pipe, Falk is now gone.
“We don’t tell everyone about the ghosts,” said the woman at the front desk of Eureka’s Inn at 2nd & C as we checked in, “only if they ask.” We’d asked, of course. “But yeah, I can take you around and show you some of the more haunted sections.”
Built in 1888—the same year Shasta City fell from grace—as the Eagle House, the inn later became notorious for its ghosts, particularly a portly gentleman the staff called the Captain. You’d just be in there cleaning a room, the receptionist explained, and all of a sudden the air would smell of his pipe’s tar-like smoke. The inn was also home to a little trickster boy who tended to play with a red ball.
“Oh, that little boy,” said a housekeeper behind the desk with a shudder. “I hate it when I see him.” He’d appear just as you rounded a corner, then disappear again once he’d succeeded in startling you.
When darkness fell, we walked a few blocks to meet up with Alex, who had apprenticed with the local history teacher who had started these tours on a whim over a decade ago, and eventually began leading groups of her own. We liked Alex immediately—even though she told us that our inn was the most paranormally active place to stay in town. She walked with a tall wooden staff, sporting a broad-brimmed cap, long braids, and a tasseled coat that swayed as she ambled. Alex was the kind of person Salem reverently termed a “critter”: someone entirely their own.
“You’re like the Eureka ghostbusters!” Salem said.
“More like the Eureka ghost historians,” Alex replied. She walked us down to the port. The night was clear and cold, and the town lights glanced upon the mirrorlike surface of the harbor.
“Imagine,” Alex bid us, “that the year is 1859. This here is a frontier port, filled with ships.” She swept her hand across the horizon as if to conjure it. They unloaded gold-mining supplies and picked up timber cut from the nearby forests, like around Falk. Eureka was home to dozens of bars, prowling shipmen and merchants and “ladies of the night,” all manner of people coming from far and wide for “fame and fortune.”
“Many didn’t in fact make their fortune,” Alex reported somberly, “but instead met an untimely death.”
Take, for instance, the wife of the tugboat captain Hans Henry Buhne. Alex explained that, according to her research, Buhne’s wife was returning from a shopping trip in San Francisco (a many-week excursion back then) when she fell into the notoriously rip-roaring waters at the mouth of the harbor. Weighed down as she was by her hoopskirt and fineries, she drowned, her husband unable to rescue her. He now prowls the upstairs of a former hardware and shipping supply store on the corner—Alex pointed to the building. “They can hear his footsteps, perhaps searching out the window for sight of his maiden.”
By the early 20th century, the town’s commercial district had grown dramatically. In 1866, there were 5 saloons; in 1909, there were 65 saloons and 32 brothels for a town of just over 7,000.
The three of us spent about two hours wandering the town that night, bundled against the chill, visiting the restaurant where a woman in old-fashioned boots is sometimes seen soaring through the air, the site of a notorious shoot-out in a quiet back alley, the building where a man cut his throat to evade his debtors, and the corner where the old theater collapsed onto a nearby home, killing a woman. Present-day Eureka was hopping, the bars and restaurants packed with people. That Eureka hadn’t become a ghost town was perhaps a stroke of luck. The railroad was no longer in operation, but the advantageous port wouldn’t vanish anytime soon. Above all, though, it was a tourist town now. People often booked our haunted inn for weddings. Eureka was a place where people came to spend their dollars, keeping it alive.
Our inn—located inside the historic Eagle House—was the last stop on Alex’s tour. We walked upstairs to an empty landing. “Someone was shot here,” she said. She described one particular tour during which a woman, who knew nothing of the story, buckled over in agony and had to sit down, clutching her stomach. “The man had been shot in the stomach,” Alex said. It was as if the woman had felt it herself.
We told Alex that we had opted not to stay in one of the haunted rooms.
“You’re in room 24?” she said, alarmed. “Oh, that is most definitely haunted.”
Salem and I looked at each other. Apparently, years ago, a guest had been taking a bath when unfamiliar hands began combing her hair.
“Oh, no,” I said.
In the middle of the night, I had to pee but didn’t dare enter our bathroom. “Salem!” I finally hissed. “Salem! I’m so sorry, but you have to get up so I can pee!” We turned on all the lights, then I raced across the room, eager to get to the bathroom and get it over with—I left the door open—then jumped back in bed. Somehow, I managed to fall asleep again.
We left the coast unscathed, heading east, homebound, with one more stop to make at Malakoff Diggins, more commonly known as Humbug, for the disappointment it engendered among prospectors. The visitors’ center was located in the former express office, where a freight wagon would drop off mail and provisions. A museum of curios from that era was now housed in the back room, which, we learned, had been added by the express-office owners to serve as a dance hall and later a roller-skating rink. Even the hardscrabble olden days needed some wholesome fun.
It was time to talk ghosts again. The ranger showed us a picture that one of the caretakers had snapped through the window of a boarded-up old home. There was, indeed, a ghostly abstraction beyond the panes—perhaps some trick of the light and reflection, perhaps some conjuring of the beyond.
“If I look long enough,” the ranger said, “I see a face in agony.” This was one of the few things I wrote down in my notebook: weirdo stuff, perhaps research for my novel.
Ghost stories, I realized, are additive and participatory; they depend on not just the embellishments of the teller but also the reactions of the audience. When Alex was giving her tour, she told as many stories about the people on past tours who had experienced the ghosts as about the ghosts themselves—the woman with the pain in her stomach, for instance, or the woman who, moments before Alex explained that the deep-in-debt man had slit his throat, inexplicably pulled her finger across her neck. In this way, ghost stories, like history, change in tenor and fact and function over time.
Alex had also told us another story, one I’d vaguely recognized from recent headlines. A half mile off the coast of Eureka was the island of Tuluwat, once home to a Wiyot community and the site of an 1860 massacre. A local militia bent on the extermination of Native people snuck onto the island one night and killed anywhere from 80 to 250 people as they slept. “For the past four years we have advocated two—and only two—alternatives for ridding our county of Indians,” ran an editorial in the local paper not long after the massacre. “Either remove them to some reservation or kill them.” In 2023, the island was granted back to the Wiyot community as an attempted reparation.
By 1873, white settlers had murdered between 9,000 and 16,000 Native Californians. In this way, every California town is a ghost town: haunted places, places decimated by capitalism and greed. The Wanted posters and red-light district relics and shoot-out tales are just diversions. “Put that in your novel,” Salem said. For that’s the real history. And it’s haunting as hell.•
Lauren Markham is a fiction writer, essayist, and journalist. Her work most often concerns issues related to youth, migration, the environment, and her home state of California. She is the author of The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life and A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging.
