[ DISCOVERY · THE DISPATCH ]

The Ghost-Town Day Trips That Are Closer to Your Hotel Than You Think

Abandoned streets, empty saloons, and houses the desert is slowly taking back — and they're often a short drive from cities you already planned to visit. Here are the ghost town day trips worth swapping a museum morning for, and how to do them right.

The best ghost town day trips I’ve ever done all started the same way: with me realising, slightly annoyed at myself, that an abandoned town had been sitting an hour or two from a city I’d already spent three days in, eating overpriced lunches and queuing for a museum. Bodie did it to me. I was at Lake Tahoe, doing the lake things, and only on the last morning did I find out one of America’s great ghost towns was right there, more or less. I went. I cancelled the spa. No regrets.

That’s the thing about ghost towns. They’re not always out in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes nowhere is just past the suburbs.

Bodie is the gold standard, literally — a gold-rush boomtown in the eastern Sierra that swelled to thousands of people, then emptied out when the gold did, and is now preserved in a state the park service calls “arrested decay.” Meaning they don’t restore it; they just stop it falling down further. So the buildings sag and lean exactly as they were left, with stuff still inside — tins on shelves, a pool table, a schoolroom with books on the desks. It’s about an hour and a bit from the Lake Tahoe area, off the road toward Yosemite’s east side.

What gets you is the quiet. No piped music, no recreated saloon experience, no costumed actor calling you “partner.” Just wind, dust, and a town of a couple hundred ghost-buildings under an enormous sky. I stood in the old church for a while and genuinely lost the thread of what year it was.

Kolmanskop is the one that looks unreal in photos and somehow better in person. A diamond-mining town in the Namib desert that boomed in the early 1900s — German colonial grandeur, a ballroom, a bowling alley, an ice factory, all the absurd luxury of sudden money in the middle of nowhere. Then the diamonds ran out, everyone left, and the desert moved in. Now the dunes have poured through the doors and windows, and you walk into elegant rooms knee-deep in sand, with light slanting through the broken glass.

It’s a short drive from the coastal town of Lüderitz, so it’s an easy half-day if you’re already out that way (and if you’re doing southern Namibia, you should be). You need a permit, which you buy in Lüderitz or at the gate; the early-morning photo permit gets you in before the day-trippers, which is exactly when the light is doing its thing through those sand-filled rooms.

Not all ghost towns are dusty mining camps. Craco, in the Basilicata region of southern Italy, is a medieval hill town that was abandoned in the late 20th century after landslides and an earthquake made it unsafe, and it now sits up on its ridge completely empty, all crumbling stone towers and silent alleys. Film crews love it (you’ve probably seen it without knowing). You visit on a guided tour with a hard hat, for safety, and wander streets that look like the set of every “vanished civilisation” daydream you’ve ever had.

It’s a doable trip from Matera, the famous cave-dwelling city, which is itself a place you should already be going. Pair them. One city is ancient and very much alive; the other is recently dead and frozen. Back to back, they mess with your head in the best way.

Bannack, Montana — a beautifully preserved gold town, easy from the Yellowstone/Bozeman side of things, with way fewer crowds than the national park down the road.

Pyramiden, Svalbard — a Soviet coal-mining town way up in the Arctic, complete with the world’s northernmost Lenin statue, reachable by boat or snowmobile from Longyearbyen. Niche, expensive, memorable.

Oradour-sur-Glane, France — a sombre one: a village left exactly as it was after a wartime massacre, preserved as a memorial. Not a fun “ooh spooky” stop; a deeply moving one. Go quietly, near Limoges.

Calico, California — close to Las Vegas and very restored/touristy, more theme park than ghost town, but honestly fine for a quick family stop if you’ve got kids and a couple of hours.

Couple of practical things. Check the actual drive time before you book some pricey far-off tour — the best one for you is often startlingly close to where you’re already sleeping, and a hire car beats a coach for ghost towns every time. Go early: better light, cooler air, fewer people, and you’re not racing daylight on the way back.

Out in the desert ones especially, bring more water than you think and watch your fuel — there’s no garage in a ghost town, that’s rather the point. Wear proper shoes; these places are rubble and rusty nails and uneven ground, and a twisted ankle two hours from anywhere is a bad afternoon. And the the golden rule, again, because it matters: take photos, take memories, take nothing else. No souvenirs, no climbing on fragile structures, no carving your name. These towns died once already; don’t help them along.

There’s something about standing on an empty main street where thousands of people once lived their whole lives that recalibrates you. It’s the cheapest, strangest, most reliably profound day trip going. And it’s probably closer than you think.

Before your next city trip, look up what ghost town sits within two hours of your hotel — then trade one museum morning for it. You’ll remember the empty street long after you’ve forgotten the gift shop.

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