- published: 08 Feb 2012
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A ghost town is an abandoned village, town or city. A town often becomes a ghost town because the economic activity that supported it has failed, or due to natural or human-caused disasters such as floods, government actions, uncontrolled lawlessness, war, or nuclear disasters. The term is sometimes used to refer to cities, towns, and neighborhoods which are still populated, but significantly less so than in years past.[citation needed]
Some ghost towns are tourist attractions: Barkerville, British Columbia; Bannack, Montana; Calico, California; Elizabeth Bay, Namibia; Pripyat, Ukraine; Kolmanskop, Namibia; and Oatman, Arizona among them. This is especially true of those that preserve period-specific architecture. Visiting, writing about, and photographing ghost towns is a minor industry.
T. Lindsay Baker holds the W.K. Gordon Chair in Industrial History at Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Texas and has researched many ghost towns throughout Texas, recording his findings in the books Ghost Towns of Texas and More Ghost Towns of Texas. Baker has proposed a short set of guidelines that he uses to distinguish a genuine ghost town from a dispersed rural community or a vanished or phantom settlement: