Ghost town.com

 

http://www.futuristspeaker.com/2010/03/ghost-towns-of-the-internet/

The picture postcard in my mailbox caught me by surprise walking out of my apartment building. Baffled I turned the card and studied it carefully, there was no name on the back of the card, nor any words of explanation.

On the front, few rows of red painted wood buildings hanging on to a cliff in varied stages of decline. I could see that the high jagged cliffs in the background were covered by snow, and a set of railroad tracks intersected the town that appeared to be a handyman special- a fixer upper heaven. 

A ghost town, the words appeared from nowhere, but once they did they just hanged there bringing a whole slew of images and stories from my teenage days when I was a keen reader of this kind of genre.

This one appeared so real, almost jumping at me from the paper, a whole town, rows and rows of houses without a human soul in sight. I could sense the eerie quiet disturbed only by the dry rustle of the wind flowing uninterrupted, in and out of the empty buildings.

Something about the picture radiated aloofness, desperation, crushed expectations, life that was cut in mid-stream; and it made me stop my urge to toss the card to the nearest waste basket and pull my hand back.

  A body without a soul, these words followed me in the weeks to come, I kept wondering about the human stories behind some well-known ghost towns. Trying to loosen the unified façade, and come up with a unique tale if even of one person. Maybe there is more to a ghost town then shadow filled images of ruins in different stages of disrepair.
The coming pages are my tries at such stories, fictional of course but based on some real facts. 

http://childventure.com/adventure-ak/places-visit/mccarthy-the-ghost-town-in-the-middle-of-nowhere/

Ghost town  "a shadowy semblance of a former self. “

 Lambert Florin

* The images on this blog were taken from google images.