Bodie, Californian ghost town created by the gold rush

Bodie, a ghost town haunted by the gold rush.

If you are an amateur of ghost cities, mythical cities, the city of Bodie in California is one of these incredible places. A symbol of the gold rush between 1870 and 1880 but also of the conquest of the American West, the city of Bodie did not leave indifferent.

Located between Lake Tahoe and Mono Lake, the city of Bodie experienced its time of glory at the time when gold fever had seized man at the end of the 19th century; At that time, the hill where Bodie nestled produced some $35 million in gold and silver.

The crisis of gold doing its work, not forgetting two big fires, was right about this city which saw its last inhabitants abandoning it in the 1950s. Today we come back to see her for her story, to hope to regain the atmosphere of a lost era.

Bodie, the real Far West

The history of this city is the classic history of all the western cities that have seen men arrive with the sole hope of finding gold and prospering. Hundreds and hundreds of miners arrived in the mid-1860s and 1870s thinking they found a new El Dorado. In the late 1880s, the city had up to 10,000 inhabitants. But the resources quickly faltered and the city gradually emptied from its inhabitants.

Today, the city is still standing, stripped of souls who made it live. She has officially become a "ghost city".

Stop your flight!

Today, to visit the city of Bodie, you must lose yourself in its streets, discover every house and stick your nose to the window. For more than 50 years now, everything seems to be fixed in time: put your hands against the tiles of the ridges and look at every detail that has not moved one inch. In Bodie, time stopped: the clothes are still in the closets, the tools are still arranged on the established, the children’s toys hang out with books.

The curse

Like all ghost cities, Bodie also has his curse. Many visitors say that after collecting any object that came from the city (a coin, dried dishes, etc.), the bad eye fell on them, from the death of the red fish of the family to the car accident.

Since then, letters from all over the country have come to Bodie, where the one-day “thieves” apologize for offending the spirits of the fallen souls and asking the Rangers to put everything back in its place, as in Uluru in Australia .

Main photo credit: Wikimedia – Ian Sewell