The silence is deafening, broken only by a creaking door hanging unevenly off its hinges and banging in the desert wind as it blows through the arid landscape, whispering its ancient secrets to no one. A bird of prey wheels high overhead, and a small creature scurries in the dust as it goes to earth.

The loneliness is palpable. And yet this was once a bustling Gold Rush town, boasting rowdy saloons, a busy post office and a thriving hardware store, its enterprising population fueled by ambition, the promise of imagined wealth and a brighter future. Until the glimmering optimism, like the gold, ran out and the prospectors moved away — some richer, some disillusioned, all perhaps a little wiser — leaving their desert mining town to the ravages of time. Now it’s a ghost town — one of almost 300 that dot the California landscape.

Haunting and, some claim, haunted, there is something poetic and enigmatic about the idea of ghost towns that draws us inexorably to them. Even their names — You Bet, Rough and Ready, Second Garotte, Eldoradoville, Coyote, Chloride City, Lila C, Petroleopolis — have the lyrical power to entrance us, conjuring up familiar images of the Wild West depicted in old cowboy movies, but also something strange, otherworldly.

“Ghost towns are seductive because they’re kind of beautiful in their decrepitude, their emptiness and solitariness, but they’re sneaky because they invite us to think about them nostalgically and romantically,” says William Deverell, divisional dean of social sciences and co-director of the Huntington-USC Dornsife Institute on California and the West.

However, Deverell suggests that perhaps that’s not the best way to understand them.

“Ghost towns have stories of human tragedy mixed in with the occasional human triumph,” he says. “So, they’re complicated places and we need to take them on their own terms — what they were and why they still exist in our midst.”

Most California ghost towns were mining towns that owed their existence to the Gold and Silver rushes that drove the state’s expansion from 1848 to World War I. There are many reasons why they were abandoned, but a recurring theme is that the mines eventually played out or the miners found more gold — or more easily accessible gold — somewhere else and simply moved on.

“Mining rushes are like tornadoes, they sweep across landscapes,” says Deverell, professor of history, spatial sciences and environmental studies. “Some of these places were briefly phenomenally successful and grew very big before collapsing. Their fortunes fluctuated with the price of gold. Even the smallest were once tied to the international silver or gold markets.”

Ghost towns are seductive because they’re kind of beautiful in their decrepitude, their emptiness and solitariness, but they’re sneaky because they invite us to think about them nostalgically and romantically.

Some towns came to an untimely end due to environmental changes. Others were abandoned when mining methods changed or were outlawed.

Other ghost towns were never mining towns at all, like Llano del Rio, an early 20th-century socialist commune on the edge of the Mojave Desert that was abandoned, in part, for a lack of water access.

And then there are the ghost towns with a decidedly more sinister history: California’s internment camps, Manzanar and Tule Lake, which were used to imprison 150,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals during World War II.

“And they’re not romantic,” Deverell notes. “They’re tragic.”

Hard-edged Places, Hardscrabble Lives

When we visit ghost towns in our air-conditioned cars, armed with snacks and sunscreen, Deverell asks us to remember how difficult life would have been for those who once lived there.

“Mining is hard on the spirit, hard on the body and hard on the Earth. That doesn’t mean that there wasn’t joy, friendship and love, of course, but those who lived in these towns lived hardscrabble lives. These were people, often impoverished, who made long, hard journeys, risking everything, to come here to seek their fortunes in the hope of transforming their lives.”

As with the reasons for their decline, the fate of California’s ghost towns varies widely. While some have fallen victim to time, returning to the earth and becoming literally invisible, with little or nothing to show they ever existed, others have become heavily commercialized, transformed into Wild West theme parks for the entertainment of tourists.

Deverell says he is generally suspicious of those transformations — and of the assumption that what remains of a ghost town today is all that’s left to recount its history.

“It will take some digging, but often there is a photographic archive that will enable us to understand their stories,” he says.

As a historian of the West, Deverell is keen to see California’s ghost towns protected.

“Ghost towns are a tangible, physical reminder of our history,” Deverell says. “They still exist because we’ve grown attached to them and they offer an almost time-travelable journey into the past.”

“They’re haunting. And so, it doesn’t surprise me that people think they’re haunted.”