T H E
Paper YOUR WEEKLY
NEWS MAGAZINE
June 29, 2023
Volume 53 - No. 25
By Cecil Scaglione It’s extremely difficult to see ghosts in a ghost town in the middle of the hot desert afternoon. Goldfield Ghost Town isn’t really a ghost town, we were told, until all the merchants leave at 5 p.m. It used to be pretty well ghostlike every summer until this one, “because we’re staying open as an experiment,” according to Trail Mas-
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Escondido San Marcos Vista Carlsbad Oceanside Valley Center
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ter “Sandman” who was taking a coffee break between tourist tours around this 130-year-old mining community at the foot of the loreladen Superstition Mountain, about 90 minutes east of downtown Phoenix. The community was renamed Youngsberg during a resuscitation begun in 1910 and ended a decade and a half later. While the site is the original town
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of Goldfield, the buildings are replicas because most of the vacated town was razed by an errant military training flare back in World War II. Its revival as a tourist-attraction Old West memorial was launched in the 1980s and it is now listed among the more than 3,800 ghost towns scattered across the land. Not all are in Cowboy Country. Pennsylvania has more than 100, about 70 of them within an hour’s drive from Pittsburgh.
Arizona and California each have 300 of these supernatural settlements, most of them abandoned mining towns. Jerome, up the road a piece, is the biggest in the country. That gold, silver, zinc and copper mining community had a population of 15,000 at the end of WWII. When the last copper mine closed in 1953, the remaining members of the community -- somewhere between 50 and 100 people -- began promoting it as a ghost town.
Ghost Towns See Page 2