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Ghost Towns of the Pacific Northwest: Five Places and Their Real Histories

The Northwest is full of places that used to be towns. Some were mining camps that lasted a decade. Some were railroad towns that died when the railroad went somewhere else. A few were deliberately drowned. “Ghost town” gets used loosely, for anything from a single collapsed cabin to a living village with twenty residents and a café, and plenty of these places get ghost stories attached to them. This article sticks to five places whose histories are well documented, and tries to explain the less spooky question of why each one emptied.

Monte Cristo, Washington: the boom the mountains wouldn’t allow

In 1889 a prospector named Joseph Pearsall found gold- and silver-bearing ore at the head of the South Fork Sauk River, high in the Cascades of eastern Snohomish County. Within a few years Monte Cristo had attracted serious money. As David A. Cameron’s history for HistoryLink describes, an Everett syndicate with major funding from John D. Rockefeller built a railroad up the Stillaguamish to reach it in 1893, along with a concentrator and aerial tramways to bring ore down from the mines on the peaks above town. Thousands of people came into the district. The town had upper and lower halves, saloons, a school, a church and a post office.

The mountains won. Cascade ore assayed well at the surface but dwindled with depth, unlike the Rocky Mountain deposits the miners knew. Winter storms dumped rain and wet snow, avalanches took out tramway towers, and floods kept destroying the railroad through Robe Canyon. In November 1897 the worst flood yet wrecked the line, and residents walked out down the damaged tracks to Granite Falls. Mining resumed for a few years and then sputtered. The last venture ended at Christmas 1920, when an avalanche off Toad Mountain smashed its mine entrance and equipment, and the last four miners walked out on snowshoes.

Monte Cristo then spent decades as a resort, and from the 1950s its owners played up a “ghost town” theme. A flood on December 26, 1980, cut the road, and the county declined to rebuild it. The lodge burned in 1983, cause unknown. Volunteers formed the Monte Cristo Preservation Association, and the site, now Forest Service land almost surrounded by the Henry M. Jackson Wilderness, can be reached on foot. HistoryLink notes that the old mine wastes have also raised questions about contamination, which is a less romantic kind of haunting.

Molson, Washington: the town that split in two

Molson sits in the Okanogan Highlands a few miles south of the Canadian border. According to the Molson Museums’ history, it was founded at the turn of the twentieth century by a promoter, George Meacham, with money from John W. Molson of the Canadian brewing family, after gold was found nearby. The mining didn’t last, but homesteaders arrived, and in 1905–06 the Great Northern built a line through on its route between Spokane and Princeton, British Columbia.

Then the town found out that its founder had never secured title to the land. A local man named J. H. McDonald (the spelling varies) had the townsite under his own claim, and in 1909 he told residents and businesses they were trespassing. Many moved about half a mile away and founded New Molson. The museum’s history describes a feud that lasted two decades over which was the real Molson, complete with a post office that went missing while the postmaster was at lunch and a bank building that was moved on skids. In 1914 the two communities settled on building a shared school between them.

The railroad stopped serving Molson in the 1930s, and the population drained away. In 1960 Harry Sherling began collecting old buildings and equipment at the original site as an outdoor museum, and the 1914 schoolhouse is a museum too.

Shaniko, Oregon: the Wool Capital of the World

Shaniko is about forty miles northeast of Madras in Wasco County. The Oregon Encyclopedia’s entry by Ulrich H. Hardt calls it the Oregon town with the most rapid growth and decline. The town takes its name from August Scherneckau, who ran the post office at nearby Cross Hollows; Shaniko was how Wasco people pronounced his name. It became the terminus of the Columbia Southern Railway in 1900 and was incorporated in 1901.

For about a decade it was the shipping point for the wool, wheat and livestock of a huge stretch of central Oregon. Freight wagons came in from as far as Burns and Bend, the warehouses could hold four million pounds of wool, and in 1904 more than five million dollars’ worth of wool was sold there. It called itself the Wool Capital of the World.

Then James J. Hill’s Oregon Trunk Railway opened a rival line up the Deschutes River canyon to Bend, and the traffic left. Fires in 1910 and 1911 destroyed much of the business district. In 1959 the Oregon Centennial Commission named Shaniko Oregon’s “Ghost Town of the Year.” About two dozen people still live there. The 1902 Columbia Southern Hotel, listed on the National Register in 1979, closed in 2008 after a water dispute and reopened in August 2023.

Golden, Oregon: two churches and no saloons

Golden, in Josephine County in southern Oregon, began as a placer mining camp on Coyote Creek in the 1850s. According to Oregon Parks and Recreation, a town grew up there around 1890. At its peak it was home to about a hundred people, and it was distinguished by its large orchard, two active churches, and the absence of a saloon in the town center. The church was built in 1892 by the Ruble family, who held mining claims nearby.

Four buildings remain: the church, a former residence, a shed and a building that once held the post office and store. Josephine County bought the old Ruble claims in 1968. The site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2002, and the state bought it that year. It’s the only former mining community the Oregon parks department owns and manages, and today it’s Golden State Heritage Site.

Old Kettle Falls, Washington: the town under the lake

Not every Northwest town emptied because the ore ran out. When Grand Coulee Dam was built on the Columbia River in the 1930s, the reservoir behind it, Lake Roosevelt, flooded eleven towns along the river. The National Park Service, which manages the Lake Roosevelt National Recreation Area, says some three thousand people had to leave. Owners could sell their buildings or pay to move them, and buildings that were left behind were burned.

Kettle Falls survived by moving. Its residents relocated homes, businesses and even the high school to the nearby town of Meyers Falls, and the combined community took the name Kettle Falls. The new town was dedicated in August 1939. The old townsite and the falls that gave it its name went under the reservoir.

Traces remain. At the Locust Grove group site, the Park Service notes, you can find concrete steps that rise to nothing, sidewalks that fade into the woods, and the name of the Bevan family pressed into the concrete outside the old bakery. The remains of Marcus, a few miles upriver, reappear when the reservoir is drawn down.

The falls themselves had been a major fishing place for Indigenous peoples of the upper Columbia long before any of these towns existed. Their loss was far older and larger than the loss of a townsite, and it belongs to the history of those peoples rather than to a ghost-town list.

Why ghost towns get ghosts

Every one of these places has a plain explanation for its emptiness: ore that played out, a railroad that went elsewhere, a title that was never filed, a dam. The feeling they give doesn’t depend on any of that. An empty town shows you, at full scale, what happens when everyone leaves. Steps lead to nothing and a church stands with no congregation. Horror writers have always known how strong that image is.

On Daily Creepypasta

July Ice is about a drowned town. A reservoir above a Montana town freezes solid in a July heat wave, and the lights of the old town are on under the ice. Route Fourteen follows a 1988 newspaper route in Aberdeen, Washington, where an empty house has kept up a subscription since 1931. Lost & Found is built from decades of a small-town weekly’s back issues on microfilm. For the rest, see the Small Towns and Pacific Northwest tags.

Sources

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