ghosttownscanada

www.ghosttownscanada.ca

I ran across this site a little over a year ago. Wow I hit the jackpot when it comes to rural exploration. Who needs to drive around needlessly to find ghost towns when you can have them handed to you on a platter. Names, pictures and sometimes history of the town all on this site. Did I mention sometimes they tell you how many residents are left? I thought this was the greatest site ever. Well was I ever wrong. For starters the only way to urban/rural explore is to go out driving on gravel roads yourself looking for towns, following all kinds of maps and doing some research. I refused to believe this site was that great, how could there be so many ghost towns? So I decided to challenge the site when I go on road trips. I made a map with purple dots on every town listed on the site. If we were in the area we would check it out.

Turns out I was right, things aren't always what they seem. As I suspected people were taking pictures of one or two abandoned buildings on the main stretch of these towns and listing them as ghost towns. Some ghost town, when you have one little abandoned building surrounded my occupied ones. Little by little I went through this list and wrote them off. None of these are ghost towns and a lot of them are very inaccurate.

One town that is almost a ghost town was listed with no residents and a classic ghost town! Funny how every time I go out to this place there is a resident living right across from the couple buildings remaining from the town. Not to mention that everything is decaying or being destroyed by teenagers or even antiquers. Mostly because people have found out about this town on this ever popular site and have turned it into their own party spot, not caring at all about its history.

This site disgusts me. Great idea, bad control. Anyone can post a couple picture of abandoned buildings in town and call it a ghost town. Who is verifying all these towns? Absolutely no one. And not to mention all those people that think because they have found a couple abandoned buildings in a town they can call it a ghost town and then consider themselves an urban/rural explorer? I'm confused shouldn't you find something that is actually worth our while. If we want to drive out to see a ghost town at least make sure its a real one, that means no residents and at very minimum six buildings. Someone should be verifying these towns, there should be standards and guidelines one must follow before posting on there. Admittedly this wouldn't solve everything but it would certainly weed out most of these supposed “ghost towns.”

Just a thought thought.