Ghost Town

BODIE, Calif. -- Waterman S. Bodey discovered gold in Bodie in 1859, but it was not until 1874 that miners hit the bonanza. By 1877 the gold rush was on.The boom lasted just four years. Exploration and assessment continued, as did small-scale mining operations and occasional comebacks, such as the 1890s with the coming of electricity and the cyanide extraction process."There has been uninterrupted mining and exploration here for the past 135 years," stresses Mark Whitehead, of Bodie Consolidated Mining Co., a division of Galactic Resources Ltd.Mining techniques and gold prices alternately spurred or stymied operations.

The Orioles on Thursday hired a baseball lifer — a manager with small-town roots, a work ethic forged by his father, and an unshakeable conviction in the fundamentals of the game, born of long heart-to-heart talks with his old man. The description fits Cal Ripken Jr. The job goes to Buck Showalter. A two-time Manager of the Year, with the New York Yankees and Texas Rangers, Showalter is the best man to lead the worst team in baseball, those who know him say. "It's a real good fit," said John Hart, onetime Orioles' coach who hired Showalter at Texas in 2003 when he was general manager.

The vacant old elementary school comes first as you enter Harney from the south on Harney Road. Then comes the closed-up United Brethren church with holes in the slate roof. A few "For Rent" signs on houses and other buildings. Some "For Sale" signs. A place or two boarded up. Peeling paint. Nobody around. The last thing in Harney before the "Welcome to Pennsylvania" sign is a cemetery. Maybe this is a ghost town.A casual visitor to this Carroll County hamlet of 50 or 60 homes might get that impression, especially at midday when many working people are away, says 15-year resident Charles Cole.

The flight attendant was skeptical. "You're getting off in El Salvador?" he asked. I nodded. "You don't need arrival forms if you are traveling on to Costa Rica," he said. "We're going to El Salvador," I told him. With some hesitation he handed me paperwork to enter the country. Our family of five, including three boys ages 4 to 7, was traveling to this Central American nation of 7 million, encouraged by a nonstop flight and the online discovery of a colonial town called Suchitoto. Blogs called it the next Antigua, Guatemala, or Granada, Nicaragua.

Richard Henry Dais, a bookstore manager and ghost-town expert, died of an aneurysm Friday at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The Ellicott City resident was 56. Mr. Dais was born in McPherson, Kan., and raised in Cody, Wyo., where he graduated from high school in 1967. He earned a bachelor's degree in history from the University of Denver. For the past four years, Mr. Dais had been assistant manager of the Barnes & Noble Booksellers store in the Bowie Town Center mall. He was a former president of the Denver Ghost Town Club and had taught a course on ghost towns at the University of Denver.

G host Town is like an antidote to those factory films that have come out over the past few years that are aimed at adolescent boys," says its star, Ricky Gervais, over the phone from Los Angeles. "They're all about boob jokes and smut, while this reminds me of something like It's a Wonderful Life or Groundhog Day, one of those lovely redemptive sort of things." Especially Groundhog Day. Because Ghost Town, directed by David Koepp, is a funny love story with an old-fashioned Technicolor glow.

A Baltimore taxpayer group warned City Council members yesterday that approval of a proposed local income tax increase would turn the city into a ghost town.But Police Commissioner Edward V. Woods and Fire Chief Herman Williams Jr. offered bleak assessments of public safety in the city without the additional revenue from the tax increase proposed by Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke for increased police and fire protection."Are we going to become a city of ghosts?" asked Daniel J. Loden, president of the Baltimore City Homeowners Coalition for Fair Property Taxes, a group that opposes increasing the so-called "piggyback tax."

Swinging, creaking doors. Tumbleweeds bouncing quietly off darkened lampposts. Whiskey bottles lying empty on their sides in long-deserted saloons. The wind howling through surprisingly well-kept graveyards situated on hilltops just north of town.Ah, the ghost towns of American lore, settlements that look as though the whole town just got up in the middle of lunch yesterday and left. Houses stand undisturbed by the ravages of time or pillaging neighbors, while handbills posted on the sheriff's door -- which, of course, still plainly says "Sheriff" -- flap in the breeze.

MUGUNGA CAMP, Zaire -- The tail end of the snake of refugees that is making its way into Rwanda from Zaire rests in this eerie ghost town, the world's largest refugee camp just four days ago and home to about half a million people.Refugees line both sides of the road that extends from the camp into the Zairian city of Goma, but their numbers are slowing, after a three-day parade of determination engulfed the two-lane byway.The 7-mile-wide camp is populated only by rats. They scurry amid the crevices in the waist-high walls the residents built out of lava rocks during their 2-year stay here.

EAST COVENTRY, Pa. - The tiny hamlet of Frick's Lock - named for the farmer who settled it and the canal locks later built there - lies vacant and abandoned today. The canal that brought it life and prosperity is filled with dirt. Yet its heyday was not so long ago that old-timers and others around here can't still hear the echoes. It was a time when boats laden with coal - as much as a million tons a year - came through the town on their way to Philadelphia. Mules trudged the towpath, pulling the boats and urged on by a colorful, ever-changing cast of boatmen who swore and drank.

The fun of Ghost Town starts with the title and doesn't end until the final line. In fact, the ending, in its own milder way, is as perfect as "nobody's perfect" in Some Like It Hot. In this movie, New York City is the ghost town, and not because everyone has left it, as in I Am Legend. Without even knowing it, surviving friends and loved ones, because of their unresolved emotions, keep a horde of dead Manhattanites tethered to Earth. As the dentist who discovers he can converse with the dead, Ricky Gervais gives the film a rich, bittersweet center.

G host Town is like an antidote to those factory films that have come out over the past few years that are aimed at adolescent boys," says its star, Ricky Gervais, over the phone from Los Angeles. "They're all about boob jokes and smut, while this reminds me of something like It's a Wonderful Life or Groundhog Day, one of those lovely redemptive sort of things." Especially Groundhog Day. Because Ghost Town, directed by David Koepp, is a funny love story with an old-fashioned Technicolor glow.

Towns usually die slowly in a cascading series of losses - the factory, the high school, the movie theater - making it hard to point to when or even why a once thriving community expires. But with Great Harbour Deep, a one-time outpost in a remote coastal stretch of Newfoundland in Canada, it was clear when the death spiral began and what triggered it. When the cod went away, so did the town. "It was overfishing," said Sharon Elgar, a former town clerk of the former town. "Fish, fish, fish, till nothing was left."

When Jeff and Cynthia Lewis first saw the dilapidated Taneytown property in photographs three years ago, they believed it needed to be saved. Inside, the ceiling was crumbling and the entire structure needed upgrading. But Jeff Lewis said he was up for the challenge. "I bought the building for $170,000, sight unseen, with the intention of fixing it up on a part-time basis," said Lewis, 51, of Fort Myers, Fla. "The location and the town were perfect. Taneytown still has the historic fabric laced in the community."

Richard Henry Dais, a bookstore manager and ghost-town expert, died of an aneurysm Friday at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The Ellicott City resident was 56. Mr. Dais was born in McPherson, Kan., and raised in Cody, Wyo., where he graduated from high school in 1967. He earned a bachelor's degree in history from the University of Denver. For the past four years, Mr. Dais had been assistant manager of the Barnes & Noble Booksellers store in the Bowie Town Center mall. He was a former president of the Denver Ghost Town Club and had taught a course on ghost towns at the University of Denver.

RINGGOLD, Texas -- Two days after a fierce brushfire swept through this rural cattle town, cinders still smoldered in the ruins yesterday. The air was heavy with the smell of smoke and everywhere there were mangled metal, ash heaps and ugly swaths of black, charred earth. "It came up on us so fast there was nothing to do but get out of the way and watch the town burn," said Kent Hanson, 49, who lost 300 acres of land in the blaze. Here in Ringgold and elsewhere across Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico, frequent high winds and a lingering drought have turned bone-dry communities into giant tinderboxes.

If the Friday after Thanksgiving has a flip side for retailers, it was yesterday. Unlike that late November day, known as the busiest shopping day of the year, yesterday's snow kept most -- if not all -- customers away. Early yesterday afternoon, downtown Baltimore streets were mostly empty except for an occasional snow plow or city bus. The quiet seemed broken only by the classical music blaring from speakers outside The Gallery at Harborplace. Storefront after storefront -- florists, restaurants, banks -- had their doors locked.

SPANISH FORT, Texas -- On the banks of the Red River, whose sludgy waters separate Texas from Oklahoma, is a community so full of abandoned buildings, so eerily devoid of conspicuous signs of life, that you may be tempted to call it a ghost town.Residents here would prefer that you didn't."I don't want anybody making fun of Spanish Fort," says 87-year-old Ruth Shipley, who once served as the town's postmaster. "I don't see anything ghostly about it."Folks like Shipley know their town is in decay.

It started with the commute - there were few cars to share the roads into Baltimore, even when the clock still pointed to rush hour. Then there were the parking lots - that coveted space much closer to the door was suddenly available. Once inside the office, many of the desks seemed empty, offices dark; voice mail picked up calls with cheery messages announcing to anyone who might be silly enough to phone that, sorry, I'm out until the new year. The calendar might say it's after Dec. 25, but to many - from schoolchildren to office workers to CEOs - the Christmas vacation has just begun.

NOVELLAS GHOST TOWN: TALES OF MANHATTAN THEN AND NOW By Patrick McGrath. Bloomsbury. 247 pages. Obsession in all its myriad forms is Patrick Mc-Grath's oeuvre. Asylum, based on his dark novel of sexual obsession, currently shows in movie theatres nationwide, to critical acclaim. Ghost Town, McGrath's latest foray into the psychological terrain of obsession and its consequences, mines yet another haunting vein of the human psyche at its most desperate. Devotees of the Londoner-turned-New Yorker will not be disappointed; newcomers will be entranced.