Ghost Towns of the American West: Complete Stories of the Gold Rush Towns Time Left Behind | American Folklore for Sleep
A slow, quiet journey through the abandoned towns of the American West, made for falling asleep to.
They went up fast. Somebody found colour in a creek, word travelled, and within two years there was a main street, a bank, three newspapers, a dozen saloons and a few thousand people who had arrived from everywhere with no intention of staying. Some of these places went from empty valley to city and back to empty valley inside a single decade.
What follows is a tour of what’s left. The towns that emptied when the ore ran out, and the ones that emptied when the railroad was routed twenty miles the other way, which killed more of them than any mine ever did. Boarded shopfronts with the signs still readable. A schoolhouse with desks in it. Hotels built for a boom that was already over by the time the plaster dried. Some are preserved now, propped up exactly as they were found, in a state of arrested decay — which is a real term, used by the people who look after them. Others are nothing but foundations and a cemetery, and the cemetery is usually the last thing standing and the most informative, because of how young almost everyone in it was.
It’s not really a ghost story. It’s a story about how quickly a place can be built out of hope and then simply let go of, and how long the buildings outlast the reason anyone put them there.
The recording itself is the usual thing. A low, even voice, no music, no sound effects, nothing that rises or drops or suddenly arrives. Nothing in it is built to frighten you. Slow enough that following along stops feeling necessary somewhere in the first twenty minutes. If you drift off in one town and surface in another, a state or two away, that’s the intended use. Most people don’t make it past the first half hour, and the rest will still be here tomorrow night.
Put it on, turn the volume down, and let it go on without you.
Mythology & Folklore for Sleep — long, calm retellings of Greek myths, Norse legends, Egyptian tales, Hindu epics, Chinese classics, American folklore and old stories from around the world, made for insomnia and the hours when you can’t sleep. Bedtime stories for adults, told in a slow, quiet voice. New episodes every day.
