This past weekend I traveled to Bodie, California’s only Gold Rush ghost town. Nestled in a grassy meadow in the high Sierras about 75 miles from Lake Tahoe, the town stands frozen in a state of arrested decay with clapboard buildings spitting nails under a blisting sun.

1800s gold miners braved isolation, fires, disease, -40 Farenheit winters with 20-foot snows, dynamite accidents, gunfights, and stabbings to work their claims worth $35 to $100 million in total, depending on whom you ask. The clothes, hats, boots, beds, blankets, dry goods, cans, bottles, dishes, games, toys, false teeth, glass eyes, tools, horse-drawn carriages, art, books, magazines, and other belongings of the miners and their families lie right where they left them as they fled violence and firestorms…or died.

The town is still. The leaning houses & outhouses, church, town bank, hotel, bar, general store, cemetary, morgue where you can see tiny coffins lined up for babies, and Chinatown where murdering gunslingers smoked opium, gambled, and screwed hookers stand in eerie quiet. All you hear is wind in the grass and your boots in the gravel. Several times I peered through a dusty window and could swear I saw movement—a shadow, maybe, or a face darting from view. I loved it though it smelled of death.

E.S.P. overload.

Photos are posted here.