Published October 5, 2026 03:00AM
Inside an old general store in Garnet, Montana—a once booming, now abandoned 1890s mining town—a congealed blob of ketchup still clings stubbornly to an antique bottle. It’s as if a grizzled prospector dunked his last bite of steak, stepped outside, and forgot to return for dessert.
At least that’s what a handful of visitors—guests from the luxe ranch Paws Up, 36 miles away—guessed as we gaped at what’s widely considered one of Montana’s best-preserved ghost towns. We gleefully photographed the ketchup and Garnet’s gloriously ramshackle outhouse, laughed at the tale of the town’s lone communal bathtub, and soaked up the Wild West nostalgia. Then, like nearly everyone who visits a ghost town, we climbed back into our vehicles and headed for the comfort of the posh resort.
But just before we left, our Paws Up guide casually mentioned something that stopped me in my tracks: If we wanted to, we could apply with the Bureau of Land Management to spend the night in Garnet.
Come to find out, Garnet is one of a handful of America’s ghost towns that invites visitors to do the very thing most people instinctively avoid: stay behind after the last tourists disappear. From restored miners’ cabins in Montana to desert outposts in Nevada and California, these places offer an eerie overnight experience that no hotel can match.
Bannack State Park, Montana
It may be quiet today, but Bannack, Montana, was once the beating heart of big sky country. After the state’s first major gold strike happened here in 1862, the boomtown grew so quickly it became the capital of the Montana Territory. So big, in fact, it hit 3,000 citizens in 1864. “Of course that was almost entirely white male prospectors,” says Christen Grohusky, recreation manager at the park. “Only 40 women lived here.”
The best way to experience that lopsided history is by wandering Bannack’s 50 preserved buildings. They’re remarkably intact for one surprising reason: the town’s last resident didn’t leave until 1984.
“The buildings are wild. Some still have linoleum floors and fairly modern wallpaper,” says Grohusky.
Bannack is worth visiting any time of year, but two weekends stand out. During Bannack Days, held on the third weekend in July, the ghost town springs back to life with gold panning, wagon rides, living-history demonstrations, and an old-fashioned gunfight after dark. Then, from December through March, the mood becomes peak old-timey winter charm. If conditions cooperate, visitors can lace up a pair of skates (available in the visitor’s center) and glide across the dredge pond on Grasshopper Creek—the same creek that fueled Montana’s first gold rush and was mined for nearly 80 years. After that, you can pitch a tent just outside the ghost town at one of two campgrounds with 24 campsites, eight of them first-come, first-served.
Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park, Nevada
In terms of bang for your buck, you can’t do better than Berlin ghost town in Nevada. Located inside the Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park, this site is home to the remaining buildings of what was once the Berlin Mine, a successful gold mine that produced $849,000 worth of gold ore from miles of underground tunnels. It also sits atop the largest known ichthyosaur fossil bed in the country, a graveyard of sea creatures that called the region home during the Triassic Period.
As you wander through what park staff affectionately call the “arrested decay” of old Berlin—past a rusting 1918 Dodge Brothers pickup, weathered clapboard buildings, and the skeletal remains of the mine and mill—you’ll discover that the setting is every bit as memorable as the history. “It’s high desert, so there’s a lot of juniper,” says Tyler Kerver, Nevada Division of State Parks education and information officer. “There’s also a unique smell because of all the old railroad wood used in the buildings.”
The park offers 14 campsites, including several that accommodate RVs, making it easy to dally after the day-trippers have gone home. Visit between Labor Day and November 1, and you can pair your stroll through the ghost town with a guided ichthyosaur fossil tour, offered at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays.
Virginia City and Nevada City, Montana
If you like your ghost towns with a little more life, head to Virginia City and Nevada City, Montana. Just a mile apart and linked by a historic train, these sister towns preserve one of the West’s most remarkable collections of Gold Rush–era architecture and artifacts.
“The outdoor museum in Nevada City has the largest collection of Old West artifacts outside of the Smithsonian,” says Becky DiGiovanna, concessionaire of the Fairweather Inn and Nevada City Cabins.
Much of that is thanks to Charles and Sue Bovey, successful Montana ranchers who developed a passion for preserving the state’s fast-disappearing frontier culture. Beginning in the 1940s, the Boveys bought buildings in Virginia City and, in nearby Nevada City, collected historic structures from around Montana and reconstructed them on the old townsite, creating what is now an extraordinary open-air museum. Today, Virginia City is a National Historic Landmark, with boardwalk-lined streets crowded with buildings that look remarkably similar to how they did when gold fever swept through the region.
From mid-May through September, visitors can wander on a self-guided walking tour, stopping at historic plaques that tell the stories behind its saloons, shops, homes, and other buildings. On weekends, Nevada City goes one step further, with living-history interpreters bringing its streets back to life. The towns are so evocative of the Old West that Hollywood has taken notice, too: Nevada City has served as a filming location, including for the Nicolas Cage Western Butcher’s Crossing.
Best of all, you don’t have to leave when the museums close. Nevada City has eighteen historic cabins available to rent year-round. And despite the 19th-century surroundings, this is hardly frontier living: Cabins come with full bathrooms, Wi-Fi, and Keurigs. You can spend the evening in a bona fide ghost town, then wake up with hot coffee and a strong internet connection, hardly roughing it.
Calico Ghost Town Park, California
Rick Moreno has been road-tripping past Calico, California, since he was a kid—long before he became a band tour manager and started logging serious miles for a living. A native Angeleno, he remembers family drives across the Mojave Desert to Las Vegas in the 1970s, with stops at the old 1881 silver-mining town along the way.
“You know about Walter Knott of Knott’s Berry Farm, right?” Moreno asks when I catch him by phone. Fittingly, he’s on the road again, this time touring Germany with a band.
As it turns out, Knott is the biggest reason there’s still a Calico to visit. In 1951, the then boysenberry baron-turned-amusement-park impresario rescued the crumbling ghost town, then donated it to San Bernardino County in 1966. And nearly 60 years later, Calico still has a little Knott’s Berry Farm in its DNA.
Moreno describes it less as a preserved-in-amber historic site than as a ghost town with a showman’s streak. You can pan for gold, hop aboard a mini Odessa Railroad, browse the leather works and Indian Trading Post, and—because what good is a ghost town without ghosts?—take a ghost tour after dark.
“There’s lots of camping too and RV hookups,” Moreno says. But the most fitting overnight option (available every day except Christmas) may be the bunkhouse, which sleeps up to 20. Because if you’re going to spend the night in a ghost town, you might as well bring enough people to investigate whatever goes bump after dark.
Terlingua, Texas
Twelve miles north of the Rio Grande in Terlingua, Texas, just outside Big Bend National Park’s Maverick Entrance, Jessica Massey, Big Bend Holiday Hotel’s manager, says the evening’s biggest show doesn’t stream on Netflix. It plays out across the Chisos Mountains, where the setting sun washes the peaks in improbable shades of pink, purple, and gold. Guests there and at Perry Mansion, one of several accommodations owned by Bill Ivey, have a front-row seat to the spectacle while spending the night in Terlingua Ghost Town, the former mining settlement Ivey began rescuing from ruin in the 1980s.
Ironically, the isolation that draws travelers here today is the same thing that once made life in Terlingua so difficult. The town sprang to life around its quicksilver mines in the late nineteenth century, but this remote patch of the Chihuahuan Desert was never an easy place to live. More than a century later, that remoteness has become Terlingua’s greatest luxury. The mines may be silent, but people keep coming back for the emptiness: big skies, desert stillness, and sunsets better than anything Hollywood could script.
To get a taste, you have your pick of accommodations from yurts to Airbnbs, but Ivey’s Perry Mansion comes with a historical pedigree; it was once the home of the head of Chisos Mining Company.
Garnet, Montana
And then there’s the ghost town I stumbled upon: Garnet, Montana. Tucked into the hillsides about thirty miles east of Missoula, Garnet doesn’t feel abandoned as much as paused. Its glory days came in 1898, when miner Sam Ritchey struck a rich ore vein, and the population promptly swelled to around 1,000. Soon there were four stores, two barbershops, a school filled with forty-one children, and a four-story hotel whose empty rooms remain wonderfully eerie today.
But Garnet’s real twist comes after most visitors have sensibly headed home. From December through January—arguably two of Montana’s least hospitable months—you can actually spend
the night. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) rents two primitive winter cabins in the ghost town. The Dahl Cabin can sleep up to six guests with two full-size beds and two cots, making it a practical choice for families or small groups, while the McDonald Cabin features a single-room layout with two double beds. Both come in at the budget-friendly $50 per night. But here’s the catch. You’re gonna have to work to get there. Guests must snowmobile, cross-country ski, or backcountry ski to their spooky abode. That said, BLM tells Outside that the cabins are very popular, especially over the holidays, and nearly every weekend is booked. This year’s availability goes live at Recreation.gov on October 3.
Kinsey Gidick is a travel journalist based in central Virginia. She’s drawn to ghost towns in the journalistic sense and deeply opposed to them in the after-dark sense. She recently wrote about national park lighthouse volunteer programs.
