One of the countrys best-preserved ghost towns is hidden in a California state park but if you visit, beware the Bodie curse

This California outpost may be abandoned, but it’s got plenty of spirit.Tucked high in the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains sits a state park where a once-booming gold mining camp has been frozen in time — dusty, deserted and eerily untouched.Scores of weathered buildings still stand, including a saloon, church and stores still stocked with goods and furniture, making it one of the best-preserved ghost towns in the country. But before you wander its historic streets this Halloween season, there’s something you should know: Bodie has a curse.The biggest news, opinion and culture shaping California right now.

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Never miss a story Located northeast of Yosemite National Park, Bodie State Historic Park sits 13 miles east of Highway 395 on SR 270, seven miles south of Bridgeport.The area was long inhabited by local Native American tribes before the California Gold Rush transformed it into a flourishing mining town.By 1879, roughly 8,500 people called Bodie home.More than 2,000 buildings had sprung up across the community to provide services and entertainment for miners and their families, including dance halls, saloons and even a red-light district.Over time, the boomtown developed a reputation for lawlessness, with gunfights, stagecoach holdups, robberies and street brawls becoming part of daily life.Chinese settlers also established a Chinatown on Bodie’s outskirts during this period, where they supplied firewood to the community and local railway company after being barred from working in the mines.By the early 1880s, however, the boom was fading.

Economic decline and devastating fires took their toll on the town, while residents began leaving in droves.The portion of Bodie that survived was designated a State Historic Park and National Historic Landmark in 1932.Today, what sits frozen in a state of “arreste...