Bodie, California

Many years ago in the Hudson Valley region of New York, there existed a small community known as Potterville. The town was nestled deep in the woods above Wawarsing, New York, and featured a few houses and buildings. The advent of modern roads and local industry apparently drew everyone out of Potterville, and the place quietly became a ghost town of sorts. Local teens used to make the 8 mile trek up the often washed out road that led to Potterville, and I was among them.
It was the local story that the place was haunted, and we would sometimes bring our uninitiated friends up there to give them a good show of it, but in truth it was a rather bucolic setting, the buildings weren’t terribly dilapidated, and overall it might have been a good place for a picnic if it was not in such a remote and hard-to-get-to location.
There was one very odd incident that I still cant explain, though. I had gone for a ride up the bumpy road myself, blasting music and just being a teenager. When I got to Potterville, I parked my car and started hiking around. There was a garage type structure, open doored, and I looked inside. On a cross beam, about 8 or 10 feet up, was a bird. It was a dead bird, and it was nailed to the cross beam. I was fascinated and stared at it for a while, trying to make sense of why a dead bird would be nailed there. It occurred to me that I had better go grab my friends and bring them up to show them, since we were always looking for some reason to keep telling people the place was haunted. I zoomed out of there, back to town, where I found a friend, Vinny Nigro, and we headed back up. I could not wait to show him the bird, and was really playing it up.
We arrived, parked the car and walked down to the building. Voila!!! And the bird was gone. I stared hard, and could not believe it. Then I thought that maybe I was looking in the wrong building. But I wasn’t. The nail was still in place but there was no bird, no blood, no feathers even. Just a cynical Vinny and a confused Jim.
I had Potterville in mind when my hostess here in California, Ms. Tess Coker, brought me up to Bodie, a ghost town in the Sierra Mountains of eastern California. It had been an old mining settlement in the mid 1800’s, and was a fairly productive one, but soon enough all of the gold and silver veins had been worked out and the population began to slowly decline. From a high of almost 8000 residents in 1880 and with 65 saloons and with a reputation as a lawless place with a red light district and a Chinatown, Bodie was booming. Then the gold went away and so did the people and by World War II there was no one left. And it just sat there. Winters up there are so severe that often the buildings would be completely buried and the summers are devilishly hot at times.
There are over 150 original buildings still standing, in a state of preserved decay. There is a store, a gas station, a pool hall, a church and a schoolhouse, a firehouse, as well as a hotel which probably was also the whorehouse, many residences and other structures. The landscape is littered with various mining machines,old conveyances, and other bits of century old junk. The state of California has taken over the care and preservation of the place and for 7 bucks a head you can spend the day there, walking around pretty much to your heart’s content. Some of the buildings are safe enough to enter and have been cordoned off in spots to prevent theft of the artifacts which still sit on old tables and shelves. The pool hall looks like you could in and rack em up and shoot a few games, after the dust has settled. The rest of the place is just quaint and atmospheric, and one cant help but try to conjure up the spirits of the long departed as they walked through the rough streets and went about their day.
The cemetery is a bit up the road with around 160 graves in evidence. The last burial there was recent, in 2003.
I didn’t see any dead birds. In fact, there was not much wildlife in evidence at all. There were, on this day, several dozen tourists, many from Europe, based on their conversations, and they were all fascinated with the place, as were Tess and I.
I would recommend Bodie to anyone who might like to see a real chunk of history, as it was, where it was. A huge bonus is the ride out of Bodie. The vistas of the snowcapped Sierra Nevada range are spectacular, and are yet more eye candy for those who like eye candy.
Not a haunted town by any means. But haunting it certainly is.