8,000 people used to live here, now it’s a ghost town… Is a ghost town still a ghost town if thousands of people visit it every year?

That’s a question for the philosophers to decide, if there even are any left these days, but the town in question has been virtually empty for decades after once boasting around 8,000 occupants.

If you journey up into the hills of California you can find the ghost town of Bodie, named after a man who found gold in the area back in the 19th century.

The discovery of gold brought people to Bodie and for a short while it was one of the American west’s boomtowns.

At one point the place had about 2,000 buildings and roughly 8,000 people living there, but as you can imagine it wasn’t to last.

A rich vein of gold was discovered in Bodie in 1875 but the town went ‘bust’ in 1881 and most of the inhabitants moved away for pastures new.

The place went from boomtown to ghost town pretty quickly as people moved to other settlements, though a few stayed and plodded on.

Many of the ghost town’s 2,000 buildings were destroyed by fires in 1892 and 1932, while in 1942 (dates ending with two don’t seem to be lucky for this place) mining efforts were officially ended and that was pretty much it for the place.

It had no raison d’être any longer, a bit like Burnley if it didn’t have a football club.