Spooky Places to Visit in the USA

Hands up if you wish that the spooky season would never end? I've got both my hands up! 

October may be officially over and the Christmas decorations may be starting to appear all over, but it's still spooky season in my book. It's always spooky season in my book!

Admittedly, I did start writing this post well before Halloween and had every intention to get it out into the world while everyone was still thinking of ghosts and ghouls, but if you've been here a while you'll know that being on time isn't my strong suit. Or maybe I'm just really ahead and this post is inspiration for next Halloween. I'll let you choose!

Anyway, seeing as all things spooky are on everyone's mind at this time of year (or, you know, last week) I thought I'd share some places that we've visited over the years that have a bit of a scary vibe to them. Some are known for being haunted, some are known as places where terrible things happened, and others are just old and kind of creepy. 

Let's take a look...

Bodie: An Old West Ghost Town

Ok, I've mentioned quite a few times now that we visited a real life Old West ghost town over the Memorial Day weekend back in May, so I think it's finally time I shared some of the photos with you all.

I have loved the idea of visiting an Old West ghost town ever since we moved to California, and I'm happy to say that Bodie, in the Sierra Nevadas, lived up to all of my expectations. The town, which is a designated State Historic Park, has been kept in a state of arrested decay since the last residents moved on to greener pastures in the early 20th Century. Everything is just as it was back then; a declining gold mining town filled with run down houses.

52 Weeks: Week 21

Week 21: Long Weekend Getaway

This past weekend was a long weekend for Memorial Day here in America. Kim had the Monday off work so we decided to go on a three day trip to the High Sierras region of California. I'll have more detailed posts coming soon about each of the places that we visited over the weekend but for now I wanted to share a quick look at our adventure.

On a side note, here's a strange thing about working in America that my Australian friends might find interesting... While there are quite a few public holidays each year, your employer decides which ones you get off. And I don't just mean for people working in stores or restaurants that may happen to be open on a public holiday, I mean for everyone! Your employer sets how many public holidays you are entitled to each year and then they chose which holidays those will be. How weird is that?

Anyway, back to the story...

I've been keen to visit a ghost town for such a long time. A friend recently took a trip through the High Sierras and visited the ghost town of Bodie. When I saw the photos on Facebook I just knew that we had to go there. Bodie is a real life ghost town that boomed back in the late 1800s gold rush and then died off as the gold petered out. The whole town is now a State Historic Park and has been preserved in a state of  "arrested decay", existing just as it did when the last residents left.