Does anyone live in bodie california

They even stole an oilcloth painting depicting the Ten Commandments, thereby violating No. For the most part, though, the public has been respectful. It, however, does not seem too much of a bother for tourists. Randar said about , tourists annually visit Bodie, impressive considering that the road in is closed seven months out of the year.

A quick check of the guest register in the Bodie museum shows that, on just one page, people from Germany, Switzerland, France, Denmark and Korea had a look around. Docents regale visitors with tales from old times, about gambling and boozing, prostitution and claim jumping, murder and mayhem, and even boring, old everyday life for families.

A self-described history buff, Arvidson dragged her husband, Bob, daughter Stephanie and grandson Caleb, back out one more time to walk the ruins. If you see certain dates, that was a plague or flu. It drives them crazy. But then I go ahead and tell them all about it.

Her house was right next to the saloon. She donated a painting and did lots of great things for the town. This tells us about where our society was, where we came from. But Frye, who visited Bodie as a girl in the s and later worked as a park aide and archivist, actually knew a Bodie resident, whose parents settled there at the turn of the century.

Bob Bell grew up at the house his father, Lester, built near the corner of Union and Fuller streets. The town stands, eerily alone in the middle of the Sierra Nevada desert, not far from the mountain range that once served as a place of employment for many of its residents. As with any western ghost town, mining was the cause of both its flourishing population and responsible for its disappearance.

In the case of Bodie, however, the town's history was far darker than that of the average mining town with natural disasters and manmade tragedy seeming to have lurked around every turn of the new year. Bodie's Reverend, F. Warrington, once spoke of the town, saying that it was a 'sea of sin, lashed by the tempests of lust and passion.

The 'sea of sin' came later as tensions rose and it was clear the town and its residents could no longer maintain lives there. The name of the town of Bodie was a bit confusing because while it was named after Willaim S. Bodey, the spelling of the town's actual name came out a bit differently. It was determined that, in order to keep people from pronouncing the name wrong, extra insurance was taken out in the form of a spelling change.

Thus, the town was still named after Body - but spelled 'Bodie' instead. Bodey was one of my prospectors who traversed the Sierra Nevadas in search of the next great mining location and it was he who made the discovery of gold in the spot where the abandoned town now sits. The location, which was called Bodie Bluff, was announced in but, sadly, Bodey himself perished in a snowstorm that same year.

He never had the chance to witness the town that shared his name come to life, nor did he have the chance to see the profit for his discovery. The higher I drove, the fewer bars of service appeared on my cellphone, until communication dropped off entirely. I was surrounded by an endless landscape of brown hills. The paved road ended and a gravel road began, with no destination in sight, and I wondered how a man could have found gold in all of these hills so long ago.

The clouds drew closer until the road was shrouded in a dense, white fog. It was the end of May. At 8, feet of elevation, Bodie can see snow almost any month of the year. Then, amid low-hanging clouds, the ghost town appeared on the far edge of my line of sight. At the entrance gate, the state parks ranger was especially cheerful for such a gloomy day and told my partner and me about the only new feature in the entire park: There are bathrooms near the parking lot with heated seats.

Otherwise, it's pit toilets and outhouses. He also recommended we layer up. A few minutes later, I was walking down the main street of Bodie, staring at the empty pews inside a Methodist church that had been collecting decades' worth of dust. Though several churches were built in Bodie, this is the only that still stands.

I said my prayers and walked on, venturing farther into the ghost town. Walking through Bodie, I felt as if I were witnessing a tragedy, hopes come and gone, lives abandoned. I turned up a street and walked past a row of houses that were fading away as time passed. Each had stairs leading up to a front door. Each had windows and a roof, and kitchens and bedrooms.

In many of the homes, furniture remains alongside empty bottles and cans, old newspapers, mattresses, and clothes left on hangers. I stared at some torn and frayed white curtains that hung across a window, half expecting to see something otherworldly just beyond. Ghosts reportedly reside in Bodie.

As the ghost moved along the mine shafts, the light swung alongside him.