Bodie State Park

Prospector W. S. Bodey found gold here in 1859, and by around 1880 Bodie had become one of the West's roughest boomtowns, with several thousand residents and dozens of saloons, before a long decline. The state took over in 1962 and has kept it in "arrested decay" ever since, maintained rather than restored. Ranger families who have lived in the park describe the J.S. Cain house at the corner of Green and Park Streets as haunted by a woman remembered as the Cain family's Chinese maid, said to be gentle with children and wary of adults. The town's best-known grave belongs to the "Angel of Bodie", a two-year-old girl who died in an accident in 1897; she is the spirit most often named in Bodie's ghost stories. Bodie also has its "curse": anyone who takes an artifact is said to suffer bad luck until it is returned. Rangers acknowledge the story was started by one of their predecessors, yet the park keeps a thick file of letters from visitors who mailed back what they took.