Bodie State Historic Park

A Bodie park ranger invented the curse in the 1970s to stop visitors from pocketing souvenirs, and now the museum keeps a thick binder full of apology letters from people who mailed stolen nails, bottles, and once even a whole piano back after years of bad luck. The town itself is the point: 170 buildings preserved in "arrested decay" at 8,379 feet, an almost complete 1880s boomtown with dishes still on the tables.

The curse of Bodie was invented by a park ranger who was sick of people stealing rocks. That's not a knock on the ghost town. It's actually the best part of the whole story.

For decades, visitors to Bodie State Historic Park have been pocketing souvenirs like nails, bottle glass, bits of old china, sometimes actual rocks from the hillside. Everything at Bodie is supposed to be left in what the Park Service calls "a state of arrested decay," meaning the buildings and artifacts are preserved exactly as they were found when California took over the town in 1962. So an overworked ranger, at some point in the 1970s or 1980s, started telling visitors that taking anything from Bodie would bring bad luck. The curse spread. People started mailing things back.

They still do. The park keeps a thick binder at the museum full of letters from people returning items. Car accidents. Job losses. Sick pets. Mysterious illnesses that only cleared up when the stolen nail got put in an envelope and sent back to Bridgeport, California. One couple sent back a whole piano after years of bad luck. The letters themselves are the exhibit now, and the park rangers don't really push the curse anymore, but they've definitely stopped trying to kill it.

Bodie itself is one of the most complete ghost towns in the country. At its peak in 1879 and 1880, it had about 10,000 people, 65 saloons, a Chinatown, a red-light district, and a reputation so rough that a little girl whose family was moving there allegedly wrote in her diary: "Goodbye God, I'm going to Bodie." The line is probably apocryphal. It's a great line anyway.

The gold ran out. People left. A fire in 1932 took out a huge chunk of the business district. By 1942 Bodie was effectively a ghost town. Today about 170 buildings remain, sitting in the high desert at 8,379 feet, preserved in that arrested-decay state where the tables still have dishes on them and the schoolhouse still has books on the shelves. You can press your face to the windows and see 1900 staring back.

The actual ghosts are a sideshow to the curse. People report seeing figures in upstairs windows, especially in the Gregory House and the J.S. Cain House. The Cain House is where the real stories come from: a woman's face in the bedroom, kids hearing voices in the attic. Park rangers who've lived on-site report doors opening, shadows in the hallways, the usual old-building stuff. A few claim to have seen a Chinese man walking through the ruins of Chinatown, which has been gone for nearly a century.

But the thing about Bodie that makes it worth the drive from anywhere is the scale. The road in is unpaved for the last three miles and turns to washboard gravel in dry weather, snow-closed most of the winter. You come over a rise and there it is: a full town, frozen. No gift shop in town. No reenactors. Just the wind through the broken glass and the sky that stretches forever because you're high in the Eastern Sierra and there's nothing to block it.

If you take a rock home, send it back. Whether you believe in the curse or not, the rangers would really like the rock.