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GHOST CHASERS

By JANET K. KEELER
Published October 30, 2005

[Times photos: Scott Keeler]

A giant petrified spider in its web dares anyone to enter.

	Is that a ghost or a trick of the light on the wall inside a dilapidated 100-year-old schoolhouse in rural Hillsborough County? The creaky wooden building is on County Road 39 in Fort Lonesome.
	School was in session here, a century ago.
	The Swazey Hotel at Bodie State Historical Park in California’s Sierra Nevada is a warped reminder of a thriving Wild West town. At one time, 10,000 people lived in Bodie.

Do you hear footsteps? Are the shadows playing games with you? What - or who - was that?

A visit to a ghost town sets a mind wondering about the people who went before.

Can you be sure they are really gone?

The West is famed for its preserved boom-to-bust towns with colorful names such as Rhyolite, Copperopolis and Wolf Hole. They bustled once with saloons and sin, but no more. Tumbleweeds still outnumber historic preservationists at many dusty locales.

But all around the world there are communities abandoned because of natural or manmade disasters or lost economic base. Prypyat, in Ukraine, sits nearly as it was in 1986 after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Residents fled, but remnants of their lives remain.

Even Florida has ghost towns, more than 300 according to www.ghosttowns.com which lists abandoned communities around the United States and what can be seen at each.

At some, that's not much. At others, historic buildings have been preserved and are a tourist draw. For example, the infamous Bodie, Calif., 50 miles south of Lake Tahoe, is a state historic park. The town's bad reputation prompted one young girl to write in her Gold Rush-era diary, "Goodbye God, I'm going to Bodie."

On a quiet Sunday, we set out to find a Florida ghost town, directions from the Web site in hand and Ghostbusters playing in our heads. We meandered south on desolate County Road 39 in southern Hillsborough County, across the Alafia River, past the crossroads at Picnic, toward Fort Lonesome. If you've never heard of it, it's because there isn't much there. Never was.

Just beyond the taxidermy shop, we found a 100-year-old schoolhouse as creepy as any Halloween haunted house. There were no signs forbidding visitors or proclaiming ownership.

The schoolhouse, which was moved to this grassy spot from Picnic, is on the west side of the road, being crushed by the branches of an untamed oak. Fire has damaged the back porch. Tattered furniture outside and in, and a box of newspapers dated 1985, indicate someone squatted here. Leaves rustle across the rusted tin roof.

We were sufficiently spooked, itchy and slapping at imaginary bugs all the way home.

We never did find the remains of the Alafia settlement Peru, pronounced PEA-roo, and the 1885 Simpson Homestead. Rather we cruised past the new subdivisions of Riverview and detoured around roads being widened to accommodate urban sprawl.

In Florida, termites, storms and development scare away ghost towns. See them if you dare and while you can.

[Last modified October 27, 2005, 15:24:02]