public

Heavily Investigated

Take something from Bodie — a nail, a shard of bottle glass, a pebble — and, they say, Bodie takes something back. Rangers have received confessional letters for decades, returned relics wrapped in apology. But the curse is only the beginning. In the J.S. Cain House, a heavy-set Chinese maid is said to love children and suffocate adults; rangers' wives have woken gasping beneath an unseen weight. Out in the cemetery, a little girl was once spotted giggling with no one — no one visible — near the grave of three-year-old Evelyn Myers, Bodie's Angel.

Gold was discovered here in 1859 by William S. Bodey, who did not live to see what his find became — he died that first winter. By 1879, Bodie had swelled to some 10,000 souls and a reputation for violence, vice, and the occasional murder before breakfast. Fires and exodus stripped it down to bones. In 1962, California designated what remained a State Historic Park, preserving its ~170 buildings in what the state diplomatically calls "arrested decay" — the official term for a place too stubborn, or too haunted, to fully die.