One Of Arizona's Abandoned Outposts Hums With Gold Rush Grit, Ghost Tales, And Desert Relics

The desert keeps a few secrets, and Vulture City is one of its more persistent. At its peak, around 5,000 people lived and worked at the richest gold mine in Arizona history. Building such saloons, boarding houses, and even a school popped up in the area. Unfortunately, the government shut the mine down during World War II; soon after, Vulture City was abandoned. When the restoration efforts started in 2017, the town was preserved exactly as it was, painstakingly restored with a level of detail that makes it easy to picture what life might have looked like then.

Of course, October puts a different spin on it. The stories that come out of Vulture City after dark tend to involve more than just mining accidents and frontier justice. Visitors report shadow figures near the infamous hanging tree, phantom piano music echoing throughout the town, and voices calling out in different languages. The notorious brothel apparently hosts its own ghostly community — complete with door slamming and object manipulation — while the assay office gives off enough bad energy to make people turn around and walk right back out.

Arizona has plenty of places where you can feel the weight of history, from Yuma Territorial Prison, a sandy ruin with a chilling atmosphere, and Nothing, a ghost town famed for its unusual name, to Oatman, a quirky Wild West destination where donkeys and shootout reenactments. But Vulture City never quite let go of its past. You can walk through 16 original 1800s structures, where Henry Wickenburg's discovery of that first gold vein in 1863 sparked one of the territory's most important settlements. Whether you believe in the ghost stories or not, there's something undeniably alive about a place that refuses to stay buried.

While Vulture City may feel like a museum by day, once the last light fades out, the place becomes less about history and more about whatever refuses to leave. The Hanging Tree is where most people start — the twisted ironwood said to have been the site of 18 vigilante executions between the 1860s and 1900s. No records prove it, but the stories have stuck, and visitors swear they've seen shadows gathering at its base or felt something cold drift across their skin. Ghost hunters have even picked up on disembodied voices there.

Inside the buildings, the stories get stranger. The assay office is considered the paranormal heart of the town. Both Ghost Adventures and Ghost Brothers managed to capture images of large figures inside, and visitors regularly report feeling an overwhelming sense that they're not wanted. Henry Wickenburg himself is said to appear in the smelting room. The brothel is supposedly home to a "playful" community of spirits who slam doors, move objects, and, in one account, applauded a serenade from Demi Lovato. Dolls, piano music, and even phantom phone rings make appearances here.

For those willing, the flashlight tours after dark put you right in the middle of it. Starting from $35, this 2-hour tour takes you through the original buildings, as guides share stories of the people who lived and died there. But if the idea of wandering around a haunted ghost town in complete darkness (understandably) sounds a bit much, the daylight self-guided tours that range $10 to $18 let you explore more than a dozen original buildings and see mining relics, from the brothel and cookhouse to Henry Wickenburg's cabin and the hanging tree.