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Friday, 15 March 2024

Phantom ghost towns


 

While there are many abandoned ghost towns known as tourists attractions, there's also actual phantom towns that are impossible to visit because they come and go. I plan to discuss just a few individual towns that are simply ghosts. I shall mention 3 of them here.

1. Ong's Hat = This is a weird place. It's located in Pemberton Township, Burlington County, on Magnolia Road, off from New Jersey's motorway, Route 72, that crosses with Route 70, with only shadows of what was a busy town. The town itself was where a farmer, Jacob Ong, used to journey there while travelling from Little Egg Harbour to Burlington. Ong's Hat was a town where he stopped while transporting goods. He spent his time in a hut that he made there so he could spend the night there. The town Ong's Hat appears on maps even one dating back to 1778. It consisted of a dancehall, houses and shops, but there's no trace of the population. What remains are some signposts and a few empty rotten old buildings. A married couple moved into Ong's Hat a long time ago but vanished without trace. An unidentified human skeleton was discovered in the bushes there. 

2. Urkhammer = There are many creepy stories about this town that behaves like an apparition. Described by many who claimed to remember it, Urkhammer was a bustling lively town that thrived but now it simply isn't there. Located in Iowa, along Route 41, the town of Urkhammer appeared on a census carried out on it in 1920 with a population of 300 people. In 1929, newspaper Clarion-Sun Telegraph, mentioned Urkhammer as a site of two strange events. The first being that a plane flew over Urkhammer and took aerial photos of it, showing the place empty and overgrown. The second was about a motorist who stopped at an Esso petrol station in Urkhammer, to find after leaving the town a couple of miles he ran out of fuel. He wanted to walk back into Urkhammer to get a refund from the petrol station, but he could never reach the town, even though he saw it. Another motorist helped him but the experience was unsettling. A mysterious woman named Miss Fatima Morgana wrote to the same newspaper weeks later, claiming to be a resident of Urkhammer and said it wasn't a ghost town. In 1932 a group of families camped near Urkhammer, while a couple of the men decided to enter the town to purchase food and drink. They reached the convenient store but found their feet passed through the steps. Frightened, they returned to their campsite and insisted that they leave. Iowa State Police wanted to clear the rumour up of Urkhammer, but once they reached the town's sheriff office, they found it was not really there. A farmer from the 1930's remembered the town of Urkhammer from his childhood,  who wanted to visit the place again, only to find nothing except fields, rotting wooden fences and a rusty bath tub. 

3. Langville = A town named Langville in Montana was a place that turned out to be a complete mystery. Many believe Langville was a true town, that lots of people claimed it was an actual place where visited or even lived. Google Maps had an entry for the town with Google Street View images revealing streets and houses of Langville. Then during the 2000's the town disappeared without trace. Some claim this was simply an urban legend and never existed at all. The pictures of the Langville streets on Google show a place that can't even be identified! Many sceptics argue it's all a marketing ploy and just an urban legend. Others bring up the Mandela Effect and it's explanation for the town disappearing. 

Links and sources:

Ranker's Vanishing Towns

She Wolf Night

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