Discover 70 Ghost Towns From Across Louisiana
Louisiana has ghosts, not sure many people will argue that. But usually when you think of ghosts in Louisiana, you think of haunted places in big cities like New Orleans or Shreveport. But sometimes its not just haunted houses that have ghosts, sometimes its entire towns. Of course we're talking about ghost towns.
Dictionary.com defines a ghost town like this:
"a town permanently abandoned by its inhabitants, as because of a business decline or because a nearby mine has been worked out."
It turns out, Louisiana has a lot of ghost towns. We found almost 100 listed online, which actually could be a low number. These are the towns we could find record of. Its likely that there were far more settlements that once existed in the area that would become Louisiana that no longer exist.
These ghost towns died out for various reasons. Many of the ghost towns we found were former stops on rail lines, or sawmill towns. As our society evolved, we started losing reasons to have cities built around these industries. But not all of these ghost towns died due to industry leaving.
One of the saddest stories of Louisiana's ghost towns is Cheniere Caminada.
In 1893, Cheniere Caminada was completely destroyed by a massive hurricane. The town was completely wiped off the map. A town of around 1,500 people, just gone.
The hurricane is listed as one of the deadliest in American history. Leading to over 2,000 deaths, in addition to countless property damage. Even though some Cheniere Caminada residents tried to rebuild, future hurricanes would continue to destroy the town.
But Cheniere Caminada isn't the only town in Louisiana's history that has died. Here are 70 of Louisiana's known ghost towns...