Some highway exits have a gas station, a Subway, and maybe a weird gift shop where everything’s covered in dust. Others have a fire that’s been burning underground since 1962, the ruins of a doomsday cult, and stone animal cages covered in 40 years of spray paint. Guess which ones are more interesting in October.
Researchers have documented more than 3,800 ghost towns across the U.S., and even that estimate is conservative because nobody really agrees on the exact point when a dying town becomes dead. Dark tourism, the very human habit of visiting places where something went terribly wrong, is now a multibillion-dollar industry.
RV Trader pulled together six detours sitting near major highways. These exits deserve the extra mileage.
1. The Ghost Road, Oklahoma — I-40, Exit 11
Between the towns of Erick and Sayre, Route 66 once ran four lanes wide. When I-40 took over in 1975, Oklahoma kept the southern two lanes and abandoned the northern pair. Nobody tore them up. Nobody marked the occasion. The pavement stayed where it was while roots, weeds, and weather eventually took over.
The unsettling thing about this stretch is how ordinary its decline was. Traffic moved to a different road, businesses lost the passing cars they depended on, and the old road slowly slipped out of use. Erick, a few miles west, still has the Roger Miller Museum and a row of shuttered storefronts left over from Route 66’s busier years.
2. Two Guns, Arizona — I-40, Exit 230
In the early 1920s, Harry Miller leased land near a family trading post on the National Old Trails Highway and opened a roadside zoo with mountain lions and Gila monsters. He later shot and killed the property owner and was acquitted. In 1971, the complex burned as I-40 opened nearby.
The stone animal cages are still sitting along the canyon rim, covered in decades of spray paint and protected by approximately zero sensible safety measures.
Two Guns also comes with a gruesome tale about a nearby cave where dozens of people supposedly died during an 1878 raid. The account comes largely from one mid-century writer, and versions of it disagree. Call it folklore. The abandoned zoo and homicide history are strange enough on their own.
3. Sego Canyon and Thompson Springs, Utah — I-70, Exit 187
Drive north through Thompson Springs, an old railroad town with more empty buildings than traffic, and keep going. The Barrier Canyon rock art panel comes up first, with tall, armless figures and hollow eyes painted on sandstone thousands of years ago, alongside later Fremont and Ute work. The creepy factor doesn’t come through in pictures; you’ve got to see it in person.
Farther up the road sits Sego, a coal camp that operated from around 1910 to 1955. A stone company store, cemetery, and scattered foundations remain. Ancient ceremonial figures and an abandoned mining town sit within a few miles of each other, with almost nothing in between to soften the transition.
4. Koreshan Settlement, Florida — I-75, Exit 123
Cyrus Teed was a Civil War surgeon who later became convinced that people were living inside a hollow Earth. In 1894, he moved a group of followers to the Estero River and founded a settlement called New Jerusalem. They ran a bakery, sawmill, and printing house, and hauled surveying equipment to Gulf beaches in an attempt to prove the horizon curved upward.
Teed died in 1908, and his followers kept his body for several days because they expected something to happen. It did not. The final four Koreshans gave the property to Florida in 1961. Eleven wooden buildings still stand beneath bamboo near the interstate, with much of the old settlement preserved in place.
5. Rochester, Nevada — I-80, Exit 119
A silver strike in 1912 turned Rochester Canyon into a two-mile chain of mining camps with more than 2,000 residents, three post offices, and, because mining towns apparently had range, an orchestra.
Mining declined by the 1940s. Wooden headframes, mill foundations, and collapsing shacks remain scattered across the hillside while a modern gold mine still operates above them.
Rochester has seen several generations of people arrive, convinced the ground would make them rich. Most of what they left behind is timber, stone, and holes in the earth. Some of those mine shafts are unmarked and deadly, so this is one place where curiosity should stay near the road.
6. Centralia, Pennsylvania — I-81, Exit 124B
A fire started beneath Centralia in 1962, reached the coal seams below town, and kept burning. Most residents left through government buyouts during the 1980s and 1990s. Geologists have estimated the fire could continue burning for another two centuries.
One thing many older Centralia guides still get wrong: Graffiti Highway is gone. The abandoned stretch of Route 61 that became an internet attraction was buried beneath thousands of tons of dirt in April 2020.
The town is mostly empty now, but the street grid remains. So are the hillside cemeteries and a Ukrainian Catholic church that still holds services. A handful of residents remain under lifetime agreements with the state.
The fire is still burning beneath Centralia, but most of it remains underground. Visitors might see vents, patches of warm ground, or sulfurous gas in some areas. It has been burning since 1962 and could continue for generations.
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