Man spent entire life savings to live in abandoned ghost town and documented everything
A man who bought a ghost town has spent the past four years living there and has been documenting everything he does.
At its most populous the California mining town of Cerro Gordo was home to around 4,700 people.
The mines produced silver, lead, zinc and occasionally gold but these days the place is almost entirely abandoned after the mines were shut in 1957.
Eventually the place was bought by Brent Underwood and Jon Bier, with plans to turn the place into a tourist attraction.
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Brent even started a YouTube channel called Ghost Town Living in 2020 to record the journey, starting things off by announcing he'd moved into the ghost town to spruce the place up.
Since then he's posted a plethora of videos chronicling his time spent living in Cerro Gordo as he's been there for over four years now.
When he first got there he ended up getting snowed in for several days as he picked a house to live in.
Brent said he was looking for a 'manageable' project and started by trying to build a small cabin where people could 'be peaceful', though admitted he didn't have much experience with what he was doing.
He also got spooked by the town's bunkhouse, and said before he bought the town he was a 'firm non-believer in ghosts' before getting a strange sighting.
The ghost town's owner said he was walking past a house when he saw a face looking back at him from one of the windows, but thought little of it as he had contractors doing periodic work and they would stay in the house.
However, he was then told that there hadn't been any contractors on site for two weeks and decided to conduct a bit of an experiment.
Locking the door to the building so nobody could get in and turning off the light, he later spotted that 'the light was back on even though the door was locked'.
He's not sure if it was a ghost or not, but it would be typical of a ghost town and Brent said the first thing people asked about when they learned he'd bought a ghost town was if he'd ever seen a ghost there.
That's how things were going right at the beginning, and years later construction of a hotel is underway in the abandoned mining town.
Brent said the biggest challenge of living in the ghost town was 'water, or lack thereof' as he'd been without running water from the beginning.
Now he's trying to pump up the water from the mines below the town, but it's taking a lot of work.
Looking forward to what the next few years brings, Brent will be hoping that Cerro Gordo can end up like fellow ghost town Bodie which has successfully ended up as a tourist attraction.
Joe Harker