Ghost Towns
Eerie Oklahoma and friends have taken two ghost town tours in he last year or so. We are planning to do more once we get some better transportation options. We start out in Garfield County and go through Grant and Alfalfa Counties and end up in Woods County. We visit several towns that people are familiar with and several that no one has ever heard of. We are very mindful of the structures we come across and do not enter anywhere that is fenced off. Every place we go was right on the road.
After a long day of ghost towning, we end up at Vina Rae's Grill & Graze in Avard, Oklahoma for dinner where we get to hear personal testimonies of the hauntings that go on there. I also speak to the group about the investigation we conducted there in 2003. After dinner, they allowd the group to do a mini investigation and take pictures.
Here are my pictures from the tour - I am not listing the locations as I do not want thrill seekers vandalizing these properties.
These pictures were taken at a Garfield County cemetery
The following photos are from the town of Fairmont, which has the most structures still standing out of the towns we visited.
These are from a town in Grant County - we weren't sure what the building was but with the entire inside painted pink we were guessing an old school maybe. The first picture is interesting to me because of the way the tree has grown around the doorway.
This was what appeared to be an outhouse and some other kind of outbuilding behind the other building.
This is an old church in Alfalfa County.
We assumed this was the parsonage as it was right next door to the church. It appears to have been left in a hurry as it was full of all kinds of stuff. It looks like someone left and no one ever bothered to clean it out.
It is very dangerous to enter into these kinds of structures as the floors are gone in most of them. We took pictures through windows and outside the structures.
It may appear that these are just a bunch of old crumbling buildings, but to me they are windows to the past. It was so strange to stand there and look at these buildings and imagine that at one time they may have been the hub of their community. Several of the towns we visited once had several hundred inhabitants and now are nothing more than a grain elevator and cemetery in some cases. It was rare to actually find buildings still standing in most of them.