Bodie

Letters arrive at the park office most weeks. They are handwritten, often unsigned, and something is usually rattling inside the envelope: a square nail, a shard of sun-purpled glass, a bottle stopper, a brass screw off a door plate. The sender took it from Bodie, had a bad year afterward, and decided the two facts belonged together. Rangers file a police report on every returned object, which is part of why they no longer raise the curse with visitors.

The park kept the letters. Some are addressed to the town rather than to the staff.

The curse has a named author

The awkward part of the legend is that it appears to have been invented. The account that holds up best is that a ranger, tired of watching the town leave in visitors' pockets, started telling people that anything taken from Bodie carries bad luck. It spread faster than any sign could have, and it kept spreading after he stopped repeating it.

That leaves an unusual shape for a story of this kind. The belief has a traceable origin and a practical motive, and the confessions arriving in the mail are real anyway.

What the town was before it was a legend

W. S. Bodey found gold in a stream bed here in 1859. He died that November in a blizzard, caught out between the camp and a supply run, before there was a town to carry his name, and the name reached the map misspelled.

The strike that mattered came in 1876. By 1879 the town held about 2,000 buildings, and accounts of the peak population run from roughly 8,000 to close to 10,000 with no single figure settled. What followed was ordinary. The ore thinned, the people left, and the buildings stayed up because nobody wanted them enough to take them apart.

A fire in 1932, started by a small boy with matches, took about 95 percent of what remained. California made the remains a state park in 1962 and chose not to restore them. The policy is called arrested decay: a roof is kept from collapsing and a wall from falling, and nothing is made new. Interiors were left as they were found, which is why there are still goods on the shelves of the store and curtains in the windows of houses nobody has lived in for a century.

The park is open 9am to 6pm from Memorial Day weekend through September 30, and 9am to 4pm from October 1 through Memorial Day weekend. Admission is $8 for adults and $5 for ages 4 to 17, and under 3s go free.

The last stretch of road in is unpaved and washboarded, and it is hard on a low car. Winter changes the trip entirely. State Route 270 is not plowed, so from the first heavy snow until spring the town is reachable only on skis, snowshoes, or a snowmobile, and a drive that takes under an hour in August becomes a day out. Checking road conditions before setting off is worth the call, since weather turns over quickly at 8,375 feet.

Interiors are viewed through the windows rather than entered, apart from the museum and a handful of buildings opened on ranger-led tours in season. Allow 2 to 3 hours to walk the townsite properly. There is no food, no fuel, and no reliable phone signal, so whatever the day needs comes in with you.

Taking anything home, down to a nail or a fragment of glass, is both illegal and the subject of the park's best-known story.