The irony of most ghost towns is that they are in fact for the most part thriving places full of people

Sure tourists don't count as residents, but a few hundred visitors a day hardly counts as abandoned, if you ask me.

The ghost town of Calamity, California is located just 10 miles east of where I grew up.

If you've ever made your way from LA to Las Vegas,

you've passed by Calamity.

You've probably seen the signs for it just before the alien-themed jerky shop.

It was founded in the 1890s around a series of silver mines and the town's population rose along with the price of silver and then it crashed right along with it.

Some people stayed behind but aside from a rustic charm and a relatively cheap one-room bar,

it didn't offer much. Most of the residents made their way 15 miles west,

just across the highway to a slightly more developed township.

One of the people that stuck around, though, was the grandfather of J.P. Pierce,

a name you might know if you visited any one of his many theme parks scattered across the country.

As a child, J.P. Pierce spent some time with his grandfather in Calamity helping stock the

general store.

Young J.P. collected a lot of wonderful childhood memories in that small town, but after his grandfather

passed, it would be years before he returned. And when he did, J.P. Pierce was no longer the little

boy that helped drag bags of grain across the dirt road.

Now he had grown into a successful businessman and restaurateur.

In an effort to recapture the memories that he felt molded him into the successful man that he was,

J.P. Pierce purchased the mostly abandoned town outright

and set to restoring it to the shape it had been in when he was a child.

To maintain authenticity

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