Good evening, and welcome back to Nighty Night with Robbie Chaudhary. Bedtime stories to keep you awake.

I'm DJ Lubel, the shows producer. Tonight's tale teaches us when it comes to dummies.

There's way more than meets the eye. Please enjoy wax.

The irony of most ghost hounds 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've 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 restaurant tour.

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, J.P. allowed everyone still residing in Calamity to stay, while funding not only the remodel of their homes, but also employing them in the project.

After about four years of reconstruction, J.P. reopened the town of Calamity as a tourist destination, and some say as the first official theme park in the western United States.

Build as an authentic ghost town, Calamity operated for the next few decades, run by both the residents and employees sourced from nearby non-ghost towns.

It was a charming attraction and brought a lot of traffic, arguably more than the silver ever did.

Unfortunately, as it goes with all empires, this one too eventually fell into disrepair, closing sometime in the late 80s.

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