Want your own ghost town? It's possible, if you have $800,000, according to The Telegraph.
There's a spooky, abandoned village in Connecticut in the US, which is in the market for less than a million.
A short backgrounder on the place, in the 1830s, Johnsonville was actually a thriving little community. It was home to the Neptune Twine Company and was even a major producer of rope for the fishing industry in the US.
Unfortunately, as time went by, demand for such products eventually dwindled - with modernization and all. As such, the entire Johnsonville population moved out, making for an abandoned town.
However, the town caught the interest of Raymond Schmitt, an eccentric millionaire. Schmitt made his fortune as the owner of a successful aerospace engineering company named AGC Corporation. He then considered turning Johnsonville into a popular tourist destination. In fact, Schmitt even went out of his to have some buildings erected in the town, such as a schoolhouse. He also had a small Gothic chapel constructed, carriage house and livery stables, an old-fashioned steamboat, and so on, until the Schmitts were able to create a replica of a small Victorian town.
Impressive as his dream was, Schmitt's tourist attraction was never opened to the public. Aside from the destruction of the mill, which was burned to the ground when it was hit by lightning, there was also the reported argument over Schmitt's plan to have another pond, which the local council didn't like because of some environmental concerns. However, that argument caused Schmitt to shut down the project in 1994, four years before he died.
It is rumored that the millionaire's ghost continues to haunt the village, disappointed about his forgotten project. There's also the assumption that some of the ghosts are that of the mill workers who died when it was struck by lightning.
Either way, the Johnsonville doesn't fail to give visitors the creeps.
According to Ray Bendici, the blogger behind Damned Connecticut, "It's an abandoned ghost town, stuck in limbo." He adds, "It's waiting for someone either to come and restore it, or to put it out of its misery and knock it down."
The 62-acre town has been listed in an online auction with the starting price of $800,000. If you wish to place a bid on Johnsonville, you still have time as the auction is open until October 30, 2014, just head on to auction.com.
