Someone Just Bought an Entire Connecticut Ghost Town for $1.2 Million

Why settle for a single apartment or home when you could own an entire town? Johnsonville, a 62-acre hamlet in Connecticut that was one a mill town, was just sold—to one person, Messy Nessy Chic reports. The entire vacant town was put on auction earlier this week, with bids starting at just $800,000. (As Gothamist points out, that's cheaper than some one-bedrooms in New York City.) 

Here's WNPR News with a run-down of Johnsonville's history: 

In the 1870s, it was a thriving mill town, using the power of the Moodus River to make twine for fishing nets. In the 1960s, aerospace millionaire Raymond Schmitt purchased most of the property in town, including the last twine mill, and brought in Victorian homes, a chapel, and a steamboat, remaking Johnsonville into a Victorian era-themed tourist attraction.

The whole tourist attraction thing never really caught on, however, and the town was left to its own devices in 1998, after the current owner died, Messy Nessy reports. 

Johnsonville has actually been for sale for years, but no one was interested in handing over the $2.9 million asking price for the property, WNPR continues. Fed up, the owner decided to just auction the property off. The auction closed yesterday at $1.2 million, although the mystery buyer's identity has not been revealed.   

Given the amount of effort the real estate agency put into the video and publicity about the auction, however, one might suspect on this Halloween Day that the owners were perhaps a bit too eager to rid themselves of the property. Could it be that the buyer got a bit more than he or she bargained for, in the form of supernatural residents? As Messy Nessy Chic points out, the town is the perfect setting for a ghost story given that it's "completely void of (human) inhabitants at present and characterized by those particular houses where one might occasionally see the faint shadows of children in nightgowns watching you from the attic window." 

Rachel Nuwer | | READ MORE

Rachel Nuwer is a freelance science writer based in Brooklyn.