Three hours outside of the hustle and bustle of Los Angeles is a vast amount of desert land, much of it uninhabited for the past two decades. The ghost town is known as Eagle Mountain, and while it hasn’t been the site of many everyday occurrences, a mystery buyer known as Ecology Mountain Holdings saw fit to pick up the vacant property for a whopping $22.5 million. at the end of last month, according to SF gate.
Despite the zip code’s relative lack of action in recent years, it does have some interesting ties to its movie star neighbor to the west: Christopher Nolan filmed scenes for his mind-bending 2020 thriller. Principle in the ghost town SF gate he reports that several foremen still live in the area to keep an eye on the dusty lot, in case there are trespassers. Eagle Mountain has attracted a number of bloggers in recent years. Many have posted videos on YouTube recounting their illicit trips to the vacant lot for curious onlookers, giving an eerie look at abandoned train tracks and empty city streets.
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The remainder of Eagle Mountain’s dwindling population departed with the 2003 closure of a prison, which had employed most of the now-ghost town’s residents at the time.
Though the area itself has proven eerie enough to inspire a bit of intrigue among internet denizens, its new owners have only added to the spooky ghost town lore. The intentions behind the purchase of Ecology Mountain Holdings are a mystery. Public information about the buyer reveals very little; SF gate it points to a business address in Cerritos, California, a three-hour drive from Eagle Mountain, as one of the few publicly available details about the LLC.
Formerly a mining town, most of the area’s 4,000 residents were employed by Kaiser Steel in its heyday. It was founded by industrialist Henry J. Kaiser in 1948 and, in the years that followed, saw three schools, a community pool, several churches, and a baseball field for the families of those who worked to mine nearby iron ore. mountains.
A 2003 look at the ghost town as its last residents prepared to leave, following the prison’s closure.
The miners broke production records during the boom of their peak years, but in the 1970s foreign competition and looming environmental concerns led to cutbacks, population reduction, and their eventual phasing out. The Eagle Mountain Community Correctional Center, established in the 1980s, injected some life into the city, but was closed by the California Department of Corrections in 2003 after a fatal riot.
The New York Times reported the stories about the last graduating class of the local high school in 1983. “It’s like a piece of your heart is being ripped out,” one of the seniors, Vicky Yates, told the Times. “But for me, Eagle Mountain will continue to be my home.”
