Who doesn’t need, sometimes, to be where the streets have no name? An excerpt from Jesse McKinley’s survey of Death Valley in the New York Times:

“IT’S just before midnight on the edge of Death Valley and I’m standing in a dark room in the Amargosa Opera House and Hotel with five people who are certain that we’re talking to ghosts.

‘There’s something going on,’ said one ghost hunter who is holding a device meant to find electromagnetic fields. Sure enough, it’s going wild. And while I don’t believe in ghosts, I have goose bumps.

Death Valley National Park doesn’t need a lot of help being spooky. One of the lowest, most arid places on earth, the valley has more ghost towns than actual ones: dried-up spots like Leadfield, Chloride City and Skidoo, whose last residents skedaddled as soon as the gold, or rumor thereof, was gone.

Even the places that survive have foreboding names like Furnace Creek or haunted reputations like Death Valley Junction, just outside the park’s eastern gate, where paranormal fans convene to hunt the spirits of miners, mistresses and other metaphysical outliers. Then there are anomalies like the park’s Racetrack Playa, where rocks seemingly slide across sand under their own power.

Death Valley’s mysteries and its extremes have always intrigued me.”