Endless Thread - Encore: Ghost Town

Episode Date: August 26, 2022

In the summer of 2018, Brent Underwood got a text in the middle of the night from a friend saying, "Look at this ghost town for sale!" Within a month, Brent had purchased Cerro Gordo, California, an abandoned silver mining town, with the help of friends and investors. He wants to revive the town for visitors while preserving its history. He's already faced some major setbacks -- from the lack of running water, to getting snowed in there during a global pandemic. But he calls Cerro Gordo his "life's work."

Support for endless thread comes from Mathworks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And, of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. What up, threadheads? It's the end of summer. Ben's away being an important podcast man at a conference. And I'm here in my little home studio reminiscing about an episode that we made back in 2020, that I think about a lot because the story at the center of this is ongoing. And at the time, the whole thing felt very 2020. But while I, a lot of us have returned to some semblance of semi-normacy, the man in this story is still

kind of isolating. Not intentionally, per se, but keep listening and you'll see what I mean. And keep listening after you keep listening because we have an update for you at the very end. Okay, here's the show. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. In many ways, Brent Underwood is like all of us right now. Just a person, stuck at home in a pandemic, trying to get his home internet to work. God damn it. And yet, at the same time, Brent's situation is also pretty unique, even his internet situation.

Hello, can you hear me? Yes. My internet overheated, ghost town problems, I guess. Yeah. I said battery overheated on my little router, so I think the router is meeting its test right now. Why is his internet router running off a battery? Good question. Also, did he say ghost town?

Great question. Brent Underwood is probably in one of the safest places you could possibly be during a pandemic. He's on a huge piece of land all by himself in California. There is nobody for miles. I'm at 8,500 feet in elevation, so it stays pretty temperate, luckily. Brent's spending his days on a rusty patch of the Inyo Mountains in the shadow of a low peak among a group of old buildings. Are you in the bar? Are you at a bar? Saloon. Saloon never closes here at Cerro Gordo.

Every once in a while, do you go up to the bar and like slam your hand on the bar and be like, whiskey. Is there anything like that? So I do, I don't know if you can see, but I have the glass here. I do practice by sliding across the bar. I think it's an important skill to have as a, you know, saloon owner. That sounds legit. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's not bad. Yeah, all right. It was Brent's plan to be here, kicking around this abandoned town in 2020, but not all by himself.

He was planning on opening a business this spring. The May 1st opening is definitely, you know, out the window. Do you have what I would call, oh, shit days where you're like, oh, shit, what have I done? I definitely have the days where I get up and I'm like, what in the world are you doing? But luckily, so far, the positive days have greatly outnumbered almost 99 to 1 the negative days. But we'll see if I can keep that enthusiasm through, you know, not just this year, but the years or decades to come. Brent is following a dream through a pandemic. He thinks it's going to be his life's work.

He thinks he's on to something. And he and his business partners have put more than a million dollars on the table in one big bet, like a brash gunfighter, putting in all of his chips on one hand in a tense game of poker. Brent bought a ghost town, and he wants to turn it into one of the coolest, most interesting places to visit in the world. Does it have good internet yet? Nope. Does it have running water? Uh, it's complicated.

Does it have any silver still in that dusty old mine? You've got to ask the guy with the dynamite. Somewhere on the property here, I won't say exactly. where because I think it's illegal to say exactly where, but there is a dynamite vault here at Cerro Gordo. I'm Ben Brock Johnson. I'm Amory Siebertson. And you're listening to Endless Thread.

The show featuring stories found in the vast ecosystem of online communities called Reddit. We're coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR station. Today's episode, Ghost Town. 200 miles north of Los Angeles, in the middle of stunningly beautiful nowhere. And at the end of a long dirt road. that requires all-wheel drive on a good weather day, sits Cerro Gordo, California. It's tucked between the tallest mountain

in the continental U.S., Mount Whitney, and the lowest point in North America, Death Valley. And much like its geography, the town itself has had epic highs and dramatic lows. It's named for the glory days. Serro Gordo is Spanish for Fat Hill. And in the mid-1800s,

that hill was fat with silver. So the town was originally established in 1865 by a guy named Pablo Flores, and he was a prospector that came up here and set up a really small-scale operation. I think they were getting a ton of ore every week or so. And the quality of that ore was really good. So Cerro Gordo started getting the attention of developers and investors. And so by 1870, full-scale operation, they were pulling a couple tons of ore out per day. And then by 1880, it was the spot in California. It was the mine in California.

known throughout the state, and they were pulling just an insane amount of order. They pulled something like adjusted for inflation, $500 million worth of silver out of the mountain. Okay, tough to confirm whether half a billion dollars worth of silver is accurate. But trust, it was boom times, baby. And it was so prosperous that like the demand of Cerro Gordo and its 4,500 residents, it had that many people in its peak, that it demanded a larger port city to supply all the supplies. And so Los Angeles at the time was kind of a sleepy little town, and the demand of Cerro Gordo forced Los Angeles to develop quicker and forced Los Angeles into develop into what it is today. And Los Angeles was developed with the silver from this little mountain town.

Cerro Gordo was developing two. Dozens of hotels, hundreds of cabins, a general store, four, count them four brothels, and the building Brent calls the crown jewel of Cerro Gordo. the American Hotel. He gave us a little tour. Oh, and heads up, that crappy internet we were talking about is crappy. The hotel was originally built in 1871. And so what you first see when you walk in is the old bar. There are 22 buildings on Cerro Gordo's nearly 400 acres.

Most are made of some combination of wood and tin. And each one is like its own little museum, full of artifacts and relics. from old photographs and letters to guns and tools, including something called the Widow Maker that was used to blast into the mountainside in search of silver. These buildings are also full of stories. Some will never know, but others have been pieced together just enough for intrigue.

Just off of the saloon is the infamous card room, and this is a room that, I believe, in about 1880, there was a card game gone a ride, and a guy got shot. There's even still a bullet hole in the wall and a bloodstain on the floor. And this is just one of the shootouts that happened in a town that averaged a murder a week during its heyday, which for a population that maxed out at 4,500, is not great. Brent also showed us the mechanic garage turned church turned movie theater. And that piece of stained glass is actually,

from a Stephen McQueen movie called Nevada Smith that they filmed up here. There's McKellons. I got a rifle, a horse, and $8. It'll hold. And then there's the bunkhouse, where the miners and contractors would stay. The bunk house is also where Brent became a believer in ghosts.

Even saying that out loud, as a preface to that I believe in ghosts now, sounds ridiculous to me. But one night I was headed towards the bunk house. And as I was walking by, I noticed the curtain in the front room opened and closed, and a face was looking out, and the light was on in the living room. And it wasn't terrifying at first just because we had had contractors staying at the property,

and so they had been staying in the bunk house. So to me, I thought that these contractors were still staying there. And the next morning, I asked Robert, the caretaker, hey, Robert, how long are the contractors staying here? And he kind of turned, and he said, you know, they left two weeks ago, which was a bit spooky because I know I saw somebody in there the night before. So Brent put a padlock on the bunkhouse, which Brent, come on, locks aren't going to stop ghosts. The next night, the light was back on.

My way to handle potential ghosts are, I know where they potentially are, and I just avoid that, and then hopefully they avoid where I am, and, you know, we're one big happy community up here. This feels very Scooby-Doo. Exactly. He would have gotten away with it, too. If it wasn't for you meddling kids, he would have gotten away with it. You don't have to believe in ghosts to know that Sarah Gordo is haunted by its past. The silver boom times of the mid-1800s didn't last.

Within a few decades, the Fat Hill was famished. By about 1895, the silver had pretty much run out. They lost the vein. I don't know too much about mining, but apparently there's a vein. They lost it. And they lost all the prosperity that went along with it. Sarah Gordo did get a second chance in the early 1900s, the mining of zinc, but then the zinc ran out too.

The final straw, though, the thing that would do Cerro Gordo in for the foreseeable future, was when its water source ran out, when nearby Owens Lake was drained and its water redirected to Los Angeles as part of the L.A. Aqueduct Program of the early 1900s. So no water and no minerals left pretty much nobody that wanted to be up here. So, yeah, for about the past 100 years, it's been essentially vacant outside of individual owners. Ghost towns and ghost mining towns are pretty common in the West. They're part of this familiar history, America's prospecting history, when maybe all you needed to get filthy rich was an active imagination,

a tip on a spot where there might be gold in the ground and a willingness to take a leap of faith. But those days for Saro Gordo are long gone. You'd have to be crazy to pay a big chunk of change for an abandoned, bullet-holed, blood-stained, possibly haunted mining town with zero access to water, unless...

Unless you're a new kind of prospector with an act of imagination. So let's get to know Sarah Gordo's newest owner, rent. He's 33, tall, skinny, red hair. He kind of looks the part of a prospector from out west. But he grew up in Tampa,

so... CNN, when we bought the property, they wrote an article about it, and they wanted it. the headline to be, Florida man buys abandoned ghost town. And they ran it by us. They typically don't do that. But they're like, hey, and my business partner, John's like, absolutely not. No, that is not the headline that is running. Long before Brent was making headlines, his career plan was actually to go into finance. So I worked at an investment for about a month. And I quit. Took my money,

travel for a long time, as many people do. I did the typical backpacker trip through Central and South America. Took a couple months there. I went to Southeast Asia. And during that process, I kind of fell in love with hostels, you know, these places where you share rooms with people, you meet other people from all over the world. Brent decided he wanted to open a hostel of his own, which he did in Brooklyn in his early 20s. Then he got priced out of New York, and he started looking for other prospects. He looked in Austin, Texas, and he found a historic building for lease. And the building was built in 1891, so it was my first experience in like a pretty old building. You know, and so I just loved it.

I dug into the history of the building. I learned who owned it, when, why they owned it, what they did. Their kind of importance in the city. And when guests would come and stay, I would be able to recount that to them. I'd be like, hey, you know, you're staying in this part of Austin's history. It's not just, you know, a white box Marriott. You're, like, really physically participating in the history of this town. A couple of years into his hospitality meets history experiment,

the hostel in Austin was thriving. And Brent decided he was ready for something bigger. He got a text from a friend one day that said, Look at this ghost town for sale, isn't that funny? And he texted me like 3 o'clock in the morning, almost as a joke. You know, I think he was just tongue-in-cheek, like, look at this, this is a project for you. And I woke up and I just became obsessed. You know, it was just, this is it.

The asking price for the town was $925,000, which Brent didn't have. But he just couldn't stop thinking about it. To me, the thought that this sleepy little mountain town in the middle of nowhere that helped develop one of the most well-known and influential cities in the world was for sale. It just seemed mind-blowing that, like,

this true piece of American history was, yeah, for sale for private owners and just the thought of history, hospitality, like what better thing than a property with 400 acres than 20 different buildings? So he called up the listing agent and offered over-asking, way over-asking, $1.4 million.

And he didn't stop there. And so me, being the very aggressive or ambitious and optimistic person that I am, I told the guy that we would, the broker, that we would close in all cash in seven days, which is a very strong real estate offer. The only problem there is that I had nowhere near the amount of cash that we needed to purchase this property. And so that was a fairly stressful day when you wire essentially half your life savings on a deposit that doesn't get refunded if you don't get the money together. So that week was full of phone calls.

bartering, no paperwork to anybody. Brent had a business partner in all of this, a guy named John Beer. And those phone calls they were making were to friends, colleagues, former clients, pretty much anyone they could think of. Brent has a marketing company, John has a PR firm, so they had a lot of contacts. And in a matter of days, they had investors. They did it. Sarah Gordo was theirs.

And the first thing that they did was just hand me this stack of a hundred keys, you know, the craziest key ring you've ever seen for every building and every lock and everything here. And I think, yeah, we were just over the moment. We were super pumped. You know, we came in here. We came into the saloon. We were digging around. I found this old bottle of whiskey, like, who knows how old it was. It was pretty disgusting. And like, we just, like, drank the whiskey and we just had a great time. And then you kind of wake up in the morning with a little bit of hangover. You're like, oh, oh, yeah, we got to do something now. It's time to, you know, figure out what to do with the property. One of the things Brent and his

co-owners could do with the property is go back to its roots, find more silver. So I mentioned earlier that they pulled something like $500 million with the silver out of the mountain. Depends on who you ask, but there's rumored to be an additional $500 million with the silver here. And here's where another interesting wrinkle of this ghost town comes in. Remember how Brent mentioned a caretaker? Yes, this ghost town has actually had one mortal resident for the last 23 years, and he's still around. Who is Robert? Why is he there? Where'd he come from? Yes. So Robert De Maris is a former school teacher, but also a

minor by trade. And Robert came to Saragoro about 20 years ago to find the lost silver vein. And, you know, the reason that he'll give you now is that he loves the town. He's the historian. He takes care of it. But, I mean, there's also the $500 million of the silver that he still looks for. You know, after it rains, he goes and circles the property and looks for tell-tale signs of deposits. You know, he's supposed to come up in the next month or so, and we're going to do another blast with dynamite to open up an old portal that he thinks might have some silver deposits in it. One big bonus of owning a ghost town.

If you want to, you can blow stuff up. And it's funny, when we bought the property, I remember I said I was handed all these keys. One key was suspiciously missing, and that key was the key to the dynamite vault. after which bringing it up to Robert, and he said, rightfully so, that it was probably best that I didn't have that key. So I actually don't have the key to the dynamite vault.

Robert is the only one with that currently. Man, you better stay friends with him. Yeah, that's right. I was going to say. You better be a good new sheriff in town to him. Yeah, I hope so. When the pandemic hit, Robert left Cerro Gordo to be with his wife, who lives a couple hundred miles away.

But he'll be back. He told Brent that he wants to be buried at Cerro Gordo. He's in it for the long haul. The question is, what does that long haul look like? We'll get a glimpse after the break. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing, or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers.

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Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. Brent Underwood has co-owned Sarah Gordo for a little over two years now. And the progress has been slow. Mostly because in a ghost town, you really can't take anything for granted. Water situation is a tough situation.

I have been surviving by bottled water. We have a lot of bottled water. And then when we had snow, I would melt a lot of the snow. Anything I wasn't drinking, I would just use snow for. Chopping wood to start a fire to melt some snow just so you can take a bath is exhausting to think about. But Brent is motivated by what he hopes Saro Gordo will someday become. He wants to breathe new life into this ghost town. Revive the main buildings.

Maybe add some cabins on the grounds for people to stay in. He wants to make it a place. where people can gather from all over the world and immerse themselves in the history and the beauty of Sarah Gordo. Brent also has a strong sense of what he does not want Sarah Gordo to become. If you look at other, quote-unquote, ghost towns, they typically go to the museum or almost like Disney World end of it, where there's fake shootouts at noon in the middle of the street,

and there's like everyone's in Western wear and that type of stuff. Brent did an AMA or Ask Me Anything on Reddit. about a year after he bought the town. That's how we first found out about Sarah Gordo. And Redditors had ideas for him. There's certainly some interesting ideas, some good ones, some admittedly pretty bad ones. But I think...

What's the worst one? Oh, man, worst ones. They go to the Westworld one, you know, to have robots roaming around. I get it. You know, I've seen the show. I don't think that that's really what we want to do. I think that's the most popular one that gets suggested.

Somebody wanted to create a water, park up here, which I don't think they understand the dynamics of water at Sierra. Go to wow, if we were able to pull that off, I would love to have water slides up here, but I'd love to have, you know, a running sink first. Brent did another AMA a few weeks into the pandemic when he had a lot of time on his hands, and he got some pretty sobering advice in the comment section. This guy chimed in. I think he was called like Resort Dude or something was his username. He had really practical suggestions. Like this is a guy that obviously knew what. he was talking about. And privately in the messages, he owns a pretty substantial resort here in

California that is off the grid. And so he deals with water issues. He deals with state permits. He deals with construction and relocation. So he was just like an absolute pro. And so it's just crazy to me like who you happen to meet through Reddit and the relationships that develop there. This kind of remote advice and human connection was especially helpful this past winter when Brent found himself completely snowed in. I came up here with about two weeks worth of food. I thought that was going to be plenty, and I very quickly ran through that, maybe in a week and a half.

The final seven miles of Cerro Gordo Road are a dirt road that twists and turns with switchbacks, and if you go a couple feet off either side, you're tumbling down thousands of feet. So if you get a couple feet of snow, it's really, there's no way in, no worry out. Some of Brent's friends started texting him, All Work and No Play, referring to Jack Nicholson's character in The Shining, who goes insane while taking care of an isolated resort in the winter. Here's Johnny. Luckily, even though Brent was snowed in,

he knew that Robert, the caretaker, had some food stashed away. So he went building to building, finding old canned goods. There were some expired beans and some kind of weird stuff that was eaten. Who knows if that led to appendicitis? I'm not a doctor, but I have... Oh, yeah. He got appendicitis during all of this. Luckily, the snow melt to the point where I started to drive myself two hours to the hospital with appendicitis. So every bump along the road was like a stabbing a knife into your stomach, basically.

So it wasn't necessarily the best. But again, I always try to go back to the most positives. And I don't have to worry about other people who have touched these doorkops. You know, like in a really selfish way. The staying in place means I shelter in place across 400 acres. So there's like, you know, like a privilege. that not people get to do. So I try to, when I am feeling down about being so far away from everybody, I try to, you know, remember that I'm in a pretty fortunate place up here and, you know,

that keeps me going too. Like Brent said, he's a pretty optimistic person. So he's been able to find a lot of other positives in these several months of solitude, like the time it's given him for reflection. It's particularly interesting to be up here right now because I read a lot of the history books at Seragoro and the Spanish influenza hit hit at Seragoro pretty hard. It was something that went through the town and there's minors in the cemetery here there's a cemetery on site with like 400 or 500 graves and there's like miners buried there that died from you know that major pandemic and so to be up here during this major pandemic it's a really uh kind of trippy like flash into the past connection to history and like to me there's this latin term this memento

mori or remember that you're going to die and i think that like serro gordo is is a giant momentum mori. Like it's very difficult to escape the thought of death here, whether it's the miners dead from the Spanish influenza or the ones that died in the gunfights here or died underground. And to me, it's not necessarily spooky. It's not grim, it's not depressing.

It's a little bit invigorating. Like, the fact remains that everybody is going to die. And so, like, what are you gonna do with the time that you're given? And so for me, it's, the time up here has helped me clarify what I wanna do with my life. And I think it's helped clarify that the answer to that is Cerro Gordo. Like all of us, Brent is not having the 2020 he thought he would. Brent started this year thinking he'd be able to Airbnb one of the buildings by this spring.

Maybe even have a meet-up with some of the Redditors who seemed really excited about Sarah Gordo. That is clearly not happening anytime soon. The setbacks he's faced would make most people think, oh, dear God, what have I done? I bought a town, but Serro Gordo isn't most towns. And Brent isn't most people. He's not going to give up that easy. I don't regret it at all, you know, not a single bit. I really believe in Serra Gordo. I think it's, it's something that deserves to be a place for more people to enjoy. And so I think that kind of like determination and belief helps get you through the nights where you're stressed a little bit about finances or ghosts or, you know, whatever else stresses you ought up here. Okay, so tell me about one of the positive days or one of the positive moments where you have just basked in the awesomeness of the fact that you bought a ghost town. Two or three weeks ago, I was cleaning up the general store. Behind one of the counters, there was this really old briefcase that was almost made out of paper.

It was so thin. You could see some stuff and I opened it up. And it was just the entire life of three different miners, the highs, the lows, the peaks, the valleys. There was lawsuits in there. There was love letters. There was divorce papers. There was, you know, mining claims, bank statements, and uncash checks all from about 100 years ago. And so it's just like this crazy time capsule into a part of American history and like these miners' lives. And I don't know, it was just these people lived and died and kind of gave their life to this mountain. And that was reassuring in a weird way where like, hey, this is something that is important. You know, aren't just wasting your time up here. And so little discoveries like that kind of keep me going. We recorded this interview with Brent at the end of May. And at the time, he was full of silver

linings for his old silver mining town. He was going to use the rest of the pandemic to get the buildings in even better shape before visitors set foot in Cerro Gordo. If they were going to be somewhat comfortable, let's make them more comfortable. Let's let me take the time and try to get the movie theater open. Let's try to get the saloon open and maybe a little kitchen open. But then, just a few weeks later, in the middle of the middle of the middle of the middle of the movie, middle of June, Brent faced his greatest test yet. He sent us this voice memo. Sometime just before 2 o'clock in the morning, I heard what I thought was fireworks. And I thought the first thing was some kids that come to town and I'd gone into the parking

lot and set off some fireworks. And I looked out my window and I saw a red hue and then I remember I leave my room and just yell out, oh no. And at that point, the hotel was already fully engulfed in flames. The American Hotel, Saragordo's Crown Jewel, home to the saloon and the card room with the bullet hole and bloodstain, had burned completely to the ground. Just was delirious, started in a state that never been in before. And so I took what water buckets we could get and, poured them all on the hill to prevent it from going up there before the police came or the fire department came. They got here within an hour, which is remarkable. But that hour, I mean,

it felt like a century when you're watching your hopes, dreams, life savings, love history that will never replace to go up in flames. Old wiring, dry wood, Brent still isn't sure how the fire started, but he is sure that he's not thrown in the towel. Not now, not ever. We're not giving up. I'm going to die at Cerro Gordo. Serro Gordo is going to be here after I'm gone, and there's going to be a hotel here. And that hotel is going to have the story of, you know, the fire of 2020.

Memento Mori. everything dies. But if there's one more silver lining to offer here, it's that just a week before the fire. Brent stumbled upon the original floor plan for the American hotel. We're going to rebuild. What other option do we have, but rebuild? So we've got to get to it.

Brent and his business partner, John, are trying to raise money to rebuild. But hey, you never know. Maybe Robert will keep blasting away with the dynamite. Maybe these guys will find that leftover $500 million worth of silver, supposedly in the mountain. Maybe they'll cash in on that big bet. In the meantime, Ben, some good news. We could use it.

Sarah Gordo has five new residents. Tofu, Bubba, Elon, Bucket, and Signorita Juanita. Squad assemble. There they are. They're goats. Goat Town. Okay, as promised, an update from Brent. He writes,

These days' construction on the American Hotel is in full swing. We have the basement done after a long battle to get concrete and cinder block up here. We're working desperately to get the building framed and enclosed by the wintertime so that we can keep working on it this winter. We recently had a massive flash flood, however, as part of the larger Death Valley flooding, and it completely washed out our road. So we have to wait to rebuild that before we can bring up the supplies needed to move forward.

So the battle always continues up here, exclamation point. My main goal is still to get the hotel open so many generations of people can come and enjoy this place. Brent, power to you, man. And for the rest of you, you can see a picture of the basement progress on the Cerro Gordo Instagram page, as well as tons of other pictures of artifacts that Brent has found,

old mining shafts he's repelled down, and even some alpacas. I'm not a big Instagrammer, but they're great follows, and you'll sort of feel like you're revitalizing your own ghost town vicariously through Brent. Sort of. This episode was written by me and Ben, mix and sound design by Matt Reed. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back with a new episode next Friday. See you then. Thank you.