Connecticut's ghost towns are small and old. Most are hill farms and mill hamlets that emptied in the 1800s, when farm families went west or to the factory cities and water-powered mills lost out to bigger ones. Dudleytown, a cluster of hill farms near Cornwall settled in the 1740s, faded as farming declined. Bara-Hack, in Pomfret, was built by two Rhode Island families in 1778 and was empty by 1890. Gay City began as a religious colony in 1796, became a woolen-mill village, and emptied after its paper mill burned in 1879.
Two are 20th-century. Johnsonville, a twine-mill village in East Haddam, was rebuilt as a Victorian attraction and closed in 1994. Pleasure Beach in Bridgeport, an amusement park from 1892 to 1958, was cut off when its bridge burned in 1996 and stood empty until the city reopened it as a beach park in 2014.
What survives is cellar holes, stone walls, mill dams and burial grounds in second-growth forest. Access is the main question: one site is a state park, one a city beach park reached by water taxi in summer, one a land-trust preserve open for guided walks, one a church compound, and Dudleytown is private and closed.
Abandoned 
