The day I was leaving Lake Tahoe the valet attendant suggested I visit Virginia City. He said it was a ghost town. I had never been to a ghost town, so of course I drove straight there. I did hit some serious weather on the way over, but it didn’t matter because the Atlas can handle any road conditions.
About Virginia City
At its peak, Virginia City was a thriving, vibrant town with 25,000 people. Silver and gold were buried deep beneath her streets, and men and women traveled from around the world to live and work. Miners pulled millions of dollars from shafts and tunnels 3,000 feet beneath the city. The spirits of those Comstock “originals” still inhabit the places where they once worked, lived, worshiped, were educated, and died. Today, it’s the perfect tourist trap!
The 19th-century mining bonanza turned Virginia City into the most important industrial city between Denver and San Francisco, and it turned destitute prospectors from all over the world into millionaires. They built mansions, hospitals, churches, opera houses, and schools, and imported furniture, fashions, and entertainment from Europe and the Orient. They helped finance the Civil War, and went on to build empires around the world. Among the finest examples is San Francisco, a city built with Comstock silver.
The four mines: Ophir, Gould, Curry and Consolidated Virginia mines made up the “Big Bonanza” of 1873. This bonanza brought out at least $300 million in mineral deposits. Today you can tour around and experience what it was like for the 25,000 residents to walk the town back in the day.
Mark Twain worked here! In 1868, Mark Twain reminisced and wrote about his journalism career in Nevada with the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise:
“To find a petrified man, or break a stranger’s leg, or cave an imaginary mine, or discover some dead Indians in a Gold Hill tunnel, or massacre a family at Dutch Nick’s, were feats and calamities that we never hesitated about devising when the public needed matters of thrilling interest for breakfast. The seemingly tranquil ENTERPRISE office was a ghastly factory of slaughter, mutilation and general destruction in those days.”
—Mark Twain’s Letters from Washington, Number IX, Territorial Enterprise, March 7, 1868
Supposedly the spirits of the people of the “Queen of the Comstock” still haunt the places where they lived, worked, played, learned, and died. I personally experienced no ghosts while I was there.
Fun fact: Silver from Virginia City may have helped save the Union. Virginia City helped finance the U.S. government during the Civil War.
Supposedly the spirits of the people of the “Queen of the Comstock” still haunt the places where they lived, worked, played, learned, and died. I personally experienced no ghosts while I was there. 
