Ghost Town in the Sky at Ghost Mountain Park
Venues
Ghost Town in the Sky was a Wild West theme park on top of Buck Mountain, some 4,600 feet up in Maggie Valley, North Carolina. R.B. Coburn, inspired by trips to the ghost towns of the American West, bought the mountain in 1960, hired more than 200 locals to build 40 replica frontier buildings at the summit, and opened the park in May 1961 for about $1 million. The park hosted live country and bluegrass sets throughout the day at the Red Dog Saloon. The park’s success turned Maggie Valley into a tourist boom town, helping create the audience that later filled the valley's clogging halls and Raymond Fairchild's Maggie Valley Opry House. Ghost Town closed in 2002, and despite partial reopenings under a string of new owners, the mountaintop park has largely sat derelict.
In the newsletter
- No. 6 Winter 1996