Contrary to its name, ghost towns aren’t just really spooky places. They are actually abandoned villages, towns, or cities that often contain visible remaining—albeit neglected—buildings and roads.

So how does a once-flourishing location become such a place? Ghost towns are typically created when the industries or agriculture that supported them fail or come to an end due to natural or human-caused disasters such as floods, droughts, extreme weather, pollution, or war. The term may also include areas that have become significantly depopulated over time, such as those affected by high levels of unemployment and neglect.

Once-bustling places that are now empty make us curious. As a result, some ghost towns have become tourist attractions, such as Bannack, Montana. You’ll find that and the 4,530 other U.S. ghost towns you can find on the map below, and details about these ghost towns’ current statuses, common names, and locations in the following post.

View Ghost Towns in a full screen map

Statuses of Deserted Towns

The U.S.’s 4,531 ghost towns are just that: abandoned villages, towns, or cities. But while they all have this classification in common, their statuses differ. From barren or semi-abandoned places to sparsely populated areas and those that are fully submerged, we’re going to highlight the most common of those now:

Status	# of Ghost Towns
Barren	211
Neglected	119
Town with residual population	102
Abandoned	97
Semi-abandoned	69
Historic	57
D — Area is sparsely populated and may boast period structures (of varied physical condition) and/or a cemetery, but no operative town proper.	47
Submerged	46
A — No apparent remains of former settlement exist. In some cases, site may be marked and/or contain a cemetery.	37
Inhabited	34

As you can see from the table above, barren ghost towns are the most common type. Other popular statuses teeter on the verge of being ghost towns: like the 102 towns with residual populations, the 69 that are semi-abandoned, inhabited, and the sparsely populated areas that may boast period structures (of varied physical condition) and/or cemeteries, but no operative town propers.

Perhaps the most interesting are the 46 ghost towns that are submerged. Most of these (14) are located in ​​Pennsylvania, including Cokeville, Fillmore, Livermore, and Social Hall, which are all under the waters of Conemaugh River Lake. Wilsonville was intentionally flooded to create Lake Wallenpaupack—similar to a plot line in the TV show Ozark. Another submerged town, Somerfield, remained hidden under the waters of Youghiogheny River Lake until 1999 when receding water levels began to reveal parts of the town.

While the stories of ghost towns are similar, their stories are all unique. But the same can’t be said for their names.

Center Point, Wilson, and Other Common Ghost Town Names

As is so often the case, there are quite a few shared names among the 4,531 ghost towns. So let’s take a look at the names shared by more than four ghost towns.

• Center Point: 7 ghost towns
• Clifton: 5
• Hopewell: 5
• Wilson: 5
• Alma: 4
• Aurora: 4
• Benton: 4
• Boston: 4
• Carpenter: 4
• Corwin: 4
• Elizabethtown: 4
• Eureka: 4
• Hamilton: 4
• Keystone: 4
• Lexington: 4
• Liberty: 4
• Midway: 4
• Millville: 4
• Pioneer: 4
• Pittsburg: 4
• Providence: 4
• Silver City: 4
• Victoria: 4

Center Point is the most common ghost town name. All seven of the towns that share this name are located in Texas, though in varying counties.

Interestingly, Hopewell—not Hope nor Hopes— is another popular name throughout multiple states. There’s a Hopewell in Florida, Mississippi, and Tennessee—and two in Missouri… three if you could the ghost town named Hopewell Furnace. And while not as common as Hopewell, there is a Hope in both Nebraska and Oklahoma.

Ghost towns named Wilson are equally as popular as Hopewell, with five throughout Florida, Illinois, Maryland, and Michigan. Though, if you were to count the number of Wilsonvilles along with Wilsons, it would be one more.

Meanwhile, 61 other names are shared by three ghost towns, including Dogtown, Empire, and Ruby. Further, 291 ghost town names apply to two each while the remaining 3,668 others have unique names.

Be sure to check out the rest of the common ghost town names on the map above, because we’re moving on to their locations.

The Most Abandoned Towns Are Located in These 10 States

Each of the 50 U.S. states has at least one ghost town—though with 4,531 total, some states are clearly home to more than one. Let’s look at which states have the most abandoned towns, using Heat View.

With more than four thousand markers on the map, all in the same country, the points can start to overlap, losing their ability to tell a useful story. This is where Heat View can be beneficial, as it exposes marker density.

The Lone Star State appears to be home to the most ghost towns: 550, to be exact. Over 30 are located in Wilson County, specifically, while Guadalupe, Presidio, Washington, Gillespie, and Bexar counties all have 10+.

Oklahoma, Kansas, California, Florida, and South Dakota are each home to more than 240 ghost towns, while Pennsylvania, Colorado, Wisconsin, and Utah all have ghost towns in the hundreds.

Find Your Nearest Ghost Town

Use the search box in the ghost town map to enter a U.S. city, zip code, or address. The map will find your nearest ghost town, so you can begin exploring the past.

Alternatively, you might want something a little more populated… The opposite of a ghost town is a boom town! For the biggest boomtowns of every U.S. state, check out our map.

Whether you’re a business owner or employee, you have enough on your plate. You don’t want the collection and storage of your sales leads to remain yet another undone task on your to-do list. This is why you’re interested in incorporating Airtable—a spreadsheet-database hybrid—into your workflow.

Airtable pairs a spreadsheet with database column types along with calendar, gallery, Kanban, and other views, which makes it perfect for storing leads.

Moreover, once you have your lead base set up, you can use the information to identify nearby leads to use during sales travel.

Let’s get started building an Airtable base for leads, automating the collection, and exporting the data to find your closest lead.

1. Build an Airtable Base for Leads

Before we can identify our closest lead(s), we must first build our base. You may already have them stored, so look below to make sure you have all the fields you need. If you’re just starting out, let’s begin with the basics. Within Airtable, select Add a base (or use one of the many available Airtable templates). Give your new base a name, “Leads.”

With that done, we can focus on making our base lead-specific. We’ll start with column headings, called fields. By default, things like Name, Notes, and Attachments appear in any new base.

But you can also add your own. Some basic suggestions include:

• Email
• Company name
• First name
• Last name
• Phone number
• City
• State
• Address

You can incorporate even more specific fields such as lead stage, priority, expected close date, or last contact, just to name a few. When it comes to finding your nearest leads, perhaps the most important of these are the location-related fields. Of course, yours needn’t be so U.S.-focused. Just be sure to include some location data, such as country, latitude and longitude, etc.

Now we can either fill all in the details for each new record manually or…

2. Automate Lead Collection with a Form

We can use forms to automate the collection of the information we need. We needn’t do much to incorporate a form into the workflow we’ve already built with our base since Airtable uses your base fields to pre-populate your form.

Let’s jump into it:

• In the Views tab of your base, select Form
• Click the fields to edit the pre-populated information
• Here you can add additional text to clarify the field in your form
• You can also opt to set conditions for when to show certain fields, make them required, or remove fields from your form altogether

There are more ways to customize your form (logos, cover images, etc.), especially if you have a paid account. You can even share your form among team members so that everyone working in sales can add the new leads they discover.

Now that we’ve built our base and created a form to automate lead collection, we can dive into finding the nearest lead to our current location.

3. Create a Custom Map of Your Airtable Leads

View Airtable Leads in a full screen map

If your lead base doesn’t contain exact locations like addresses or latitude and longitude coordinates, it might make sense to just sort your base by city, state, or country to find which lead is closest to your location.

But if you have access to more specific location data, or you just want a way to identify your closest leads on the go, mapping your points may be your best bet.
There are two ways to do so in Airtable, as we discussed in a previous post.

Because the first involves many steps, including obtaining a Google Maps API Key, we’ll go over the second option:

• Ensure the location information in your Airtable base has its own single line text fields
• Click Grid view and select Download CSV
• Open your web browser and navigate to batchgeo.com
• Drag and drop your downloaded file to the location data box, then click Map Your Data and watch as the geocoder performs its process
• Check to make sure you have the proper location data fields available under “Validate and Set Options”
• Select Show Advanced Options to customize marker labels, colors, shapes, and map styles
• After any updates, click Make Map. When you’re done, Save & Continue
  • Optional: link your Airtable base in the Description, then click Save Map

Yet, we don’t have to stop here. While you can access your new map on your phone, which is already more helpful than a table full of addresses for seeing locations while traveling, you needn’t just estimate the map location closest to you at any given time.

Search or Measure Your Nearest Lead

Our last step is to pinpoint exactly which lead is closest to us using our map.

Using the Search bar in the upper right-hand corner of our map, enter your current address or the address of the hotel you’re staying at during your trip. When you press Enter on your keyboard, the nearest point on our map will pop up, taking away the guesswork of eyeballing it from the map—or worse—from your Airtable base.

Map your Airtable base today at batchgeo.com.

From Aerosmith to Roger Waters, there are only several artists who performed tours that spanned 150+ shows. What else do these artists and their very long tours have in common?

There are only so many concert venues in the world, so these artists played many of the same venues—some more than once. So let’s take a look at 10 of the longest concert tours and then which of their 820+ stadiums they have in common, giving you a glimpse into the world of epic musical tours.

View Common Stadiums of the 10 Largest Concert Tours in a full screen map

Ten of the Longest Concert Tours

Before we can get to the 823 different stadiums where the artists of the 10 longest concert tours played, let’s first take a look which concert tours even played the most shows.

Artist	Tour	No. of Shows
Bob Dylan	Never Ending Tour	3,000+
Bruce Springsteen	Tunnel of Love Express	384
Elton John	Farewell Yellow Brick Road	300
Ed Sheeran	÷ Tour	255
Metallica	Wherever We May Roam	234
Aerosmith	Get a Grip	231
Roger Waters	The Wall Live	219
Pink Floyd	Momentary Lapse of Reason	198
Guns N’ Roses	Use Your Illusion	194
Janet Jackson	Rhythm Nation	194
Metallica	Death Magnetic	180

Each of the 10 longest tours played 150+ shows. Aside from Bob Dylan’s Never Ending Tour (which is not included on the map due to it being ongoing), Bruce Springsteen performed 384 shows for his 1988 Tunnel of Love Express tour, making it the second longest in history. Beyond this, only Elton John and his 2018-2023 Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour has hit 300 shows.

The top tours aside, two Metallica tours surpassed 150 shows: the 1991-1993 Wherever We May Roam tour (234 shows) and the more recent Death Magnetic tour (180).

Speaking of the Wherever We May Roam tour, it’s one of two of the top 10 that began in 1991. In fact, the ’90s as a whole is when most of these tours took place:

• 1990: Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation tour (194 shows)
• 1991: Metallica’s Wherever We May Roam (234) & Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion tour (194)
• 1993: Aerosmith’s Get a Grip tour (231)

After the ’90s, there were three extra-long in the 2010s: Roger Waters’s The Wall Live tour, Ed Sheeran’s ÷ Tour, and Elton John’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour.

Now we can move on to the common stadiums of these really, really, really long tours.

Most Common Stadiums of the Longest Tours

With an understanding of the longest concert tours, it’s time to crowd dive into the stadiums they have in common. The following list represents the top venues that have hosted the most number of shows played by the artists with the largest concert tours.

• Madison Square Garden – 27 shows
• The O 2 Arena – 18
• Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy – 16
• Rosemont Horizon – 15
• Nassau Coliseum – 15
• Capital Centre – 15
• The Palace of Auburn Hills – 13
• Rod Laver Arena – 13
• Wembley Stadium – 12
• Tacoma Dome – 12
• Richfield Coliseum – 12

The most commonly played stadium is Madison Square Garden. This New York City venue holds up to 20,000 concert-goers and tops the list. MSG, as it’s sometimes called, was home to 27 different concerts from the longest tour list. Not every artist on the list played this NYC venue—while some have played more than once.

In 2018, Elton John said that The Garden was his “favorite venue in the whole wide world,” so it’s no surprise that eight of the 27 shows were performed by him throughout his “Farewell Yellow Brick Road” tour. Bruce Springsteen seemed equally enamored with the venue with five shows coming from his “Tunnel of Love Express.” Three tours: Guns N’ Roses’ “Use Your Illusion,” Pink Floyd’s “Momentary Lapse of Reason,” and Roger Waters’ “The Wall Live” also played The Garden three times each during their respective tours. On the other hand, neither Ed Sheeran during his “÷ Tour” nor Metallica on their “Wherever We May Roam” tour played at The Garden.

Madison Square Garden is followed by The O2 Arena in London with 18 shows. A whopping 10 of those once again came from Elton John and six from Roger Waters’ “The Wall Live” tour.

Click around on the map to discover which other long-touring artists have played at these venues. Then, check out the highest-attended concerts. Or, if you have more of an interest in sports, head on over to our map of former, current, and future MLB stadiums.