Dude's Stuck In An Old, Potentially Haunted Mining Town

Brent Underwood is a 32-year-old entrepreneur who, in 2018, bought a former mining town in California named Cerro Gordo. As a 34-year-old whose savings account is filled with tumbleweeds and cricket chirps, I cannot express how painful that sentence was to type. His purchase of the land was covered by CNBC, as the network is primarily known for two things: exhaustive coverage of the financial sector and breaking news about Old West ghost towns.

The town came with a caretaker who left, to check in on his wife in Arizona, as the magnitude of the current pandemic started to settle in. Brent was supposed to fill in for the guy for only a week, but statewide shelter-in-place orders hit. Then Cerro Gordo got slammed by a storm that buried the town in five feet of snow. Brent suddenly found himself in a b-horror movie logline: A young entrepreneur was trapped in a haunted mining town during a viral outbreak.

Oh, yeah, the place is "haunted," too. So "haunted" that the stars of TLC's Ghost Adventures deemed it worthy of recording themselves walking through it while being startled by nothing. At one point, the town was averaging one murder per week, and if I'm reading the New York Post article correctly, Brent implies he's sleeping in the very bedroom in which two kids died while trapped in a closet.

I guess when you buy an old mining town, built on a foundation of blood, anywhere you sleep is bound to have had some ghastly crime committed in it. Oh no, don't sleep in that room. That's where a man gutted his best friend. Oh, not there, either. A wife exploded her husband there. Some say that on quiet nights, when the moon is full, you can still hear him exploding.

Luis can be found on Twitter and Facebook. Catch him on the "In Broad Daylight" podcast with Cracked alums Adam Tod Brown and Ian Fortey! Check out his regular contributions to Macaulay Culkin's BunnyEars.com and his "Meditation Minute" segments on the Bunny Ears podcast. And now, you can listen to the first episode on Youtube!

Top Image: QKC/Wiki Commons