Ghost Town Picher

My friend and I decided to give Picher, Oklahoma a visit. She and I had discovered the ghost town through the deep part of YouTube. It turns out that the town was previously one of the largest exporters of lead and zinc in the world for the most part of World War I. The bullets the soldiers used had lead and zinc from Picher. However; there came a point where they had so much, they had to pile it up (the town now has giant "chat" piles fenced off by the EPA) in mounds around the town. Children would play in the piles, adults would use it for their driveways, and stuff of the sort. A study by the Environmental Protection Agency in the 1980s showed a link between the exposure to chat and children's learning disabilities, which caused them to include the town in the Tar Creek Superfund Site. There was also an E4 tornado that blew through the town sometime in 2008. The homes were never reconstructed. The population slowly began decreasing, from 1,640 in 2000, until the last member of the Picher community died in 2015, leaving the town unmitigatedly abandoned. These photos are from our visit to Picher last week. We came across some of these things in an old auction warehouse, and we also took some photos in an abandoned baseball field.
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