You can buy a Colorado ‘ghost town’ on Craigslist for $350,000
Cabin Creek, a “ghost town” in Colorado, equipped with old service station, cafe and abandoned motel has been listed up for sale at $350,000. The town Cabin Creek is located just outside of Byers, Colorado in rural Adams County.
Recently, the owner, James Johnson placed an ad “for sale” on Craigslist to sell his town.
The advertisement for Cabin Creek says the nearly 5-acre property is about 45 minutes from Denver. It comes with an old gas station, an 8-room motel, a roadside restaurant cafe, an eight-space RV park, two houses and a private shooting range.
The 3,300 square feet gas station still has pumps outside and the building was once a gas station repair shop and a movie theatre.
A smokehouse with a fire pit sits behind the Café,which features a small seating area, bathroom, cook kitchen, manager’s office, underground cold storage room and three bedrooms in the basement.
“We’ve had so many people look it’s been amazing,” said Johnson, who owns the tiny road-side village along Highway 36.
“There’s something cool about tiny towns,” Johnson told KDVR. “Anytime I would stop on Route 66, I’d see places like this and I just love them.”
Johnson first drove by Cabin Creek decades ago, and he had to have it. People thought he was crazy. But in its prime, it was quite the gathering spot.
“It was full of chickens when I first got the place, so I was telling everybody I had a whole motel full of chicks,” Johnson joked.
Joan Lippet who lives in Byers and used to frequent Cabin Creek remembers it in its heyday. “A lot of people just went out there for the meals because they were so good. The couple who owned the town, and ran the cafe, served the best chicken fried steak in the state,” said Lippett.
However, sometime back in the 70s, something bad happened at Cabin Creek.
“There was a murder there. There was some people that they took in, felt sorry for or something, and they found out the couple had money,” Lippett said.
That’s when Cabin Creek’s fate as a ghost town was closed.
“Then everything just, literally, there was nobody here, so these buildings sat totally vacant. Nothing going on out here for a number of years,” Johnson said.
He once had big plans for the town. He wanted to turn it in to a Route 66-style tourist attraction and opportunities. However, his wife now wants to retire somewhere else.
“We`re looking at Idaho or Montana I think. We`re ready to get out of town even farther than this,” Johnson said.
He is hoping to find someone with similar aspirations.
“We would like to sell,” Johnson wrote on Craigslist. “We have some traveling we would like to do and this project keeps us here.”
