Modern Ghost Town, Ordos, China

Factors leading to abandonment towns include depleted natural resources, railroads and roads bypassing or no longer accessing the town (as was the case in many the ghost towns along Ontario's historic Opeongo Line), economic activity shifting elsewhere, human intervention such as highway re-routing (as was the case with many towns located along U.S. Route 66, after motorists bypassed the towns on the faster moving I-44 and I-40), river re-routing (the Aral Sea being one example this), and disasters (such as Chernobyl). Significant fatality rates from epidemics have also produced ghost towns; for example, some places in eastern Arkansas were abandoned after over 7,000 Arkansans died during the Spanish Flu epidemic 1918 and 1919. The Middle East has many ghost towns, created when the shifting politics or fall empires caused capital cities to be socially or economically non-viable; for example, Ctesiphon.
Natural disasters can also create ghost towns. After being flooded more than 30 times since their town was founded in 1845, residents Pattonsburg, Missouri, had enough after two floods in 1993. With government help, the whole town was rebuilt 3 miles (4.8 km) away.
Ghost towns may also occasionally come into being due to an anticipated natural disaster — for example, the Canadian town Lemieux, Ontario was abandoned in 1991 after soil testing revealed that the community was built on an unstable bed Leda clay. Two years after the last building in Lemieux was demolished, a landslide swept part the former townsite into the South Nation River.
Land contamination can also create a ghost town. This is what happened to Times Beach, a suburb St. Louis, whose residents were exposed to a high level dioxins. Centralia, Pennsylvania was abandoned by many people due to a dangerous underground coal fire.