Secret USA Map: 25 Maps of Silos, Ghost Towns and Obsessions
Missile silos renamed by activists, border surveillance towers, working payphones, haunted furnaces, dead malls and 16,000 abandoned rail lines.
Updated
More than 400,000 maps on MapIndex lie in the United States. Under the road trips and
national park checklists are people who count things nobody else counts. One mapped
57,593 warning sirens by make and model. Another tested payphones from Penn Station to
Yosemite and wrote down which ones still work. A group of peace activists gave every nuclear missile silo on the Great
Plains a name of its own.
550 silos and launch control centers in Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado, North Dakota and
Montana, and not one keeps its Air Force number alone. The control center at A1 is
“Doomsday”, G1 near Minot is “The Little Shop of Horrors”, and the missiles around them
are “Life’s End”, “Outright Insanity”, “Vengeful Aim” and, at J9, “Leave this Land for
the Prairie Dogs and Wildflowers”. The map accompanies Nukewatch’s book on the
remaining land-based missiles.
The southern border’s watchers, point by point: 598 surveillance towers sorted by
Border Patrol sector and station, tethered radar balloons from Yuma to Marfa,
face-recognition lanes at every port of entry, and a “Covert ALPR” layer of plate
readers disguised as construction barrels along the highways east of San Diego. Each
entry cites its source, a procurement document or an environmental assessment, and
carries a Street View link to check it yourself.
Every ghost town here comes with the reason it died. Ludlow, California, lived off
Route 66 until I-40 replaced it and now has 10 residents. Kaskaskia, the first capital
of Illinois, ended up on the wrong side of the Mississippi. And Nothing, Arizona, is
remembered by its own town sign: its citizens “had faith in Nothing, hoped for Nothing,
worked at Nothing, for Nothing.”
5,304 points along the microwave relay chain that carried America’s long-distance
calls, each tower described as someone found it: “tower gone, bunker present” in Fort
Stockton, “red-and-white, VERY abandoned” in Midlothian, “tower demolished 1998, looks
abandoned 2008” in Freeport. The notes count the horn antennas still on each tower and
mark the former AUTOVON switch at Mounds, Oklahoma.
Every pin tells its legend in a few lines. At Sloss Furnaces in Birmingham, foreman
James “Slag” Wormwood fell into molten ore in 1906, or was pushed by the men whose 47
colleagues died on his watch. In Bear Creek Swamp sheriffs removed 21 white-painted
dolls on bamboo stakes in 2014. And in Whittier, Alaska, all 160 residents live in one
building, Begich Towers, with a ghost that whistles.
1,634 launch sites from Atlas to Peacekeeper, sorted by the years each system stood
on alert, with notes on what happened next. Kansas holds the best stories: Atlas E
548-9 was sold to a school district for one dollar and turned into a high school, and
548-7 housed an illegal LSD lab until authorities shut it down around November 2000.
Each pin is a phone number. The maker sorted them into working, possibly working,
dead and courtesy phones, with the date each one was confirmed: the bank of phones
in Penn Station’s lower level “between Hilton Corridor and Long Island Railroad”,
the ones in Yosemite Valley, a theater phone with TTY. A census of a vanishing
network, dated phone by phone.
16,332 dead railroad lines drawn as lines, each with its length, the railroads that
ran it and the year it closed: Denrock to Mendota, Illinois, 47.6 miles, abandoned
1985. Separate layers hold logging and military railroads, interurbans, lines that
were reactivated and lines that were planned and never built. Sources are cited,
down to the remark that one old book spells Zearing “Ziering”.
158 locations sorted by season, each with the episode and what stands there now. The
murderer’s lover in the pilot lives in the Stahl House, which you can visit by
reservation. Ken Franklin’s “San Diego” cabin is actually on Big Bear Lake, “nowhere
near San Diego”. And Columbo discusses a life insurance policy at Tail o’ the Pup, the
hot dog stand opened in 1946.
Each siren is named by its make and model, Federal Signal STH-10, Sterling M-10,
Sentry 3V8, and many carry a note from someone who listened: “Ungodly low”, “Every
Saturday at noon”, “Motor burnt up around 2011”, “Wires cut by neighbors in 2008”.
Around the Beaver Valley nuclear plant one entry after another reads “Disconnected as
a part of BVNP shutting of 52 sirens”.
A visitor’s day inside the Nevada Test Site in June 2010, leg by leg. Icecap was three
days from being blown up when the 1992 moratorium stopped all testing, and its cables
still lie on the ground. A bank vault tested with money inside “looks pretty beat up”
but the money survived. The Device Assembly Facility “looks like a fort”, and the
cafeteria stop was annoying because they were re-waxing the floors.
A hunter of roadside giants keeps two lists, visited and unvisited, plus a legend that
sorts the giants by type (“Classic/Cowboys: clean-shaven giants with different
clothing than lumberjacks”). The notes track each statue’s fate: Copeland’s Cowboy in
Grove, Oklahoma, “SOLD - Moved to an as-yet named site in Dallas”, and the Muffler Man
in Hatch, New Mexico, holds a small RV behind a chain link fence.
2,448 wrecks with their histories, from HMS Investigator, abandoned in Arctic ice in
1853 while searching for Franklin and found in 2010, to the Edmund Fitzgerald. Some of
the darkest lie off the East Coast: the SS Mormactern was scuttled in 1968 carrying
sarin and VX. The layer names are Norwegian, “Nord-Amerika” and “Stillehavet”.
911 Holiday Inns from the era of the “Great Sign”, each with its highway and
its fate: “Opened July 1962; Demolished 2013” in Anniston, “lot still vacant 2015” in
Auburn, “Now Hiway Host Motel. Back row of rooms demolished; pool removed” in
Bessemer. In downtown Birmingham the old Holiday Inn is now the Royal Inn, “in dubious
condition; pool is full of broken toilets”.
794 strange stories across the Midwest and Appalachia, in layers called “Boucoups of
Cults! (and the Occasional Witch!)” and “UFO-No!”. The Loveland Frog “carries a wand
wherever it goes”, Mud Mermaids terrified 1800s Vevay from the banks of the Ohio, and
at Stepp Cemetery in Indiana a sect that believed the earth was square left behind a
“Warlock’s Chair”.
335 bunkers and silos sorted by what they are today: museums, private bunkers in use,
silos on farms “likely not in good shape”, an Atlas F turned into a tourist B&B in
Kansas, and active government sites like Raven Rock and Mount Weather. A “Likely
Spots” layer explains its suspicions, such as a building in Washington with “clear
access under building seen, ventilation on east side”.
A driver’s own reviews of 100 truck stops, rest areas and yards in the West, dated and
blunt. At the Fernley Pilot “officially 160 parking spots, but it’s more like 300+”,
with decent Indian food and a classy mini casino. At the Bouse Wash rest area in
Arizona the speed test never finished: “I’ve seen rocks move faster across Arizona’s
desert floor.”
917 places of the frontier in ten layers, from the Overland Trails and Lewis and
Clark to the Robberies and Gunfighters and Lawmen. The notes tell each story at
length: the James-Younger gang’s raid on the First National Bank of Northfield on 7
September 1876, Sam Bass spotted while buying tobacco before a robbery in 1878, and
the Bellevue War in Iowa, “the first recorded shootout of the Antebellum West”.
9,384 painted advertisements fading on brick walls from Washington to Montana, each
with a few words from the person who found it. “Fair was a store that closed in 1916”
in Colfax. The Dougan Building in Tacoma “was painted many times and the result is a
busy blur”. A Coca-Cola sign in Port Townsend gets one word: “Sad”.
791 teardrop crossing bells made by Union Switch & Signal, sorted by generation and
by fate: active, out of service, on display, privately owned or removed. The surviving
first-generation bell at Monticello, Illinois, comes with its milepost, track speed and
trains per day, and a date verified of June 2026.
4,086 abduction reports filed by decade, each with what the witness said and an
“Explanation” where one exists. The oldest American case is Indio, California, in
December 1896, marked “Hoax”. A 1957 highway abduction in California describes “thin,
bony humanoids 7-8’ tall, wearing transparent clothes” and carries its “Vallee
reliability rating”.
A fan works out the film’s road trip from the few clues it gives. The journey starts
“somewhere in the vicinity of Little Rock”, so the map starts at the State Capitol.
Thelma proposes the direct route to Mexico on US 81, Louise refuses to cross Texas, and
the map draws each route they might have taken, down to the “Final Chance”.
626 dead and dying malls, state by state, each with its type, the year it opened, the
year it closed and links to the enthusiasts who documented it. Birmingham’s Eastwood
Mall opened in 1960, “one of the first malls of the South”, and closed in 2006;
Dunnavants Mall in Huntsville is now a hospital’s medical mall.
4,177 oval tracks and drag strips with their years of racing, and a “USA Lost Ovals”
layer for those gone. Ice Palace Raceway in Alaska ran 1973 to 1974 and became an
airstrip. Of Birmingham’s Iron Bowl, from 1939, the “outline is barely visible”. Sand
Lake Speedway, Anchorage’s first dirt track, “was VERY sandy and dusty”.
475 stops on the Great Loop, the water route around the eastern United States, with
the warnings boaters need: the Champlain Canal’s clearance of 15 feet 5 inches, the
Asian carp barrier near Chicago that you may pass only with the Coast Guard’s
permission, and at Demopolis, Alabama, “Your next fuel stop is 98 miles away at
Bobby’s Fish Camp”.
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