text:
Tom Hanks

Thomas Jeffrey Hanks (born July 9, 1956) is an American actor and filmmaker. Known for both his comedic and dramatic roles, he is one of the most popular and recognizable film stars worldwide, and is regarded as an American cultural icon. Hanks's films have grossed more than $4.9 billion in North America and more than $9.96 billion worldwide, making him the fourth-highest-grossing actor in North America.

Hanks made his breakthrough with leading roles in a series of comedies: Splash (1984), The Money Pit (1986), Big (1988) and A League of Their Own (1992). He won two consecutive Academy Awards for Best Actor, playing a gay lawyer suffering from AIDS in Philadelphia (1993) and the title character in Forrest Gump (1994). Hanks collaborated with Steven Spielberg on five films: Saving Private Ryan (1998), Catch Me If You Can (2002), The Terminal (2004), Bridge of Spies (2015) and The Post (2017), as well as the World War II miniseries Band of Brothers (2001), The Pacific (2010) and Masters of the Air (2024). He has also frequently collaborated with directors Ron Howard, Nora Ephron and Robert Zemeckis.

Hanks's other films include the romantic comedies Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and You've Got Mail (1998); the dramas Apollo 13 (1995), The Green Mile (1999), Cast Away (2000), Road to Perdition (2002) and Cloud Atlas (2012); and the biographical dramas Charlie Wilson's War (2007), Captain Phillips (2013), Saving Mr. Banks (2013), Sully (2016), A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019), News of the World (2020) and Elvis (2022). He appeared as the title character in the Robert Langdon series and voiced Sheriff Woody in the Toy Story films (1995–2019). Hanks directed the comedies That Thing You Do! (1996) and Larry Crowne (2011), and acted in both.

In 1998, Hanks launched his production company Playtone, which has an exclusive television development deal with HBO. Hanks has won seven Primetime Emmy Awards for his work as a producer of various limited series and television movies, including From the Earth to the Moon (1998), Band of Brothers (2001), John Adams (2008), The Pacific (2009), Game Change (2012) and Olive Kitteridge (2015). He made his Broadway debut in Nora Ephron's Lucky Guy (2013), earning a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play nomination. Among other honors, he has received the AFI Life Achievement Award (2002), the Kennedy Center Honor (2014), the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the French Legion of Honor (both 2016)  and the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award (2020).

Early life and family
Hanks was born in Concord, California, on July 9, 1956, to hospital worker Janet Marylyn (Frager) and itinerant cook Amos "Bud" Hanks. His mother was from a Portuguese family; their surname was originally "Fraga". His father had English ancestry, and through his line, Hanks is a distant cousin of President Abraham Lincoln  and children's host Fred Rogers, both of whom he would portray in film roles. His parents divorced in 1960.

Their three oldest children, Sandra (later Sandra Hanks Benoiton, a writer), Larry (who became an entomology professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), and Tom, went with their father, while the youngest, Jim (who also became an actor and filmmaker), remained with their mother in Red Bluff, California. In his childhood, Hanks' family moved often; by age ten, he had lived in ten different houses. Although Hanks' family religious history was Catholic and Mormon, as an adult he converted to Greek Orthodox Christianity after his marriage to Rita Wilson.

One journalist characterized Hanks' teenage self as being a "Bible-toting evangelical" for several years. In school, he was unpopular with students and teachers alike, later telling Rolling Stone magazine, "I was a geek, a spaz. I was horribly, painfully, terribly shy. At the same time, I was the guy who'd yell out funny captions during filmstrips. But I didn't get into trouble. I was always a real good kid and pretty responsible." Hanks acted in school plays, including South Pacific, while attending Skyline High School in Oakland, California.

Having grown up in the Bay Area, Hanks says that some of his first movie memories were seeing movies in the Alameda Theatre. Hanks studied theater at Chabot College in Hayward, California, and transferred to California State University, Sacramento after two years. During a 2001 interview with sportscaster Bob Costas, Hanks was asked whether he would rather have an Oscar or a Heisman Trophy. He replied that he would rather win a Heisman by playing halfback for the California Golden Bears. He told New York magazine in 1986, "Acting classes looked like the best place for a guy who liked to make a lot of noise and be rather flamboyant. I spent a lot of time going to plays. I wouldn't take dates with me. I'd just drive to a theater, buy myself a ticket, sit in the seat and read the program, and then get into the play completely. I spent a lot of time like that, seeing Brecht, Tennessee Williams, Ibsen, and all that."

During his years studying theater, Hanks met Vincent Dowling, head of the Great Lakes Theater Festival in Cleveland, Ohio. At Dowling's suggestion, Hanks became an intern at the festival. His internship stretched into a three-year experience that covered most aspects of theater production, including lighting, set design, and stage management, prompting Hanks to drop out of college. During the same time, Hanks won the Cleveland Critics Circle Award for Best Actor for his 1978 performance as Proteus in Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Verona, one of the few times he played a villain. In 2010, Time magazine named Hanks one of the "Top 10 College Dropouts".

1980–1989 Early work, sitcom and comedy films
In 1979, Hanks moved to New York City, where he made his film debut in the low-budget slasher film He Knows You're Alone (1980) and landed a starring role in the television movie Mazes and Monsters (1982). Early that year, he was cast as the lead, Callimaco, in the Riverside Shakespeare Company's production of Niccolò Machiavelli's The Mandrake, directed by Daniel Southern. The following year, Hanks landed one of the lead roles, that of character Kip Wilson, on the ABC television pilot of Bosom Buddies. He and Peter Scolari played a pair of young advertising men forced to dress as women so they could live in an inexpensive all-female hotel. Hanks had previously partnered with Scolari on the 1970s game show Make Me Laugh. After landing the role, Hanks moved to Los Angeles. Bosom Buddies ran for two seasons, and, although the ratings were never strong, television critics gave the program high marks. "The first day I saw him on the set," co-producer Ian Praiser told Rolling Stone, "I thought, 'Too bad he won't be in television for long.' I knew he'd be a movie star in two years."

Hanks made a guest appearance on a 1982 episode of Happy Days ("A Case of Revenge", in which he played a disgruntled former classmate of Fonzie) where he met writers Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel who were writing the film Splash (1984), a romantic comedy fantasy about a mermaid who falls in love with a human, to be directed by former Happy Days star Ron Howard. Ganz and Mandel suggested Howard consider Hanks for the film. At first, Howard considered Hanks for the role of the main character's wisecracking brother, a role that eventually went to John Candy. Instead, Hanks landed the lead role in Splash, which went on to become a surprise box office hit, grossing more than US $69 million. He had a sizable hit with the sex comedy Bachelor Party, also in 1984. In 1983–84, Hanks made three guest appearances on Family Ties as Elyse Keaton's alcoholic brother Ned Donnelly.

With Nothing in Common (1986)—a story of a young man alienated from his father (Jackie Gleason)—Hanks began to extend himself from comedic roles to dramatic. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Hanks commented on his experience: "It changed my desires about working in movies. Part of it was the nature of the material, what we were trying to say. But besides that, it focused on people's relationships. The story was about a guy and his father, unlike, say, The Money Pit, where the story is really about a guy and his house." In 1987, he had signed an agreement with The Walt Disney Studios where he had starred to a talent pool in an acting/producing pact. After a few more flops and a moderate success with the comedy Dragnet (1987), Hanks' stature in the film industry rose.

The broad success of the fantasy comedy Big (1988) established Hanks as a major Hollywood talent, both as a box office draw and within the industry as an actor. For his performance in the film, Hanks earned his first nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor. Big was followed later that year by Punchline, in which he and Sally Field co-starred as struggling comedians. Hanks then suffered a run of box-office underperformers: The 'Burbs (1989), Joe Versus the Volcano (1990) and The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990). In the last, he portrayed a greedy Wall Street figure who gets enmeshed in a hit-and-run accident. Turner & Hooch (1989) was Hanks' only financially successful film of the period.

1990–1999: Leading man stardom and acclaim

Hanks climbed back to the top again with his portrayal of a washed-up baseball legend turned manager in Penny Marshall's A League of Their Own (1992). Hanks has said his acting in earlier roles was not great, but that he subsequently improved. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Hanks noted his "modern era of moviemaking ... because enough self-discovery has gone on ... My work has become less pretentiously fake and over the top". This "modern era" began in 1993 for Hanks, first with Nora Ephron's Sleepless in Seattle and then with Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia. The former was a romantic comedy about a widower who finds true love over the radio airwaves. Hanks co-starred with Meg Ryan. Richard Schickel of TIME called his performance "charming", and most critics agreed that Hanks' portrayal ensured him a place among the premier romantic-comedy stars of his generation.

In Philadelphia, he played a gay lawyer with AIDS who sues his firm for discrimination. Hanks lost 35 lb and thinned his hair in order to appear sickly for the role. In a review for People, Leah Rozen stated, "Above all, credit for Philadelphia's success belongs to Hanks, who makes sure that he plays a character, not a saint. He is flat-out terrific, giving a deeply felt, carefully nuanced performance that deserves an Oscar." Hanks won the 1993 Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in Philadelphia. During his acceptance speech, he revealed that his high school drama teacher Rawley Farnsworth and former classmate John Gilkerson, two people with whom he was close, were gay.

Hanks followed Philadelphia with Robert Zemeckis's Forrest Gump (1994), which grossed a worldwide total of over $600 million. Hanks remarked: "When I read the script for Gump, I saw it as one of those kind of grand, hopeful movies that the audience can go to and feel ... some hope for their lot and their position in life ... I got that from the movies a hundred million times when I was a kid. I still do." Hanks won his second Best Actor Academy Award for his role in Forrest Gump, becoming only the second actor to have accomplished the feat of winning consecutive Best Actor Oscars. (Spencer Tracy was the first, winning in 1937 and 38 for Captains Courageous and Boys Town. Hanks and Tracy were the same age at the time they received their Academy Awards: 37 for the first and 38 for the second.)

Hanks reunited with Ron Howard to play astronaut and commander Jim Lovell in Apollo 13 (1995). Critics generally applauded the film and the performances of the entire cast, which included Kevin Bacon, Bill Paxton, Gary Sinise, Ed Harris and Kathleen Quinlan. The movie earned nine Academy Award nominations, winning two. Hanks starred in Pixar's Toy Story (1995) as the voice of Sheriff Woody.

Hanks made his directing debut with That Thing You Do! (1996), about a 1960s pop group, also playing the role of a music producer. Hanks and producer Gary Goetzman went on to create Playtone, a record and film production company named after the record company in the film.

Hanks then executive produced, co-wrote and co-directed the HBO docudrama From the Earth to the Moon (1998). The 12-part series chronicled the space program from its inception, through the familiar flights of Neil Armstrong and Jim Lovell, to the personal feelings surrounding the reality of Moon landings. The Emmy Award–winning project was, at $68 million (equivalent to $ million in ), one of the most expensive ventures undertaken for television.

His next project was no less expensive. For Saving Private Ryan (1998), he worked with Steven Spielberg to make a film about a search through war-torn France after D-Day to bring back a soldier. It earned the praise and respect of the film community, critics and the general public. It was labeled one of the finest war films ever made and earned Spielberg his second Academy Award for direction, and Hanks another Best Actor nomination. Later that year, Hanks re-teamed with Ephron and Ryan for You've Got Mail, a remake of Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner (1940). He starred in Frank Darabont's The Green Mile (1999), based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King. He reprised the role of Woody in Toy Story 2 (1999).

2000–2009: Established star and expansion
Hanks reunited with Zemeckis for Cast Away (2000), playing a marooned FedEx systems analyst. Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times wrote: "Hanks proves here again what an effective actor he is, never straining for an effect, always persuasive even in this unlikely situation, winning our sympathy with his eyes and his body language when there's no one else on the screen."

Hanks co-directed and produced the Emmy Award-winning HBO miniseries Band of Brothers (2001). He also appeared in the September 11 television special America: A Tribute to Heroes and the documentary Rescued From the Closet. In 2002, he teamed up with Sam Mendes for Road to Perdition, an adaptation of the adaptation of Max Allan Collins's and Richard Piers Rayner's comics, in which he played an anti-hero role as a hitman on the run with his son. Hanks reunited with Spielberg, starring opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can (2002), based on the true story of conman Frank Abagnale, Jr. Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson produced My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002). In August 2007, Hanks, along with co-producers Wilson and Gary Goetzman and writer and star Nia Vardalos, initiated a legal action against the production company Gold Circle Films for their share of profits from the movie. At the age of 45, Hanks became the youngest-ever recipient of the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award on June 12, 2002.

In 2004, he appeared in three films: The Coen brothers' The Ladykillers, Spielberg's The Terminal and Zemeckis's The Polar Express, a family film for which Hanks played multiple motion capture roles. In a USA Weekend interview, Hanks discussed how he chooses projects: "[Since] A League of Their Own, it can't be just another movie for me. It has to get me going somehow ... There has to be some all-encompassing desire or feeling about wanting to do that particular movie. I'd like to assume that I'm willing to go down any avenue in order to do it right". In August 2005, Hanks was voted in as vice president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Hanks next starred in The Da Vinci Code (2006), which grossed over US$750 million worldwide. In 2006, Hanks topped a 1,500-strong list of "most trusted celebrities" compiled by Forbes magazine. He produced the animated children's movie The Ant Bully and Starter for Ten, a comedy about working-class students attempting to win on University Challenge.

Hanks did voice work for Ken Burns's documentary The War (2007), reading excerpts from World War II-era columns by Al McIntosh. Hanks played himself in The Simpsons Movie (2007), in which he appeared in an announcement claiming that the U.S. government has lost its credibility and is hence buying some of his. He also made an appearance in the credits, expressing a desire to be left alone when he is out in public. He starred in Mike Nichols's Charlie Wilson's War (2007) as Democratic Texas Congressman Charles Wilson. In the comedy-drama film The Great Buck Howard (2008), Hanks played the on-screen father of a young man (played by Hanks' real-life son Colin) who chooses to work as road manager for a fading mentalist (John Malkovich). His character was less than thrilled about his son's career decision. In the same year, he executive produced the musical comedy Mamma Mia! and the miniseries John Adams.

Hanks' next endeavor was Angels & Demons (2009). Its April 11, 2007, announcement revealed that Hanks would reprise his role as Robert Langdon, and that he would reportedly receive the highest salary ever for an actor. The following day he made his 10th appearance on NBC's Saturday Night Live, impersonating himself for the Celebrity Jeopardy sketch. Hanks produced Spike Jonze's Where The Wild Things Are (2009), based on the children's book by Maurice Sendak.

2010–2019: Broadway debut and other roles
Hanks reprised his role of Woody in Toy Story 3 (2010) after he, Tim Allen and John Ratzenberger were invited to a movie theater to see a complete story reel of the movie. The film went on to become the highest-grossing animated film at the time. He executive produced the miniseries The Pacific (2010).

In 2011, he directed and starred opposite Julia Roberts in the title role in the romantic comedy Larry Crowne. The movie received poor reviews, with only 35% of the 175 Rotten Tomatoes reviews giving it high ratings. Also in 2011, he starred in the drama Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. In 2012, he voiced the character Cleveland Carr for a web series he created, Electric City. He played multiple parts in Cloud Atlas (2012), based on the novel of the same name by David Mitchell, and was executive producer of the miniseries Game Change.

In 2013, Hanks starred in two critically acclaimed films—Paul Greengrass's Captain Phillips and John Lee Hancock's Saving Mr. Banks—which earned him praise, including nominations for the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role and the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama for the former role. In Captain Phillips, he starred as Captain Richard Phillips with Barkhad Abdi, which was based on the Maersk Alabama hijacking. In Saving Mr. Banks, co-starring Emma Thompson, he was the first actor to portray Walt Disney in a mainstream film. That same year, Hanks made his Broadway debut, starring in Nora Ephron's Lucky Guy, for which he was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play.

In 2014, Hanks' short story "Alan Bean Plus Four" was published in The New Yorker. Revolving around four friends who make a voyage to the moon, the short story is titled after the Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean. Slate magazine's Katy Waldman found his first published short story "mediocre", writing that "Hanks' shopworn ideas about technology might have yet sung if they hadn't been wrapped in too-clever lit mag-ese". In an interview with The New Yorker, Hanks said he has always been fascinated by space. He told the magazine that he built plastic models of rockets when he was a child and watched live broadcasts of space missions back in the 1960s.

In March 2015, Hanks appeared in the music video for Carly Rae Jepsen's "I Really Like You", lip-syncing most of the song's lyrics as he goes through his daily routine. His next film was Steven Spielberg's Bridge of Spies (2015), in which he played lawyer James B. Donovan, who negotiated for the release of pilot Francis Gary Powers by the Soviet Union in exchange for KGB spy Rudolf Abel. In April 2016, Hanks starred as Alan Clay in the comedy-drama A Hologram for the King, an adaptation of the 2012 novel of the same name. It is the second time he was directed by Tom Tykwer after Cloud Atlas. Hanks starred as airline captain Chesley Sullenberger in Clint Eastwood's Sully (2016). He next reprised his role as Robert Langdon in Inferno (2016), and co-starred alongside Emma Watson in the 2017 science fiction drama The Circle. He voiced David S. Pumpkins in The David S. Pumpkins Halloween Special, which aired October 28, 2017, on NBC, a character he had portrayed in episodes of Saturday Night Live.

Hanks reprised his role as Sheriff Woody in Pixar's Toy Story 4 (2019). Hanks portrayed Fred Rogers in Marielle Heller's biographical film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019), for which he was nominated for his first Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

2020–present
On April 11, 2020, Hanks made his first television appearance since his COVID-19 diagnosis by hosting Saturday Night Live. Hanks delivered an opening monologue via his house but did not appear in any of the sketches. This is the first episode of SNL to debut after the show's hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic; it features different sketches filmed remotely from the cast members' homes. This is also a first in SNL history, for the show to be made up entirely of prerecorded content before airing, and the second to not be filmed at Studio 8H.

Hanks had two films released in 2020. Hanks starred in Greyhound, a war film which he also wrote the screenplay for. Initially set to be theatrically released in June 2020 by Sony Pictures, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, distribution rights to the film were bought by Apple TV+, where it was released in July 2020. He reunited with Paul Greengrass for the Western News of the World. David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter praised Hanks' performance: "Hanks has built a career out of playing thoroughly decent men, so his casting here is entirely to type. But the soulfulness and sorrow, the innate compassion that ripple through his characterization make this an enormously pleasurable performance to watch, with new depths of both kindness and regret that keep revealing themselves."

In 2021, Hanks starred in the science fiction drama Finch, directed by Miguel Sapochnik, and released by Apple TV+. On March 2, 2022, Connor Ratliff appeared as a guest on Late Night With Seth Meyers, where he revealed that Hanks would at last be interviewed for the season three finale of Ratliff's podcast Dead Eyes. The conversation between Hanks and Ratliff took place 22 years after Ratliff was about to begin filming an episode of Band of Brothers, when he was subsequently fired, allegedly because Hanks believed Ratliff had "dead eyes". The 90 minute interview was hailed as a momentous achievement in podcasting, a "rare show that gives you a perfect conclusion", "surprisingly funny and empathetic", and an event Paul Scheer called "thrilling".

Hanks had three films released in 2022. He first starred as Tom Parker, the manager of Elvis Presley, in Baz Luhrmann's Elvis. Shooting commenced in the beginning of 2020 in Queensland, Australia, and the film was released in June 2022. Hanks next film was portraying Geppetto in Walt Disney Studios' live-action adaptation of Pinocchio. His involvement in the film, which was directed by his longtime collaborator Zemeckis, was officially confirmed in December 2020, and released on September 8, 2022, by Disney+. Hanks' final film of the year was A Man Called Otto, an English-language remake of the Swedish film A Man Called Ove. In 2023, Hanks appeared in Wes Anderson's Asteroid City, starring alongside Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Adrien Brody, Jeffrey Wright and Bryan Cranston. The film premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival to mixed reviews, and was released in June 2023.

HBO confirmed in January 2013 that it was developing a third World War II miniseries based on the book Masters of the Air by Donald L. Miller with Hanks and Spielberg, to follow Band of Brothers and The Pacific. NME reported in March 2017 that production was progressing under the working title The Mighty Eighth. On October 11, 2019, it was announced that the series would keep the title from the book and that the miniseries would stream on Apple TV+ due to budget constraints at HBO. Masters of the Air was expected to cost $200 million with a duration of at least eight hours. The series premiered on January 26, 2024. Hanks is also appearing in In the Garden of Beasts, an adaptation of the 2011 non fiction book from director Joe Wright about American diplomat William Dodd. In February 2022, it was announced that Hanks will star in the feature adaptation of Here, a graphic novel by Richard McGuire, directed by Robert Zemeckis.

Filmography
As an actor

Awards and honors

In Hanks' career as an actor and producer, he has received many award nominations. Hanks has received six Academy Award nominations including two consecutive wins for Best Actor for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump in 1993 and 1994 respectively. Hanks also received a Tony Award nomination for Best Actor in a Play for his performance in Nora Ephron's play Lucky Guy in 2013. Hanks has also received 12 Primetime Emmy Award nominations for his work on television which includes 7 wins for his work as a producer on various limited series and television films including From the Earth to the Moon (1998), Band of Brothers (2002), John Adams (2008), The Pacific (2010), Game Change (2012), and Olive Kitteridge (2015).

Honors
 * 2002: AFI Life Achievement Award
 * 2006: Douglas S. Morrow Public Outreach Award
 * 2014: Kennedy Center Honors Medallion
 * 2016: Presidential Medal of Freedom
 * 2016: French Legion of Honor, at the rank of Chevalier (Knight), for his presentation of World War II and support of World War II veterans, along with Tom Brokaw, retired NBC anchor, and Gordon H. Mueller, president and co-founder of the National WWII Museum, New Orleans.
 * 2019: Honorary citizen of Greece.
 * 2020: Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award

Personal life
Hanks married American actress Samantha Lewes (1952–2002) in 1978. They had one son, actor Colin (b. 1977), and one daughter, Elizabeth (b. 1982). Hanks and Lewes divorced in 1987. Lewes died in 2002 at the age of 49 from bone cancer. Hanks actively attends church. He said, "I must say that when I go to church—and I do go to church—I ponder the mystery. I meditate on the 'why?' of 'why people are as they are' and 'why bad things happen to good people,' and 'why good things happen to bad people'[...] The mystery is what I think is, almost, the grand unifying theory of all mankind."

In 1981, Hanks met actress Rita Wilson on the set of TV comedy Bosom Buddies (1980–1982). They were reunited in 1985 on the set of Volunteers. Wilson is of Greek and Bulgarian descent, and a member of the Greek Orthodox Church. Before marrying her, Hanks converted to her faith. Hanks and Wilson married in 1988 and have two sons. The older, Chet, released a rap song in 2011 and had recurring roles in Empire and Shameless. Their younger, Truman, was born in 1995, and portrayed the younger version of his father's character in A Man Called Otto (2022). Hanks lives with his family in Los Angeles, California, and Ketchum, Idaho.

In October 2013, Hanks said he has type 2 diabetes. Despite being a fan of the Oakland Athletics and the Raiders when they were based in Oakland, Hanks stated in April 2017 he would boycott the NFL for two years after the Raiders filed for relocation to Las Vegas. Since 1984, Hanks has been an avid fan of the English Premier League club Aston Villa.

In November 2019, shortly before the release of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, a drama film in which Hanks portrays Fred Rogers, he learned through Ancestry.com that he and Rogers were sixth cousins, both descendants of Johannes Meffert (1732–1795), who was born in Schöneck, Hesse, Germany (then part of the Holy Roman Empire) and emigrated to the United States in the 18th century, settling in Kentucky and changing his last name to Mefford. Hanks is also a distant relative of the 16th US president, Abraham Lincoln. Hanks narrated the 2011 television program Killing Lincoln.

On December 27, 2019, the President of Greece, Prokopis Pavlopoulos, signed an honorary naturalization order for Hanks and his family, citing their "exceptional services to Greece", thus making him and his immediate family Greek citizens. Hanks, along with Wilson and their children, were conferred honorary citizenship for their role in bringing global attention and appealing for aid after a devastating wildfire that ripped through the seaside village of Mati, near Athens, in July 2018, which killed more than 100 people. Greece's Interior Minister Takis Theodorikakos said Hanks "showed real interest in the people who suffered from the fire in Mati and promoted this issue in the global media". On July 26, 2020, the Prime Minister of Greece, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, accompanied with his wife, handed over Greek passports to both Hanks and Wilson.

Political views and activism
Hanks has donated to many Democratic politicians, and during the 2008 United States presidential election uploaded a video to his MySpace account endorsing Barack Obama. He also narrated a 2012 documentary, The Road We've Traveled, created by Obama for America. In 2016, Hanks endorsed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.

Hanks was outspoken about his opposition to the 2008 Proposition8, an amendment to the California constitution that defined marriage as a union only between a man and a woman. Hanks and others raised over US$44 million to campaign against the proposition. While premiering a TV series in January 2009, Hanks called supporters of Proposition8 "un-American" and criticized LDS Church members, who were major proponents of the bill, for their views on marriage and role in supporting the bill. About a week later, he apologized for the remark, saying that nothing is more American than voting one's conscience.

A proponent of environmentalism, Hanks is an investor in electric vehicles and owns a Toyota RAV4 EV and the first production AC Propulsion eBox. He was a lessee of an EV1 before it was recalled, as chronicled in the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? He was on the waiting list for an Aptera2 Series.

Hanks serves as campaign chair of the Hidden Heroes Campaign of the Elizabeth Dole Foundation. The stated mission of the campaign is to inspire a national movement to more effectively support the military and veteran caregivers.

In 2004, while touring the White House, Hanks learned that the press corps did not have a coffee pot, and shortly thereafter he donated an espresso machine. He again donated new machines in 2010 and 2017. His 2017 donation was accompanied by a note that read "To the White House Press Corps, Keep up the good fight for Truth, Justice, and the American Way. Especially for the truth part." He endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.

Other activities
A supporter of NASA's crewed space program, Hanks said he originally wanted to be an astronaut. Hanks is a member of the National Space Society, serving on the Board of governors of the nonprofit educational space advocacy organization founded by Wernher von Braun. He also produced the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon about the Apollo program to send astronauts to the Moon. In addition, Hanks co-wrote and co-produced Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3D, an IMAX film about the Moon landings. Hanks provided the voice-over for the premiere of the show Passport to the Universe at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

In 2006, the Space Foundation awarded Hanks the Douglas S. Morrow Public Outreach Award, given annually to an individual or organization that has made significant contributions to public awareness of space programs.

In June 2006, Hanks was inducted as an honorary member of the United States Army Rangers Hall of Fame for his accurate portrayal of a captain in the movie Saving Private Ryan; Hanks, who was unable to attend the induction ceremony, was the first actor to receive such an honor. In addition to his role in Saving Private Ryan, Hanks was cited for serving as the national spokesperson for the World War II Memorial Campaign, for being the honorary chairperson of the D-Day Museum Capital Campaign, and for his role in writing and helping to produce the Emmy Award-winning miniseries, Band of Brothers. On March 10, 2008, Hanks was on hand at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to induct The Dave Clark Five.

Hanks is a collector of manual typewriters and uses them almost daily. In August 2014, Hanks released Hanx Writer, an iOS app meant to emulate the experience of using a typewriter; within days the free app reached number one on the App Store. After contracting and recovering from a COVID-19 infection early in the pandemic, Hanks and his wife donated their blood antibodies for virus research. Hanks is an ordained minister, and on March 24, 2022, CBS News reported that he had recently officiated a wedding in Pittsburgh.

Legacy

Hanks is often compared to James Stewart, and has also frequently been referred to as "America's Dad". In 2013, when he was starring in Nora Ephron's Lucky Guy on Broadway, he had crowds of 300 fans waiting for a glimpse of him after every performance. This is the highest number of expectant fans post-show of any Broadway performance.

Hanks is ranked as the fifth-highest all-time box office star in North America, with a total gross of over $4.9 billion at the North American box office, an average of $100.8 million per film. Worldwide, his films have grossed over $9.96 billion. Asteroid 12818 Tomhanks is named after him.

In 2003, Hanks was voted Number 3 in Channel 4's countdown of the 100 Greatest Movie Stars of All Time, and he is number 22 on VH1's list of the "200 Greatest Pop Culture Icons of All Time". He was included on Forbes' list of the top ten most powerful celebrities in the world, in 2000, 2002, and 2003.

Hanks was the guest on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs on May 8, 2016; his chosen favorite song, book and luxury item were Richard Strauss' Also sprach Zarathustra by the Vienna Philharmonic, A World Lit Only by Fire by William Manchester, and a Hermes 3000 typewriter and paper, respectively.

Hanks was interviewed five times on WHYY-FM by Terry Gross on the radio show Fresh Air in Philadelphia. Topics included two segments on his lead role in Captain Phillips, a movie about the real life story of a ship's captain hijacked by Somali pirates. Two interviews are about the 12 part miniseries From Earth to the Moon, for which Hanks was executive producer and which was nominated for 17 Emmy Awards. The last interview segment comprises anecdotes shared by Hanks about his acting career.

title: Tom Hanks


text:
Ghost town

A ghost town, deserted city, extinct town, or abandoned city is an abandoned settlement, usually one that contains substantial visible remaining buildings and infrastructure such as roads. A town often becomes a ghost town because the economic activity that supported it (usually industrial or agricultural) has failed or ended for any reason (i.e. a host ore deposit exhausted by mining). The town may have also declined because of natural or human-caused disasters such as floods, prolonged droughts, extreme heat or extreme cold, government actions, uncontrolled lawlessness, war, pollution, or nuclear and radiation-related accidents and incidents. The term can sometimes refer to cities, towns, and neighborhoods that, though still populated, are significantly less so than in past years; for example, those affected by high levels of unemployment and dereliction.

Some ghost towns, especially those that preserve period-specific architecture, have become tourist attractions. Some examples are Bannack, Montana and Oatman, Arizona in the United States; Barkerville, British Columbia in Canada; Craco and Pompeii in Italy; Aghdam in Azerbaijan; Kolmanskop in Namibia; Pripyat and Chernobyl in Ukraine; Dhanushkodi in India; Fordlândia in Brazil and Villa Epecuén in Argentina.

Definition
The definition of a ghost town varies between individuals, and between cultures. Some writers discount settlements that were abandoned as a result of a natural or human-made disaster or other causes using the term only to describe settlements that were deserted because they were no longer economically viable; T. Lindsey Baker, author of Ghost Towns of Texas, defines a ghost town as "a town for which the reason for being no longer exists." Some believe that any settlement with visible tangible remains should not be called a ghost town; others say, conversely, that a ghost town should contain the tangible remains of buildings. Whether or not the settlement must be completely deserted, or may contain a small population, is also a matter for debate. Generally, though, the term is used in a looser sense, encompassing any and all of these definitions. American author Lambert Florin defined a ghost town as "a shadowy semblance of a former self."

Reasons for abandonment
Factors leading to the abandonment of towns include depleted natural resources, economic activity shifting elsewhere, railroads and roads bypassing or no longer accessing the town, human intervention, disasters, massacres, wars, and the shifting of politics or fall of empires. A town can also be abandoned when it is part of an exclusion zone due to natural or human-made causes.

Economic activity shifting elsewhere

Ghost towns may result when the single activity or resource that created a boomtown (e.g., nearby mine, mill or resort) is depleted or the resource economy undergoes a "bust" (e.g., catastrophic resource price collapse). Boomtowns can often decrease in size as fast as they initially grew. Sometimes, all or nearly the entire population can desert the town, resulting in a ghost town.

The dismantling of a boomtown can often occur on a planned basis. Mining companies nowadays will create a temporary community to service a mine site, building all the accommodations, shops and services required, and then remove them once the resource has been extracted. Modular buildings can be used to facilitate the process. A gold rush would often bring intensive but short-lived economic activity to a remote village, only to leave a ghost town once the resource was depleted.

In some cases, multiple factors may remove the economic basis for a community; some former mining towns on U.S. Route 66 suffered both mine closures when the resources were depleted and loss of highway traffic as US 66 was diverted from places like Oatman, Arizona, onto a more direct path. Mine and pulp mill closures have led to many ghost towns in British Columbia, Canada, including several relatively recent ones: Ocean Falls, which closed in 1973 after the pulp mill was decommissioned; Kitsault, whose molybdenum mine shut down after only 18 months in 1982; and Cassiar, whose asbestos mine operated from 1952 to 1992.

In other cases, the reason for abandonment can arise from a town's intended economic function shifting to another, nearby place. This happened to Collingwood, Queensland, in Outback Australia when nearby Winton outperformed Collingwood as a regional centre for the livestock-raising industry. The railway reached Winton in 1899, linking it with the rest of Queensland, and Collingwood was a ghost town by the following year. More broadly across Australia, there has been a shift towards fly-in fly-out arrangements over building a company town, in order to avoid the development of ghost towns once a mining resource has been fully extracted.

The Middle East has many ghost towns and ruins that were created when the shifting of politics or the fall of empires caused capital cities to be socially or economically unviable, such as Ctesiphon.

The rise of real-estate speculation and the resulting possibility of real-estate bubbles (sometimes due to outright overbuilding by land developers) may also trigger the appearance of certain elements of a ghost town, as real-estate prices initially rise (whereupon affordable housing becomes less available) and then later fall for a variety of reasons that are often tied to economic cycles and/or marketing hubris. This has been observed to occur in various countries, including Spain, China, the United States, and Canada, where housing is often used as an investment rather than for habitation.

Human intervention

Railroads and roads bypassing or no longer reaching a town can also create a ghost town. This was the case in many of the ghost towns along Ontario's historic Opeongo Line, and along U.S. Route 66 after motorists bypassed the latter on the faster moving highways I-44 and I-40. Some ghost towns were founded along railways where steam trains would stop at periodic intervals to take on water. Amboy, California, was part of one such series of villages along the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad across the Mojave Desert.

River re-routing is another factor, one example being the towns along the Aral Sea.

Ghost towns may be created when land is expropriated by a government, and residents are required to relocate. One example is the village of Tyneham in Dorset, England, acquired during World War II to build an artillery range.

A similar situation occurred in the U.S. when NASA acquired land to construct the John C. Stennis Space Center (SSC), a rocket testing facility in Hancock County, Mississippi (on the Mississippi side of the Pearl River, which is the Mississippi–Louisiana state line). This required NASA to acquire a large (approximately 34 sqmi) buffer zone because of the loud noise and potential dangers associated with testing such rockets. Five thinly populated rural Mississippi communities (Gainesville, Logtown, Napoleon, Santa Rosa, and Westonia), plus the northern portion of a sixth (Pearlington), along with 700 families in residence, had to be completely relocated away from the facility.

Sometimes the town might cease to officially exist, but the physical infrastructure remains. For example, the five Mississippi communities that had to be abandoned to build SSC still have remnants of those communities within the facility itself. These include city streets, now overgrown with forest flora and fauna, and a one-room schoolhouse. Another example of infrastructure remaining is the former town of Weston, Illinois, that voted itself out of existence and turned the land over for construction of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Many houses and even a few barns remain, used for housing visiting scientists and storing maintenance equipment, while roads that used to cross through the site have been blocked off at the edges of the property, with gatehouses or barricades to prevent unsupervised access.

Flooding by dams
Construction of dams has produced ghost towns that have been left underwater. Examples include:
 * Kensico, New York was replaced by the Kensico Reservoir.
 * Loyston, Tennessee, U.S., inundated by the creation of Norris Dam and reconstructed on nearby higher ground
 * St. Thomas, Nevada, U.S., flooded by up to 70 feet of water by Lake Mead following construction of the Hoover Dam
 * The Lost Villages of Ontario, flooded by Saint Lawrence Seaway construction in 1958
 * Nether Hambleton and Middle Hambleton in Rutland, England, which were flooded to create Rutland Water
 * Ashopton and Derwent, England, flooded during the construction of the Ladybower Reservoir
 * The Tignes Dam flooded the village of Tignes in France, displacing 78 families
 * Mologa in Russia was flooded by the creation of Rybinsk reservoir in 1940.
 * Many ancient villages were abandoned during construction of the Three Gorges Dam in China, leading to the displacement of many rural people
 * In Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica, inhabitants of Arenal and Tronadora were forced to relocate in 1978 to make room for the human-made Lake Arenal.
 * Old Adaminaby in New South Wales, Australia, was flooded by a dam of the Snowy River Scheme.
 * Construction of the Aswan High Dam on the Nile River in Egypt submerged archaeological sites and ancient settlements, such as Buhen under Lake Nasser.
 * Tehri was drowned after the construction of the Tehri Dam in the Indian state of Uttarakhand.
 * Aceredo and five other villages in the region of Galicia, Spain, drowned by the construction of Alto Lindoso Dam downstream in Portugal in 1992 (later exposed after extreme drought conditions in early 2022 )

Massacres
Some towns become deserted when their populations were massacred, deported, or expelled. Examples include Kayaköy, an ancient Greek city abandoned in 1923 as result of population exchange between Greece and Turkey and the original French village at Oradour-sur-Glane which was destroyed on 10 June 1944 when 642 of its 663 inhabitants were killed by a German Waffen-SS company. A new village was built after the war on a nearby site, and the ruins of the original have been maintained as a memorial. Another example is Aghdam, a city in Azerbaijan. Armenian forces occupied Aghdam in July 1993 during the First Nagorno-Karabakh War. The heavy fighting forced the entire population to flee. Upon seizing the city, Armenian forces destroyed much of the town to discourage Azerbaijanis from returning. More damage occurred in the following decades when locals looted the abandoned town for building materials. It is currently almost entirely ruined and uninhabited.

Disasters, actual and anticipated
Natural and human-made disasters can create ghost towns. For example, after being flooded more than 30 times since their town was founded in 1845, residents of Pattonsburg, Missouri, decided to relocate after two floods in 1993. With government help, the whole town was rebuilt 3 mi away.

Craco, a medieval village in the Italian region of Basilicata, was evacuated after a landslide in 1963. Nowadays it is a filming location for many movies, including The Passion of The Christ by Mel Gibson, Christ Stopped at Eboli by Francesco Rosi, The Nativity Story by Catherine Hardwicke and Quantum of Solace by Marc Forster.

In 1984, Centralia, Pennsylvania, was abandoned due to an uncontainable mine fire, which began in 1962 and still rages to this day; eventually the fire reached an abandoned mine underneath the nearby town of Byrnesville, which caused that mine to catch on fire too and forced the evacuation of that town as well.

Ghost towns may also occasionally come into being due to an anticipated natural disaster – for example, the Canadian town of Lemieux, Ontario, was abandoned in 1991 after soil testing revealed that the community was built on an unstable bed of Leda clay. Two years after the last building in Lemieux was demolished, a landslide swept part of the former town-site into the South Nation River. Two decades earlier, the Canadian town of Saint-Jean-Vianney, Québec, also constructed on a Leda clay base, had been abandoned after a landslide on 4 May 1971, which swept away 41 homes, killing 31 people.

Following the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, dangerously high levels of nuclear contamination escaped into the surrounding area, and nearly 200 towns and villages in Ukraine and neighbouring Belarus were evacuated, including the cities of Pripyat and Chernobyl. The area was so contaminated that many of the evacuees were never permitted to return to their homes. Pripyat is the most famous of these abandoned towns; it was built for the workers of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and had a population of almost 50,000 at the time of the disaster.

Disease and contamination
Significant fatality rates from epidemics have produced ghost towns. Some places in eastern Arkansas were abandoned after more than 7,000 Arkansans died during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 and 1919. Several communities in Ireland, particularly in the west of the country, were wiped out due to the Great Famine in the latter half of the 19th century, and the years of economic decline that followed.

Catastrophic environmental damage caused by long-term contamination can also create a ghost town. Some notable examples are Times Beach, Missouri, whose residents were exposed to a high level of dioxins, and Wittenoom, Western Australia, which was once Australia's largest source of blue asbestos, but was shut down in 1966 due to health concerns. Treece and Picher, twin communities straddling the Kansas–Oklahoma border, were once one of the United States' largest sources of zinc and lead, but over a century of unregulated disposal of mine tailings led to groundwater contamination and lead poisoning in the town's children, eventually resulting in a mandatory Environmental Protection Agency buyout and evacuation. Contamination due to ammunition caused by military use may also lead to the development of ghost towns. Tyneham, in Dorset, was requisitioned for military exercises during the Second World War, and remains unpopulated, being littered with unexploded munitions from regular shelling.

Ghost town repopulation
A few ghost towns have managed to get a second life, and this happens through a variety of reasons. One of these reasons is heritage tourism generating a new economy able to support residents.

For example, Walhalla, Victoria, Australia, became almost deserted after its gold mine ceased operation in 1914, but owing to its accessibility and proximity to other attractive locations, it has had a recent economic and holiday population surge. Another town, Sungai Lembing, Malaysia, was almost deserted due to closure of a tin mine in 1986 was revived in 2001 and has become a tourist destination since then.

Foncebadón, a village in León, Spain, that was mostly abandoned and only inhabited by a mother and son, is slowly being revived owing to the ever-increasing stream of pilgrims on the road to Santiago de Compostela.

Some ghost towns (e.g. Riace, Muñotello) are being repopulated by respectively refugees and homeless people. In Riace, this was accomplished by a scheme funded by the Italian government which offers the housing to refugees and in Muñotello it was accomplished through an NGO (Madrina Foundation).

In Algeria, many cities became hamlets after the end of Late Antiquity. They were revived with shifts in population during and after French colonization of Algeria. Oran, currently the nation's second-largest city with 1 million people, was a village of only a few thousand people before colonization.

Alexandria, the second-largest city of Egypt, was a flourishing city in the Ancient era, but declined during the Middle Ages. It underwent a dramatic revival during the 19th century; from a population of 5,000 in 1806, it grew into a city of more than 200,000 inhabitants by 1882, and is now home to more than four million people.

Africa
Wars and rebellions in some African countries have left many towns and villages deserted. Since 2003, when President François Bozizé came to power, thousands of citizens of the Central African Republic have been forced to flee their homes as a result of the escalating conflict between armed rebels and government troops. Villages accused of supporting the rebels, such as Beogombo Deux near Paoua, are ransacked by government soldiers. Those who are not killed have no choice but to escape to refugee camps. The instability in the region also leaves organized and well-equipped bandits free to terrorize the populace, often leaving villages abandoned in their wake. Elsewhere in Africa, the town of Lukangol was burnt to the ground during tribal clashes in South Sudan. Before its destruction, the town had a population of 20,000. The Libyan town of Tawergha had a population of around 25,000 before it was abandoned during the 2011 civil war, and it has remained empty since.

Many of the ghost towns in mineral-rich Africa are former mining towns. Shortly after the start of the 1908 diamond rush in German South-West Africa, now known as Namibia, the German Imperial government claimed sole mining rights by creating the Sperrgebiet ("forbidden zone"), effectively criminalizing new settlement. The small mining towns of this area, among them Pomona, Elizabeth Bay and Kolmanskop, were exempt from this ban, but the denial of new land claims soon rendered all of them ghost towns.

Asia
The town of Dhanushkodi, India is a ghost town. It was destroyed during the 1964 Rameswaram cyclone and remains uninhabited in the aftermath.

Many abandoned towns and settlements in the former Soviet Union were established near Gulag labour camps to supply necessary services. Since most of these camps were abandoned in the 1950s, the towns were abandoned as well. One such town is located near the former Gulag camp called Butugychag (also called Lower Butugychag). Other towns were deserted due to deindustrialisation and the economic crises of the early 1990s attributed to post-Soviet conflicts – one example being Tkvarcheli in Georgia, a coal mining town that suffered a drastic population decline as a result of the War in Abkhazia in the early 1990s.

Although in 2010s Chinese ghost cities became a frequent feature of discourse regarding China's economy and urbanization, under-occupied cities filled up. Writing in 2023, academic and former UK diplomat Kerry Brown described the idea of Chinese ghost cities as a popular bandwagon which was shown to be a myth.

The town of Namie, along with several other towns in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan, was temporarily evacuated as a result of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. Following ongoing decontamination works, several portions of Namie have been fully reopened to residents, allowing reconstruction and renovation of the town's buildings to be undertaken and resettlement of the area to take place.

Europe
Urbanization – the migration of a country's rural population into the cities – has left many European towns and villages deserted. An increasing number of settlements in Bulgaria are becoming ghost towns for this reason; at the time of the 2011 census, the country had 181 uninhabited settlements. In Hungary, dozens of villages are also threatened with abandonment. The first village officially declared as "dead" was in the late 1970s, but later it was repopulated as an eco-village. Some other depopulated villages were successfully saved as small rural resorts, such as Kán, Tornakápolna, Szanticska, Gorica, and Révfalu.

In Spain, large zones of the mountainous Iberian System and the Pyrenees have undergone heavy depopulation since the early 20th century, leaving a string of ghost towns in areas such as the Solana Valley. Traditional agricultural practices such as sheep and goat rearing, on which the mountain village economy was based, were not taken over by the local youth, especially after the lifestyle changes that swept over rural Spain during the second half of the 20th century.

Examples for ghost towns in Italy include the medieval village of Fabbriche di Careggine near Lago di Vagli, in province of Lucca, in Tuscany, the deserted mountain village Craco located in Basilicata, which has served as a filming location, and the ghost village Roveraia, in the municipality of Loro Ciuffenna, in province of Arezzo, situated near Pratovalle. During World War II it was an important partisan base  and it was definitively abandoned in the 1980s, when the last family who lived here, left the village.. Two projects have been proposed for the recovery of the village: in 2011 the proposal of Movimento Libero Perseo "Roveraia eco - lab", based on sustainability,  and in 2019 there was a proposal aiming to recover the village with a mix of functions called "Ecomuseum of Pratomagno".

In the United Kingdom, thousands of villages were abandoned during the Middle Ages, as a result of Black Death, revolts, and enclosure, the process by which vast amounts of farmland became privately owned. Since there are rarely any visible remains of these settlements, they are not generally considered ghost towns; instead, they are referred to in archaeological circles as deserted medieval villages.

Sometimes, wars and genocide end a town's life. In 1944, occupying German Waffen-SS troops murdered almost the entire population of the French village Oradour-sur-Glane. A new settlement was built nearby after the war, but the old town was left depopulated on the orders of President Charles de Gaulle, as a permanent memorial. In Germany, numerous smaller towns and villages in the former eastern territories were completely destroyed in the last two years of the war. These territories later became part of Poland and the Soviet Union, and many of the smaller settlements were never rebuilt or repopulated, for example Kłomino (Westfalenhof), Pstrąże (Pstransse), and Janowa Góra (Johannesberg). Some villages in England were also abandoned during the war, but for different reasons. Imber, on Salisbury Plain, and several villages in the Stanford Battle Area, were commandeered by the War Office for use as training grounds for British and US troops. Although this was intended to be a temporary measure, the residents were never allowed to return, and the villages have been used for military training ever since. 3 mi southeast of Imber is Copehill Down, a deserted village purpose-built for training in urban warfare.

Disasters & natural disasters have played a part in the abandonment of settlements within Europe. Two examples are Pripyat and Chernobyl. After the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, Both cities were evacuated due to dangerous radiation levels within the area. As of today, Pripyat remains completely abandoned, and Chernobyl has around 500 remaining inhabitants. Another example is Todoque in Spain. During the 2021 Cumbre Vieja volcanic eruption, the locality was severely affected. Hundreds of buildings which also includes Church of Saint Pius X, the health center, the headquarters of the neighborhood association, the School of Early Childhood Education, and Los Campitos Elementary School and the Todoque Elementary and the Infant Education School, and by October 10, new lava flows destroyed the buildings that were still standing, leaving the town practically erased from the map.

An example in the UK of a ghost village which was abandoned before it was ever occupied is at Polphail, Argyll and Bute. The planned development of an oil rig construction facility nearby never materialised, and a village built to house the workers and their families became deserted the moment the building contractors finished their work.

War activities, displacements and complete destruction of cities as result of intense fighting were the reason for their complete abandonment. Examples are Marinka and Soledar in Donbas in Ukraine.

Canada
Canada has several ghost towns in parts of British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, Saskatchewan, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Quebec. Some were logging towns or dual mining and logging sites, often developed at the behest of the company. In Alberta and Saskatchewan, most ghost towns were once farming communities that have since died off due to the removal of the railway through the town or the bypass of a highway. The ghost towns in British Columbia were predominantly mining towns and prospecting camps as well as canneries and, in one or two cases, large smelter and pulp mill towns. British Columbia has more ghost towns than any other jurisdiction on the North American continent, with more than 1,500 abandoned or semi-abandoned towns and localities. Among the most notable are Anyox, Kitsault, and Ocean Falls.

Some ghost towns have revived their economies and populations due to historical and eco-tourism, such as Barkerville; once the largest town north of Kamloops, it is now a year-round provincial museum. In Quebec, Val-Jalbert is a well-known tourist ghost town; founded in 1901 around a mechanical pulp mill that became obsolete when paper mills began to break down wood fibre by chemical means, it was abandoned when the mill closed in 1927 and re-opened as a park in 1960.

United States
Many ghost towns or abandoned communities exist in the American Great Plains, the rural areas of which have lost a third of their population since 1920. Thousands of communities in the northern plains states of Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota became railroad ghost towns when a rail line failed to materialize. Hundreds of towns were abandoned as the Interstate highway system replaced the railroads as the favored means of transportation. Ghost towns are common in mining or mill towns in all the western states, and many eastern and southern states as well. Residents are compelled to leave in search of more productive areas when the resources that had created an employment boom in these towns were eventually exhausted.

Sometimes a ghost town consists of many abandoned buildings as in Bodie, California, or standing ruins as in Rhyolite, Nevada, while elsewhere only the foundations of former buildings remain as in Graysonia, Arkansas. Old mining camps that have lost most of their population at some stage of their history such as Aspen, Deadwood, Oatman, Tombstone and Virginia City are sometimes referred to as ghost towns although they are presently active towns and cities. Many U.S. ghost towns, such as South Pass City in Wyoming are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Starting in 2002, an attempt to declare an official ghost town in California stalled when the adherents of the town of Bodie and those of Calico, in Southern California, could not agree on the most deserving settlement for the recognition. A compromise was eventually reached—Bodie became the official state gold rush ghost town, while Calico was named the official state silver rush ghost town.

Another former mining town, Real de Catorce in Mexico, has been used as a backdrop for Hollywood movies such as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), The Mexican (2001), and Bandidas (2006).

South America
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a wave of European immigrants arrived in Brazil and settled in the cities, which offered jobs, education, and other opportunities that enabled newcomers to enter the middle class. Many also settled in the growing small towns along the expanding railway system. Since the 1930s, many rural workers have moved to the big cities. Other ghost towns were created in the aftermath of dinosaur fossil rushes.

In Colombia, a volcano erupted in 1985, where the city of Armero was engulfed by lahars, which killed approximately 23,000 people in total. Armero was never rebuilt (its inhabitants being diverted to nearby cities, and thus becoming a ghost town), but still stands today as "holy land", as dictated by Pope John Paul II.

A number of ghost towns throughout South America were once mining camps or lumber mills, such as the many saltpeter mining camps that prospered in Chile from the end of the Saltpeter War until the invention of synthetic saltpeter during World War I. Some of these towns, such as the Humberstone and Santa Laura Saltpeter Works in the Atacama Desert, have been declared UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

Oceania
The boom and bust of gold rushes and the mining of other ores has led to a number of ghost towns in both Australia and New Zealand. Other towns have become abandoned whether due to natural disasters, the weather, or the drowning of valleys to increase the size of lakes.

In Australia, the Victoria gold rush led to numerous ghost towns (such as Cassilis and Moliagul), as did the hunt for gold in Western Australia (for example, the towns of Ora Banda and Kanowna). The mining of iron and other ores has also led to towns thriving briefly before dwindling. The town of Wittenoom was abandoned and demolished due to the health hazards posed by asbestos mining in the area.

In New Zealand, the Otago gold rush similarly led to several ghost towns (such as Macetown). New Zealand's ghost towns also include numerous coal mining areas in the South Island's West Coast Region, including Denniston and Stockton. Natural disasters have also led to the loss of some towns, notably Te Wairoa, "The Buried Village", destroyed in the 1886 eruption of Mount Tarawera, and the Otago town of Kelso, abandoned after it was flooded repeatedly after heavy rainstorms. Early settlements on the rugged southwest coast of the South Island at Martins Bay and Port Craig were also abandoned, mainly due to the inhospitable terrain.

Antarctica

The oldest ghost town in Antarctica is on Deception Island, where in 1906, a Norwegian-Chilean company set up a whaling station at Whalers Bay, which they used as a base for their factory ship, the Gobernador Bories. Other whaling operations followed suit, and by 1914 there were thirteen factory ships based there. The station ceased to be profitable during the Great Depression, and was abandoned in 1931. In 1969, the station was partially destroyed by a volcanic eruption. There are also many abandoned scientific and military bases in Antarctica, especially in the Antarctic Peninsula.

The Antarctic island of South Georgia used to have several thriving whaling settlements during the first half of the 20th century, with a combined population exceeding 2,000 in some years. These included Grytviken (operating 1904–64), Leith Harbour (1909–65), Ocean Harbour (1909–20), Husvik (1910–60), Stromness (1912–61) and Prince Olav Harbour (1917–34). The abandoned settlements have become increasingly dilapidated, and remain uninhabited nowadays except for the Museum curator's family at Grytviken. The jetty, the church, dwellings and industrial buildings at Grytviken have recently been renovated by the South Georgian Government, becoming a popular tourist destination. Some historical buildings in the other settlements are being restored as well.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Ghost town