ELM RIVER TOWNSHIP — The view from Tom Chobanian’s house in Houghton County is a thick wall of trees. It wasn’t always, though.

“There used to be nothing but whorehouses here,” said the wiry 29-year-old, pointing into the woods, recounting family memories. “This used to have 600 people. They had their bars right here, and, right here, there used to be nothing but wood stacked up. Lumber.”

Chobanian lives in Donken, an Upper Peninsula town that isn’t really a town anymore. More than a century ago, the Case Lumber Mill stood here and a whole town was built around it, named by the mill owner for his sons — Donald and Kenneth. It had a schoolhouse, a post office, a company store, a main street and, according to local lore, a few places where lumberjacks could unwind and get wild.

But decades after the mill closed, Donken slowly vanished. Now it’s just a brief interruption in a corridor of trees along a narrow highway. There are a few crumbling buildings left surrounded by wildflowers on the main road, and there’s a winding dirt road where only a few houses still stand, not far from the hollowed-out remains of the town’s old lumber mill. Chobanian’s mom lives in one of the houses; his brother lives next door in another. Farther down their road, there’s a Vietnam vet with two guard dogs and a deep mistrust of strangers. Don’t go down there, Chobanian warned.

Without a town around him, there’s no work and not much to do all day.

“I cut wood, fish,” he said. “I have a nice motorcycle. I go out and ride. I cut grass. Basically, if you don’t keep busy around here you’ll die quick, just sitting around. Boredom.”

The Detroit Free Press reports that Donken is just one of hundreds of ghost towns in Michigan, localities that died when the jobs dried up after the trees were all cut down or the copper was all mined and everyone moved away. Many are located in the Upper Peninsula, where fortunes were often tied to boom-or-bust mining. But the densest concentration of them is in the Keweenaw Peninsula, the site of a sudden copper rush and an equally spectacular collapse when the industry died.

Many of these towns don’t exist in their own right anymore; they’re classified as unincorporated communities that lie within a larger municipality’s boundaries, phantoms of once-living places. Donken, for example, exists in name only as part of Elm River Township.

There isn’t much left to most of them, apart from a few stone foundations where buildings once stood. Others are little more than notations in obscure history books, or a historical marker along the highway. But not all ghost towns are completely deserted. A few, like Donken, linger on the edge of death, and only a handful of residents keep them from official extinction.

There’s even one town at the north end of the Keweenaw Peninsula that one man has entirely to himself.

Life might seem bleak in a ghost town. For some people though, it’s ideal.

“I love it. Oh, I love it. You don’t even know,” he said. “I love just the peace and quiet, just the wind blowing. You can’t open up your door in a big city and piss out your back door. But here, you can.”

The Keweenaw Peninsula is the upper peninsula of the Upper Peninsula. It’s the state’s northernmost region, a landscape of small mountains, dense woods, wild berries, winding trails, icy beaches and hundreds of inches of snowfall each winter spawned by Lake Superior.

The Keweenaw was a remote backwoods populated by Chippewa Indians until Michigan’s first state geologist published a report in 1841 describing the massive copper deposits beneath the ground there. That spawned a land rush by speculators, investors and entrepreneurs who established dozens of mining companies in the region, followed by tens of thousands of immigrants from Finland, Cornwall and other parts of Europe who flooded the region to work in the mines. In response, the mining companies built and operated dozens of towns to accommodate them while they dug millions of dollars from the ground.

The region is known to this day as Copper Country because it was home to America’s first mining boom, which, in its heyday, supplied nearly all the nation’s copper and created 10 times more wealth than the California Gold Rush. The era of copper mining still defines the peninsula, from the ruins of shafts and mills dotting the landscape, to the trackless railroad grades now used as snowmobile trails, to the thousands of miles of tunnels carved out beneath the peninsula.

But rising production costs, a failed strike by miners in 1913 that required the Michigan National Guard to restore order and the collapse of copper prices during the Great Depression effectively brought an end to mining in the region. A brief spike in demand during World War II revived a few mining companies, but after the war, the jobs again vanished, this time for good. So did the residents, who left ghost towns in their wake as they moved elsewhere, leaving the buildings to be slowly consumed by the elements.

Today, the Keweenaw Peninsula economy relies mostly on tourists who come for hiking, fishing, skiing or snowmobiling, plus some small-scale logging operations. But that’s a fraction of the economic activity of the glory days.

“This is also a very familiar story to so many American places, especially industrial places where you have a lot of people come and work in one particular industry,” said Sarah Fayen Scarlett, a 41-year-old assistant professor of history at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, which was founded in 1885 as the Michigan Mining School specifically to train new mining engineers. “It’s a one-industry town mostly, and then when something goes wrong with the industry it really, really affects the people who live there. And that’s something that’s happened over and over again in so many American towns.”

She was standing in Lake Linden, near the ruins of a stamp mill for the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company, for years the leading copper producer in the world. An iPad in her hands featured an app that she helped create called the Keweenaw Time Traveler, which allows users to summon historical maps of any place they’re standing in the Keweenaw Peninsula, ghost town or otherwise, to evoke from the past the names of the buildings and streets that in many cases are now gone, and to give life to the ruins left behind. It showed a long row of buildings at the spot where she stood, where now there’s just a grassy park.

“I think there’s a lot of human story in ghost towns, even though there aren’t people there anymore,” Scarlett said. “They’re so evocative of what might have been there.”

“I think it boils down to curiosity about how they came to be,” said Dan Trepal, a senior research associate with the Time Traveler project. “And also just their picturesque appearance. It’s a visually arresting spectacle to see these things here.”

The Keweenaw is home to dozens of ghost towns, and they’ve become a popular attraction for tourists. Scarlett said she understands the enduring fascination with them — that whole generations could create something seemingly enduring, only to have it erased from the map and largely forgotten when circumstances change.

“You know, we have just the remnants of maybe a part of a church or a foundation, you can imagine someone’s life happening there, and then having the physical remains of that wiped away can feel really sad,” Scarlett said. “And it’s probably something everyone’s a little concerned about — what’s going to happen to us when we’re gone? Is anyone going to remember? Or am I just going to be this concrete slab left over from where I lived?”

You can survive in a ghost town by searching for buried scraps of metal, Chobanian said. You can get killed that way, too.

After the lumber mill in Donken closed decades ago, most local job options vanished. Chobanian grinds out a living by doing seasonal work like minnow trapping or selling deer bait for a few bucks here and there, but also through his own form of mining — exploring ghost towns of the region with a metal detector, hoping to find something of value left behind by those who fled years ago.

“I’ve nailed big chunks of copper,” he said. “We’ve found silver, gold. You can still find it. And there’s old wagon wheels wrapped around trees. As a kid I remember seeing them.”