The time was, maybe 30 or 40 years ago, when ghost town hunting was a popular activity for many New Mexicans who had a fondness for our history.

Scattered across the state were some 150 such sites to be discovered and visited by tourists, photographers and authors of ghost town guidebooks.

These dying or dead communities, mainly left over from the 19th century, tended to be extraordinarily picturesque. Often they contained buildings with elevated false fronts to give the appearance of being something more than they were.

A number of the best ghost towns have been used by Hollywood film producers as movie sets, after a little fixing up.

A writer once defined a ghost town as "a shadowy semblance of its former self." That leaves room for the inclusion of towns that are merely on their way to being dead, but still have a handful of residents.

In the 1960s, guidebooks and magazine features routinely referred to State Road 10 running south from Santa Fe as the "Ghost Town Highway." Today, it has been renumbered N.M. 14 and renamed the Turquoise Trail.

The original ghost towns were Cerrillos, Madrid, Golden and San Pedro. By the following decade, the first two were being repopulated by escapists and artists, Golden was holding its own, while even the ruins of San Pedro had disappeared.

This illustrates that towns formerly classified as ghosts can vanish entirely, or they may find a new reason for being and spring back to life.

As a rule, towns that started as prosperous mining camps were prime candidates to fall victim to the boom-and-bust cycle of the industry. The larger story was repeated over and again, with only the details changing.

Estey City, for example, grew up rapidly after 1899 as the home of Estey Copper Mining Co. Located on the El Paso and Northeastern Railroad 38 miles southwest of Carrizozo, the "city" developed a respectable downtown business district that gave it a feeling of permanence.

A collapse of world copper prices, however, brought a swift end for Estey City, which was abandoned by 1910. Nothing is left on the ground now except old mine dumps.

Dawson, northeast of Cimarron in Colfax County, thrived as a coal-mining town for more than half a century. Its population reached 9,000. There were suburbs, tree-lined streets, a high school, modern hospital staffed by five doctors, a theater, opera house, giant department store and churches.

When the end came, the reason was not that the coal deposits had been exhausted, but rather the railroads had converted from coal-fired steam locomotives to diesel. The demand for Dawson's one product plummeted and in 1954 the entire town was razed to the ground for salvage.

High in the Sangre de Cristos, five miles above Eagle Nest, lie the remains of Elizabethtown, often shortened to E-town. Its history began in the mid-1860s with a Wild West-style gold rush that led to construction of 100 buildings.

Bearded Charles Kennedy had a cabin beside the road leading to E-town. In 1870 he took to robbing and murdering single travelers passing by.

Upon learning of his crimes, a posse of miners went out and seized him. No hanging tree was in sight. So they put a noose around Mr. Kennedy's neck and dragged him behind a horse until he strangled.

Much of Elizabethtown was consumed in a 1903 fire, but small-scale mining continued until World War II. Thereafter, vandals destroyed a majority of the few remaining landmarks.

Some of the best-preserved former ghost towns, now repopulated, are Chloride, Hillsboro and Kingston in Sierra County; Mogollon, east of Alma near the Arizona border; White Oaks in western Lincoln County; and Cabezon on the middle Rio Puerco.

To my mind, New Mexico's foremost surviving ghost town has to be Shakespeare, just two miles outside Lordsburg.

First called Mexican Springs, the site in 1858 became a stage stop on the road from El Paso to San Diego. A town grew up around the station, and expanded during a succession of mining booms that resulted in various name changes.

Finally, British investors established the Shakespeare Mining Co. in 1879, and the town, then called Ralston City, was renamed Shakespeare. Although on a private ranch today, the historic town is maintained and made accessible by the current owner. A new visitor's center and small museum will soon be open to the public.

Since the mid-20th century, the number of our surviving ghost towns has vastly diminished and public interest in them has waned. Partly, that can be attributed to a decline in America's long fascination with the history of the West.

Of the many books on the subject, I recommend the late Ralph Looney's Haunted Highways, The Ghost Towns of New Mexico. Although out of print, this book by the one-time managing editor of the Albuquerque Tribune is well worth searching out.

Historian Marc Simmons is author of numerous books on New Mexico and the Southwest. His column appears Saturdays.