Say the word “ghost town” and images of empty saloons and tumbleweeds immediately come to mind. But unlike the wild, wild West, Ontario’s ghost towns are often more dying than dead.

Driving along the Pickering-Uxbridge town line, it’s easy to feel as if one has stepped back in time. Turn-of-the-century homes, a general store and farm stands roll by as the car takes a turn off the main drag and down a windy gravel road.

“These are ghost town roads,” says Jeri Danyleyko, as the car jostles and bumps towards Altona, a ghost town located about an hour outside of Toronto near Stouffville.

Danyleyko has been exploring ghost towns for almost 17 years, taking pictures of the forgotten towns and operating a website devoted to preserving their history.

“Finding out what happened to these places, why they didn’t make it, what’s there,” she says.

According to Danyleyko, ghost towns aren’t necessarily completely abandoned. Rather, they are dying a slow death, shut off from industry, schools or post offices and commercial business, their landscapes peppered with abandoned churches, railways and mills.

Incorporated into nearby towns with better infrastructure, these sleepy hamlets may still be home to a few stalwarts, residents clinging to the rundown houses that have been passed from generation to generation.

In Altona, the air smells like root beer and wood from a nearby fire and the trees shimmer from a late summer fog. Pulling out her camera, Jeri begins snapping pictures of a rundown car from the 1940s or ’50s.

“I can understand why someone would want to live out here,” she says, breathing deeply.

Next to Jeri, her son Jeff Danyleyko, 25, is also taking pictures. He has been accompanying his mother on these trips since he was a kid, when their family vacations always included a trip to a ghost town or two.

“Every time we go camping, Mom ends up picking a place,” he says.

One particularly memorable trip involved an exploration of an abandoned chemical factory.

“The first time we were there, the owner of the property came out and let us in,” Jeri says.

“Oh yes, I remember that one,” he says, thrilled at the memory. “It’s literally ruins!”

A film student and shutterbug, Jeff started exploring on his own as a photography project. But Jeff has branched into urban exploration.

Also known as infiltration, urban explorers break into abandoned buildings within the city limits, like the Kodak factory at Eglinton Ave. and Black Creek Dr.

“I really like going in and seeing these places that had such a history to them just lying in ruin,” he says. “Something about the kind of apocalyptic state of them.”

The Danyleykos aren’t alone. A virtual community of ghost town explorers and urban infiltrators exists on the Internet, with many websites and wikis dedicated to helping others find the next abandoned treasure. Jeri’s website alone gets about 10,000 hits a month.

Part of the thrill of exploring these ghost towns or abandoned buildings is in discovering the remnants of former lives.

While exploring the Kodak building, Jeff found a list taped on the inside of a locker, detailing exactly what should be inside. But of course it was empty.

“Wow, this was like the last checklist they used,” he says.

And on a trip to northeastern Ontario, Jeri visited an abandoned schoolhouse in a town that had once tried — and failed — to open a gold mine. Inside, she found scads of old papers, documenting the town’s financial demise.

“Their whole history in paper was sitting there in this abandoned schoolhouse,” she says.

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Some towns die because the main industry, like a factory or railroad, closes down.

The hamlet of Ballycroy, near Orangeville, was once a thriving mill town. Hotels, churches, 11 taverns and two liquor stores served its 200 residents and visiting tourists.

But a fire in 1875 destroyed the town’s main hotel and a number of homes. Two years later, the Hamilton & North Western Railway bypassed the town, choosing to stop in Palgrave instead.

With no more visitors to keep the town’s nightlife alive, the town slowly died. In 1951 the post office closed, effectively shutting the town off from the rest of the country.

But other ghost towns are man-made. Altona, named after a city in Germany, was settled in the 1830s by German-Swiss Mennonites. Like much of the surrounding area, Altona was a farming community with a number of mills, and by the 1870s, the township was 200 strong.

About 100 years later, the federal government expropriated much of the land for the Pickering airport. Some people remained on their land, which was leased back to them. But many of the old buildings, like a brick schoolhouse built in 1911, were boarded up.

By 2010, the government began knocking these buildings down, one by one, save for a few designated as historic sites.

Now, when Jeri and Jeff drive through Altona, they have a hard time finding their old haunts. Driving down dirt road after dirt road, they look for the old schoolhouse and a historic tavern, but to no avail.

“They must have been torn down,” Jeri says with a sigh.

One building that still stands is the Mennonite Meeting House, which was designated a historic landmark in 1985. Its front door is nailed shut, but if you peek through the windows, the inside looks as if it were waiting for a sermon to begin any moment.

Around the meeting house are scattered the gravestones of Altona’s fallen residents; the oldest marker is dated 1835. Although there are plans to build an airplane runway nearby, the cemetery and church will remain preserved as a historical site.

Jeff and Jeri admit to feeling a certain uneasiness when they walk in the footsteps of the dead.

Jeff remembers a trip to Camp Pickton, an abandoned RAF base near Belleville, where he felt the eerie sense that the now-empty facility had once been brimming with life.

“I really didn’t like being in there,” he says. “[It] made me feel like I wasn’t quite in the right place.”

“It just feels strange,” Jeri agrees. “Gee, at one time, this place was full of people!”