Sitting atop a cliff in the Colorado Rockies is a town that, viewed from a distance, appears inhabited. It has its houses standing. There hasn't been any demolition of the school building or the gas station. However, nobody has lived in Gilman, Colorado, since 1984, and it is not because of any of the ghost town stories that have been associated with the exhaustion of the mine or the evacuation of all of its inhabitants.
In fact, Gilman had been evacuated because of the danger the place posed on its residents due to the federal decree. As reported by the Eagle Mine Superfund Site Profile by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the mining process that had been going on there for decades had contaminated the area with toxic heavy metals, such as cadmium, arsenic, copper, lead, and zinc.
