spookysouthwest: This abandoned strip club in Superior, Arizona fits in well with the other decaying
spookysouthwest: This abandoned strip club in Superior, Arizona fits in well with the other decaying buildings huddled within its crumbling downtown. Like everything else in this formerly thriving city of prospectors and gamblers, it is inhabited only by ghosts. Superior was one of the wealthiest mining towns in the days of the Old West–situated at the base of Picketpost Mountain, it earned its riches from the nearby Silver King Mine and the Silver Queen Mine. The Silver King Mine was depleted by the late 1880s, but the Silver Queen Mine endured long after its silver dried up, providing silver and copper for the next hundred years. Legendary gunslinger Wyatt Earp himself had a girlfriend here named Mattie Blalock; but when he started a relationship with another woman, Mattie became addicted to laudanum and overdosed. Another tragic and apocryphal story also haunts the town of Superior, the story of Apache Leap. East of the town is a high cliff upon which, when confronted by hostile American troops, 75 Apache women leaped to their deaths rather than be captured. The ground where they fell is littered with flecks of shiny black obsidian rock called “Apache tears”. Today, Superior maintains a few businesses and a small population, although that has been shrinking rapidly since the closure of the last remaining mines in the 1990s. -- source link