A small trading post along the famous Route 66 in the US became the site of wild animals, rivalry, fires and murder in the early part of the 20th century.
All that remains for visitors passing through Two Guns today in Arizona are derelict buildings, from the graffitied relics of an empty zoo to an abandoned gas station.
But it was not always this way for Canyon Lodge, as it was originally known.
At the start of the 19th century a married couple, Mr and Mrs Oldfield, bought 320 acres of land in the area by Diablo Canyon and opened up the beginnings of a trading post.
A road through the town became known as the National Trail Highway, a precursor to Route 66, and saw many travellers passing through that helped increased business.
By the 1920s Earle and Louise Cundiff owned the land and added a restaurant, post office and gas station that turned the Lodge into a thriving town.
Prospects were looking good until an eccentric war veteran called Harry Miller wandered into town, claiming to be a descendent of Apache Indians, and leased a business site off the Cundiffs for ten years.
He renamed Canyon Lodge as Two Guns, which sounded more appropriately Wild West in nature for a town where the infamous Billy the Kid and his outlaw gang had once hidden out nearby.
Miller went by the alternative name of Crazy Chief Thunder, wore long braided hair and was said to be an unpleasant character.
Many years before his arrival in 1878 a nearby cave was the scene of the mass murder of 42 Apache men.
The gang of Indians were killed by a rival Navajo tribe after they had raided and murdered one of the latter's camp.
Another Navajo group found the Apaches hiding out in a cave and set fire to sagebrushes at the tunnel's opening, either smoking the men to death or shoot any trying to escape.
The site became known as 'Death Cave' and earned a haunted reputation afterwards with eerie groans and footsteps reported by locals in the area.
Some tribes said the land was now cursed and no Apache people have ever gone back there.
Miller exploited the gruesome history for all he could and started tours of the cave - renaming it 'Mystery Cave'.
He hung lights up in the stone dwellings and even sold the skulls of the ill-fated Apache men he found inside to tourists.
The so-called curse of Two Guns started soon after when a significant amount of goods were stolen from the trading post by a drifter couple.
Things took a grimmer turn in 1926 when Miller fell into an argument with the Cundiffs over the terms of his lease and he shot dead an unarmed Earle.
Astonishingly, he was acquitted of murder and carried on in Two Guns as before.
However, the bad luck continued and Miller was mauled on three separate occasions by two mountain lions and a venomous Gilia monster in the zoo he had set up in town (another of his entrepreneurial attempts).
A devastating fire broke out in 1929 that wiped out the entire trading post and led to a series of court disputes between the surviving Louise Cundiff and Miller.
He brazenly and dishonestly claimed he owned the land, costing Cundiff $15,000 worth of legal action before she could prove it was hers.
The deceitful Miller left Two Guns not long after and Cundiff had to relocate the whole of Two Guns, including the zoo, with her new husband.
Route 66 had unfortunately been realigned to the opposite canyon and the track was vital to the town's survival.
Two Guns was sold in the 1950s and ping ponged between being occupied and abandoned until a buyer named Dreher attempted to renew the once happening area.
Business was going well until another fire, in 1971, took out not just the trading post but the whole town.
It seemed as if the curse of Two Guns had taken its final hit and the site and its colourful yet murderous past has been left abandoned like a ghost town ever since.
