A potential buyer might be on the horizon for Ghost Town, the Western theme amusement park above Maggie Valley that drew more than 300,000 visitors a year during its heyday. It closed in 2002 after a decade of gradual decline to the detriment of tourism regionwide.

The potential buyer is a real estate investment group from Florida, according to Wade Reece, owner of Quality Inn who announced the pending sale.

Ghost Town’s owner and founder, R.B. Coburn, would not comment on the record regarding the potential buyer. Coburn, 85, said it was inappropriate to discuss the sale publicly before the deed is signed and money changes hands.

Coburn did say that an article appearing in The Enterprise Mountaineer Monday (March 14) was inaccurate, however. The article stated that Ghost Town had been sold and a contract existed. The article was based on a press release sent to local media by Reece stating that Ghost Town had been sold.

Reece, a self-appointed volunteer who is marketing Ghost Town, found the investment group and orchestrated the potential deal with Coburn. Some of the partners in the investment group came to Haywood County one month ago to look at a $1 million, 102-acre vacation property that Reece owned. They decided not to buy the vacation property, but Reece showed them around Maggie Valley while they were here. They sat in the Ghost Town parking lot in Reece’s Denali for 30 minutes listening to Reece talk about the story behind Ghost Town and the history of tourism in Maggie Valley.

“They said ‘we’ll buy it,’” Reece recounted. “I said, ‘Wait a minute, I’ve heard that before. If you’re going to buy it, where is the money going to come from?’”

That’s when Reece learned these visitors in the market for vacation property run a development group with a circle of very wealthy — and some famous — investors. The group puts together multi-million dollar real estate deals — including golf courses, shopping malls and resorts — and then floats the projects to its circle of investors, who opt in or out on each deal.