You say most of the houses are a "museum or a church". Sounds to me like you are heading to the type ghost town that's been made into a modern "tourist" type thing (as opposed to lost ruins out somewhere, out-of-mind).
My experience with is this: Many years ago, a friend and I gathered up a bunch of "ghost town" books, that detailed "ghost towns" across the desert southwest (AZ, NM, etc...). Bear in mind, these were "coffee table" type auto-club tourist books, detailing stuff that retirees in motor homes would drive out to see. Ie.: "no secret to anyone" type stuff. As we went, location to location, we found that .... generally, since these were all open eye-sores, that detectors were not very welcome. I mean, since they were such glamorized known spots, there had been no shortage of bottle diggers and relic hunters over the past 30 yrs. Even in the remote ones, we encountered REAMS of open bottle pits, picnic junk, etc.... And occasionally we encountered private property owners who left no doubt in our minds, that they wished these "tour guide" books had never been written. Ie.: it only brought out the lookie-lous and retirees with detectors, by the droves.
I would guess it would be the same for your ghost towns, if the psychological profile ("museums and churches") is the same: if it is a historical "monument" (or destination) type place, you'll be just one of a LONG line of people showing up at their door-step with detectors. And generally, places made into tourist destinations, are going to be more on the "preservation" side of things, as opposed to a set of less-recorded ruins out in the middle of nowhere.
We quickly learned, on our ghost town tour, to AVOID the places in the books we carried. Any coffee-table glossy tourist auto-club book that detailed ghost towns, were the ones we
stayed away from
Instead, we did our research, and found places left
out of those type books. Like: Stage stops that weren't marked with a plaque, ruins and foundations that we found on our own, forts or ghost towns that we only found referenced in older out-of-print citations, that were
not easy-to-find, etc..... When we got to those locations, we found less or no competition, less or no ill-will to our hobby, or simply forgotten innocuous sites, that were out-of-site/out-of-mind where, uh, there was really no one to "ask".
The days of going to the type ghost towns like you see in a Clint Eastwood spaghetti western, are over. Maybe the guys in the 1960s and early '70s walked right into Rhyolite (
http://www.ghosttowns.com/states/nv/rhyolite.html ) , or Bodie (
http://www.bodie.com/ ) or whatever, but now, you'll probably do better to hit old-town urban demo's (which are every bit as old as ghost towns of the west), or find remote unusual historical citations, that the arm-chair hunters aren't likely to read about.
