You might expect a few ghosts to be lingering around the grounds of an abandoned 19th-century Connecticut mill town, what with lots of empty buildings, peeling paint, rotting wood, even a forlorn chapel.

I can report though, after a stroll this week through Johnsonville, a charming little hamlet in East Haddam, once the town's second most popular tourist site, that it feels surprisingly spirit free.

Of course I visited on a spectacular October afternoon, fall colors ablaze, sunshine glimmering on the village's central pond. It might feel spookier after dark.

I wasn't alone, either. Other visitors had parked along Johnsonville Road, under some of the replica Victorian-era streetlights, and were walking the village grounds.

Maybe some of them are planning to bid later this month when Johnsonville, with its 62 acres and collection of buildings, including a tavern, general store, Victorian barn and assortment of houses, goes on the auction block.

The auction website auction.com is planning a two-day event, starting Oct. 28. You could maybe even wrap up a successful bid by Halloween.

The bidding starts at $800,000, although the auction company is not disclosing the minimum bid the owners will accept. It was last listed for sale in a regular real estate listing for under $3 million and apparently there were no takers.

Assuming that a bid in the neighborhood of a couple of million dollars would be accepted, it does seem like kind of a bargain. We are talking an entire little village, and some of the buildings seem to be in pretty good shape, ready almost for someone to move right in.

Johnsonville, originally the mill town associated with the Neptune mill, the region's only twine mill that operated through the Civil War, was recreated by industrialist Raymond Schmitt, after he bought it in the 1960s, when it was already empty.

Schmitt, an eccentric and an avid antiques collector, not only bought and rebuilt the existing buildings but bought more and moved them to his new village.

He furnished them all with Americana antiques, with the idea of creating a tourist village. He even bought a big sidewheel steamboat and had it shipped up the Connecticut River and trucked to the village pond.

A restaurant opened for a while, and lots of couples got married at Johnsonville, where Schmitt welcomed visitors, never charging admission.

Schmitt's cantankerous side got him in trouble with rule-enforcing town officials and eventually he shut everything down in 1994 in a pique, canceling a summer's worth of weddings.

One town selectman told The New York Times that Schmitt, in the heat of battle with the town, called her late at night and threatened to sic the FBI on her.

After Schmitt's death in 1998, the managers of his estate first sold the contents of the village and then eventually the village itself.

The developers who bought it, with plans for high-density housing, eventually ran afoul of town regulations since there are no sewers. They put it back on the market, where it languished.

I made one stop in East Haddam on my way to Johnsonville this week and ran into a shopkeeper who was married in the village chapel. She said people in town liked Schmitt and appreciated the way he made his mill town open to the public, sharing, in a way, his obsession.

It is certainly unlikely that another rich industrialist with a vision of recreating a Connecticut mill town will surface during this month's auction.

And it probably won't help if some aggressive developer picks up Johnsonville for a song, hoping to create a high-density housing development.

It would be nice if someone with some more modest plans surfaces, and maybe an inn and restaurant could open in town, drawing some tourists again. That would be good for East Haddam in general.

And maybe the weddings could start up again, before the ghosts get too comfortable.

This is the opinion of David Collins

d.collins@theday.com

Twitter: @DavidCollinsct