More Americans have seen a ghost than have visited North Dakota

One in five Americans say they’ve seen a ghost — even President Teddy Roosevelt is said to have sensed Abraham Lincoln stalking the White House. That’s more people than have set foot in North Dakota.

Just 14% of Americans have ever visited the state, according to a YouGov survey in 2025. That makes it the second least-visited in the country. Only distant Alaska (from which you really can see Russia) ranks lower.

And it’s not about distance. Nearly half of Americans hold a passport, and by some estimates more than a third travel to another country in a given year. Put plainly: More Americans will visit a foreign nation this year alone than have ever in their lifetimes visited North Dakota.

It’s also not a Midwest, Great Plains or “big, sparsely populated American state” story. Montana, Idaho, Nebraska, Iowa and Kansas have each been visited by at least 1 in 5 Americans, versus North Dakota’s 1 in 7.

Not enough people ever get a chance to decide North Dakota is for them. To be clear, the state population is growing, not fading — nearly crossing 800k people in 2024, up more than 18% since 2010. The catch: the fastest growth is in oil counties like Williams and McKenzie, not the rural farm towns, nor the charming small midwestern cities, so the state has long struggled to retain homegrown college graduates. A slew of statewide efforts intend to reshape the future of North Dakota’s economy.

Why does visitation matter? Set aside the cheap gain of tourist dollars and look at North Dakota’s longer-term planning. With college brain drain and declining rural counties, the state is overly reliant on boomerang residents who come home with a partner. The state’s oil and gas strengths are crucial, but risk being a resource curse.

One state native who reluctantly moved away to work in economic development in another state recounted to me that many North Dakota leaders appear serious about using this generation’s energy boom to fund a transformation. (Contrast that with the local warning that an oil extraction boom in 1980s fizzled with little to show for it.) 

The state’s North Dakota Development Fund, its equity-focused use of federal SSBCI funding, the North Dakota Growth Fund and the National Science Foundation-funded AgTech Engine are all major strategies for establishing North Dakota’s future. Inventive agtech, specialized science and compelling entrepreneurial engines attract the curious. And the curious visitor can become a future resident. As I’ve written often, entrepreneurs don’t choose a place to start a company. They choose a place to live, and then start companies there.

North Dakota need not change what it is to expose more Americans to its glory. But it should tell more Americans about what’s happening there. In our own small part, that’s a role we at Technical.ly want to play — we’ll begin reporting in the state this fall.

In 1884, a 25-year-old Teddy Roosevelt returned by train to the badlands of what is today western North Dakota. He sought solitude after his mother and his wife died on the same day, hours apart, following the birth of his first child. Roosevelt settled his Elkhorn Ranch there and cemented a lifelong championing of preserved land, later using the presidency to protect some 230 million acres of public land. 

More Americans should see where our national parks system began than have seen ghosts.