You can buy the slum from 'The Hunger Games'

It's not often someone offers a slum for sale. But if that slum appeared in the popular new film "The Hunger Games," perhaps it will fetch $1.4 million.

Or so owner Wade Shepherd hopes.

The 83-year-old North Carolina resident has been trying to sell the 72-acre abandoned mill town for several years. But the film, based on the popular trilogy of novels, has brought new attention to Henry River Mill Village, about 60 miles northwest of Charlotte.

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The abandoned mill town, which includes 20 vacant houses and an abandoned general store, is one of a dozen sites included on a list of places to experience "The Hunger Games."

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"It’s been for sale two and a half years and I dropped it $400,000 in price awhile ago because of the economy. Before the movie I had some interest from one gentleman who wanted to knock it all down and build new houses. But I would hate to lose the history," Shepherd told The Sun, a British newspaper. "But I’ve had lots of calls since the movie. I would be happy if a fan bought it. It would mean they might preserve it."

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Henry River Mill Village was used in the film as a stand-in for District 12, the poorest of the slums and the home of Katniss, the heroine.

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The real-life Henry River Mill Village was home to a cotton mill starting in 1905, plus a general store, a boarding house and about 35 homes for mill workers and their families. The mill closed in  the late 1960s or early 1970s and burned down in 1977. The last resident moved out in the 1980s.

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Shepherd, who lives across the river from the village, bought it in 1975, to save it from drunken vagrants, according to The Sun. Now he has to protect it from "Hunger Games" tourists.

"I let them take all the pictures they like from the street, but I don’t want them going inside," Shepherd told the newspaper. "I've had to run a few out of the houses."

CORRECTION

April 4, 2012: This post originally included incorrect information about town and country names in the film "The Hunger Games."