I’m another Regular Guy who’s late to the party, and you probably don’t need any more input on this, Melz, but I’m gonna write anyway since this is precisely the kind of thing about which I have a strong opinion, and you haven’t quite told us all to shaddap about it yet. 
I agree with everyone in this thread who, like you, believe that this is NOT COOL BEHAVIOR. And unlike @nungesser, I have known women to do this. Doesn’t surprise me at all that men do it; pretty much anyone who is afraid of conflict or even a slightly uncomfortable conversation will at least be tempted to ghost. But you know what I know and what most mature, empathetic grownups know: leaving such a situation completely unresolved is a certain degree of psychological torture to the other party, especially if they have no idea that anything went wrong.
Now, like many otherwise respectable people, I have to admit to a certain degree of hypocrisy about this. I have, on more than one occasion, been known to procrastinate and postpone an uncomfortable conversation long after its proper due date. Just last weekend I finally called my uncle regarding my late father. He was married to my dad’s sister for over 40 years until she died about a decade ago. He has since remarried and has a pretty good life going in his sunset years, but somehow I couldn’t quite bring myself to call this sweet, generous, soft-spoken gentleman and tell him his former brother-in-law had passed away once I realized my dad had been dead a week and nobody had called Uncle Howard yet. I apologized profusely and he was predictably quite gracious about it, but still: that was not cool at all, and I’ll feel terrible about it for the rest of my days. I know better than that. Even when the delay had gotten embarrassingly long, I should have just called and gotten it over with six months ago. He wasn’t mean or outwardly hurt or rude about it, I knew he wouldn’t be, and even if he was he still deserved to know about it and it was my job to call him and I failed in that responsibility.
Okay, sorry, long digression, entirely too characteristic of me, I hope you’ll forgive me. You already knew this ignoring-a-problem-and-hoping-it’ll-go-away thing was a bad practice, and now you know that it’s sadly pretty common. I actually had one woman do it to me twice. It was a long-distance relationship, she lived in Salt Lake, I lived in Burbank, I drove out to see her one time, she ghosted me there, wouldn’t talk to me, so I drove home. I called a day or two later, she wouldn’t answer, I figured that was that and went on with my life. A month or two later, she called, we had a long conversation, she said she wanted me back as a boyfriend, that sounded pretty okay to me, we hung up on what sounded like excellent terms… and I never heard from her again. I called and wrote a couple of times, to no avail. As far as any official notification goes, I guess I’m still her boyfriend. (Not really, of course; a few months later I met my next girlfriend and after that relationship had run its course I met my wife. This Utah girl was back in 2001 or so.)
I have read enough and learned enough over the years to avoid trying to contact someone who obviously doesn’t want to be contacted. I used to torture myself by thinking “maybe the last message didn’t get through” and the like, and I used to continue to pursue people who, in retrospect, weren’t interested, even though they never could just come out and say so. And eventually I learned to not do that. At the same time, I think ghosting is both cowardly and irresponsible, and for the last couple decades I’ve just said exactly what I feel, and asked others directly how they felt, and made it surpassingly clear that I wasn’t going to necessarily be reliably good at interpreting subtext or body language or any other hidden message. So if someone drops their end of the conversation, I won’t try more than a couple times to restart it. Everyone that has ever known me knows how to find me. I leave it at that. But I will make every effort to prevent someone from believing I feel something differently from how I actually feel. Nothing drives me nuts faster than being misunderstood. Rarely have I ever regretted telling someone exactly how I feel, and never have I regretted someone else telling me exactly what she felt either.
Communication, as the cliche goes, is key in any relationship. My prescription for everyone would be to say up front what your hopes and expectations are (if any), and that this particular behavior of ghosting is not acceptable, and that if ever things are looking less than wonderful for the prospective SO in question, they had better spit it out and they can expect a civil conversation about it. But ghosting will make them forever a chickenshit in your eyes.
