Post by Graveyardbride on Oct 19, 2014 18:28:19 GMT -5
Wraiths of the Wild West
The phantoms of the Old West walk the streets of former Nevada mining towns and the halls of abandoned hospitals, emerge from the walls of old Spanish missions and party in saloons once frequented by the likes of Wyatt Earp. No witch trials beckon here with widely known tales of witchcraft and spectral mayhem. You have to know where to look. There are tales here of men who mined gold and silver and new settlers who scratched crops from dry soil. Remote areas – where the wind-kicked, rain-stripped boardwalks of forgotten mines and towns moan and clatter – have spawned a thousand stories. Elsewhere, the lights and bustle of advancing cities have swallowed some of the Old West’s pioneer flavor, but a mysterious world still finds shelter in historic houses and hotels, as if the spirits are confused by the millions of newcomers who have arrived since they themselves departed for the Other Side.
The term “ghost town” usually refers to settlements so quickly abandoned that residents simply walked away, leaving many of their possessions behind – and sometimes their wraiths as well. Preserved by dry, high-desert air, the old structures can defy everything except fire, flash floods and the voracious appetites of souvenir hunters. Most towns were products of the West’s great mining period between 1849 and the early 1900s. For many men, the mine work was like death itself: tens of thousands found themselves as deep as 3,200 feet in the earth under a million tons of rock that might give way at any moment. Clinking pickaxes found seams of gold- or silver-rich ore – or poisonous gases and gushing water that filled the shafts until the life was squeezed out of miners as they floated face-up against the rock ceilings, sucking the last oxygen from trapped air pockets. Realizing the shafts were filled with spirits, miners watched for signs and nurtured superstitions, hoping to anticipate the next cave-in. Cornishmen believed in buccas, hobgoblins who first arrived in the West by hitchhiking in a miner’s knapsack from the coal mines of England to the Comstock Lode of Virginia City, Nevada. Miners carefully left a bite from every meal for the little imps and in return, the buccas would tap on the walls and timbers, warning the men of danger.
Spirits of the Comstock Lode. By the 1950s, ghost towns like Virginia City began attracting tourists and the town’s name became a household word in 1959 when the fictional Ponderosa Ranch of Bonanza fame was located on the banks of Lake Tahoe within a short ride of Virginia City. Members of the Cartwright clan seemed to spend as much time in town as on the ranch. Walking Virginia City’s boardwalks today is an exercise in anything but ghostly presences. The smell of hot dogs mingles with the visual chaos of thousands of T-shirts and souvenirs. But the old town is rich in paranormal activity.
Just one block from the main avenue, John Mackay’s mansion (pictured above) seems as quiet as an abandoned mine in the famed Comstock Silver Lode. Hundreds of shafts crisscross the mountainside beneath Virginia City and a good deal of refined gold and silver brought up from their grim maws passed through the edifice. Built by George Hearst in 1859 with a borrowed sum of $400, the house served as assay office and living quarters. Hearst made millions in Virginia City and went on to seed the Hearst family fortune. He sold the home to John Mackay, who had even better luck. His Consolidated Virginia Mine struck the largest silver deposit in North America and made in excess of $133 million. Today, the house is open to the public and several generations of caretakers have seen and heard the ghosts.
“Shhh! Mamie’s comin’!” says the little girl in the pink party dress at the top of the stairs, before she vanishes into thin air. In the parlor, a lady in a maroon dress occasionally appears near the sofa. And once during a wedding reception, a similarly dressed “guest,” whom no one knew, circulated among the revelers. She has also allegedly appeared mistily in a group photograph of a tourist family posing on the front porch. Then there’s the doll room, where the rocking chair sometimes rocks by itself. Once, after caretakers thoroughly vacuumed and carefully repositioned all the dolls, they returned to find the small rocker turned completely around and a doll flat on the floor, even though a wire gate, designed to protect the dolls against theft, remained securely locked.
In winter, when the entire town rests from the tourist onslaught, the true desolation of this mountain outpost hits home. Occasionally, if passersby look hard enough through the fog or snow, they see the outline of a little girl standing on a side street where she was run down and killed by a team of horses more than a century ago.
Sea of Sin. “Spirits” have always been a part of Bodie, California (above), the best-preserved ghost town in America and former site of 65 saloons, but those of the paranormal variety remain untapped. About a half-day’s drive from Virginia City, Bodie is now a state park inhabited solely by rangers. In the 1870s, however, the town had some 10,000 residents. Preachers decried Bodie as a “sea of sin, lashed by the tempests of lust and passion.” Today, the town is not so much lashed by sin as by dust and decay. Bodie itself is a ghost, an ethereal, creaking apparition barely clinging to the sagebrush of a lonely high range, then lost each winter beneath snowdrifts.
The town’s ghosts include one wasteful of electricity in the J. S. Cain House. Built in the late 1870s, the building now accommodates rangers’ families. The presumed spirit of Cain’s mistress is either afraid of the dark or bored enough to play pranks. One of the ranger’s daughters flipped off the light in her bedroom, crawled under the covers, and the light came back on. She turned it off again. Back in bed, she watched the switch flip on a second time. “You turn that light off, right now”! she yelled. The light went out. In another incident, a professional photographer was shooting the Standard Mill’s reflection in a window of Boone Store when he saw a man in a Confederate uniform walking along Main Street. The photographer turned from his viewfinder to see how long the pedestrian would take to pass, but there wasn’t a soul in sight.
The Dark Cell. The first seven prisoners escorted into cells at the new Yuma Territorial Prison on July 1, 1876, would have longed for the relative comforts of Devil’s Island. An ungodly heat funneled down the Colorado River’s course along the border between California and the Arizona Territory. The “Yuma Seven” were dehydrated, exhausted and they had built their cells themselves, raising the walls and sealing their fate, block by block. As additional prisoners arrived, they, too, were put to work. The prison grew as the men gouged deeper into the baked rock layers of the Mojave Desert, seeming to burrow toward relative coolness – or perhaps hell itself – like a tormented reptile. Until its closure in 1909, the prison housed a total of 3,069 prisoners and all of them knew about the Dark Cell.
Most prisoners have a Solitary, a Hell Hole, but Yuma had a particularly harrowing destination for the incorrigible. Set deep in the hillside, the Dark Cell saw no light except from an air shaft’s pinpoint beam. At high noon, the ray briefly found its way to the floor, as narrow and ephemeral as the hopes of the incarcerated. Prisoners sometimes went mad there or had their madness confirmed by the unremitting isolation. Today the prison is part of a state historic park and the Dark Cell seems unwilling to release some of its old inhabitants. Visitors often feel extremely uncomfortable in the cave-like confines and are anxious to see the light of day. Some rangers avoid the Dark Cell for reasons they cannot, or will not, explain. But it is the pinching that unsettles them most. One female ranger, dressed in a turn-of-the-century-style red dress during a living-history tour, stepped into the Dark Cell and felt someone pinch her bottom. Others have felt the same exploratory fingers. Apparently, the lonely soul in the Dark Cell enjoys female company.
Remember the Alamo. Violence inevitably spawns ghosts and such was the case at two of the bloodiest conflicts in the frontier West. On February 23, 1836, 5,000 Mexican soldiers arrived in San Antonio bent on destroying a band of rebellious Texans. The rebels had secured the four-acre compound of Mission San Antonio de Velero, better known as the Alamo (above). Although the Franciscan mission had been transformed into an arsenal, the compound had yet to hear its most fervid prayers.
Fortifying the Alamo, along with 185 others, were Col. William B. Travis and frontiersmen James “Jim” Bowie and Davy Crockett, who arrived with his fiddle. Outnumbered 10 to one and sneering at the words surrender and escape, the rebels inflicted 600 casualties on their attackers. The battle ended in a manner as gruesome as it was abrupt. Answering a predawn bugle call on March 6, the Mexicans made it over the walls and into the raging holdout. The invaders, furious because of their high losses, were encouraged to kill the Americans and mutilate their corpses. Bowie was tossed into the air and skewered on bayonets. His body, along with those of his fallen comrades, was burned on a pyre.
Today, both locals and tourists have no problem remembering the Alamo. When they are not catching the faint notes of a mysterious bugle or Crockett’s fiddle, they sometimes inhale the odor of an equally mysterious smoke. And on occasion, monstrous apparitions are observed emerging from the mission’s walls.
The Little Bighorn. Another lopsided 19th-century clash is of enduring interest to ghost-hunters: the Battle of the Little Bighorn, better known as Custer’s Last Stand. The clash took place June 25, 1876, when the Seventh Cavalry, commanded by Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, encountered a large camp of Sioux and Cheyenne Indians on the plains of eastern Montana. The brash young officer made three errors that fateful day: he underestimated the number and capabilities of the Indian warriors, failed to wait for reinforcements, and divided his regiment into three battalions. It was a classic, and fatal, blunder, and all 272 members of the Seventh Cavalry were killed.
If Davy Crockett’s ghost plays the fiddle, Custer’s spirit enjoys a ritual no less serene. More than a century of contemplation has softened the egotistical Indian fighter, transforming the soldier, into, well, a security guard. At his haunt, the museum and visitor’s center at Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, Custer’s apparition is said to pass through late at night, checking the place before retiring. Don’t worry, the general’s not alone. A soldier’s wraith, wearing a black cartridge belt slung across a brown shirt, also has been seen roaming about the museum. As for the battlefield, park personnel have spotted what some believe to be the ghost of Second Lt. Benjamin Hodgson, who was killed by an arrow while he attempted to drag himself up a hill despite his bullet-shattered leg.
Spooks of the Bird Cage. Ghosts of a more subtle nature prowl the Bird Cage Theater (above) in Arizona’s famous shoot-em-up town, Tombstone. Closed in 1885, but reopened in the 1930s, the Bird Cage sometimes smells of phantom cigar smoke and faint piano music emanates from an unidentified source. Most unusual are the boxes built into the balconies on two sides of the main hall. Called “cribs,” these tiny curtained rooms are where ladies of the evening entertained their clients. When the Bird Cage reopened as a tourist attraction, the new owners made the mistake of putting a mannequin of Wyatt Earp into a crib favored by the Clanton brothers, Earp’s sworn enemies. Day after day, Wyatt’s hat mysteriously ended up on the floor, knocked off by some unseen force – until his image was moved to a different crib.
The Haunted Hospital. A building that has probably spooked more teenagers than any other in the West still stands on a hillside in Jerome, Arizona, about a day’s drive from Tombstone. Once a busy infirmary serving the Verde Valley, it languished after closure for 44 years until it was renovated and reopened as a hotel. Break-ins and late-night beer busts had been common as Verde Valley teens drove up the hill to the vacant structure and participated in a James Dean-like rite of passage. Many falsely believe the hospital had been an insane asylum, a legend fueled by ornate iron bars on an upstairs balcony. In fact, through, it was a place where miners and ranch families went for treatment. Many passed to the great beyond of natural causes, but others died mysteriously, including a caretaker who was discovered in the basement with his head crushed by the elevator.
Perhaps death is what bothers the Lady in White as she wanders the halls. Was she a nurse? No one knows for sure, not even Nancy Smith, a Jerome historian who works at the hotel’s front desk at night. “We hear voices,” she says. “Feelings of cold air. Sometimes people have heard a name spoken, turned around and nobody’s there. Bartenders hear music in the lounge and find items have been moved about. The bar area, incidentally, was where the hospital’s examining rooms were located. Smith is aware the sounds she hears may be nothing more than water in the pipes or noisy woodpeckers – which used to hammer on metal and wood in the attic and send many trespassers scurrying into the night with new ghostly tales to tell. Whatever it is, Smith philosophizes: “Time is real to me, but not to them. Of course, you have to be careful what you’re looking for. You just might see it.”
Ghost Dance. Jack Wilson’s vision came to him January 1, 1889, by some accounts during a solar eclipse, by others, as he lay near death from scarlet fever. The Great Spirit showed him the future – a paradise in which his people would live with the happy, eternally youthful ghosts of their ancestors. There would be no strife, no misery, no famine, no death. The spirits would replenish their culture and religion, restore their lands and give them victory over an enemy that seemed unstoppable. The key to this miraculous outcome was the summoning of those ancestral souls, which could be hastened, Wilson believed, by an excruciating, exhausting ritual – the Ghost Dance. Wilson had come to this revelation along two very different paths. A Northern Paiute Indian by birth, he had spent years with a Presbyterian family, from whom he took his surname and the Christian notion of paradise in the hereafter. But as the Indian Wovoka, he was reviving a short-lived spectral choreography developed by Wodziwob, a Northern Paiute prophet whose cult had spread across the Pacific Northwest 20 years earlier. Wovoka’s father, Tavibo, had assisted Wodziwob and had no doubt planted the seed of revelation in his own son.
Wovoka hoped to become the Indian messiah and went so far as to use nails to wound his hands and feet in emulation of Christ. His message of a great, peaceful miracle to come spread through the tribes as swiftly as a pox, for it came at a time when the futility of further warfare was clear. To a desperate people facing cultural extinction, the idea of ancestors riding to the rescue was a godsend. His Ghost Dance swept the western tribes, each of which had its own idea of paradise. To the Sioux, for example, it would be a world restored with herds of buffalo, and it would not necessarily be tranquil. The ghosts were summoned by a shuffling circle of dancers whose melancholy, trance-inducing steps could last for several nights and continue until morning on the last night. Most dancers chose the costumes of an earlier time and shunned such things as metal buckles and ornaments. But many wore consecrated buckskin shirts bearing designs of animals and stars – “ghost shirts” they thought no bullet could penetrate.
Late in 1890, as relations between Ghost Dancing Sioux and government agents deteriorated, troops were called in and the dominoes of tragedy began to fall. On December 15, the great chief, Sitting Bull, was killed when Indian police arrived to arrest him. Two weeks later, a band of exhausted Sioux Indians surrendered at Wounded Knee Creek. The next morning, a disturbance erupted between captors and captives. The Indians were fearless, believing their charmed garments would protect them, but they did not. Hundreds of Sioux were run to earth and killed, adding Wounded Knee to the ledger of infamous losses for the Indians. It also marked the beginning of the end of the Ghost Dance. The spectral ancestors, whom the dancers had called repeatedly, never came.
Sources: Peter Jensen, Discovery Travel; Virginia City: Ghost Town; and Haunts of the Wild West.
