Grandstreet’s Ghost

Happy Halloween!

Helena’s Grandstreet Theatre began in 1901 as the Unitarian Church. Unitarians were a progressive group who believed churches should serve the community, so the building doubled as a public auditorium and theatre. Reverend Stanton Hodgin and his wife Clara arrived as a team in 1903. Clara was a former kindergarten teacher, full of energy and eager to work with Helena children. Fiercely devoted to her small charges, Clara was adored by the children and she loved to direct them in dramatic presentations. The Sunday school grew from 20 to 100 children in a matter of months. But Clara’s time was short. She became ill and died in January 1905; she was only 34. Her husband found boxes of notes detailing things she had wanted to do, and her students remembered that Clara’s smile was like sunshine. The church became the public library in the 1930s. Then in 1976, its adaptive reuse as Grandstreet Theatre brought the building back to one of its original functions. Grandstreet has earned a top-notch reputation for its highly professional productions and its creative theatre school where young thespians gain hands-on training and experience. Students, actors, and patrons of all ages report an electric energy in the building. Lights and equipment turn on without assistance. A misty apparition occasionally hovers in the balcony. And the light plays oddly around Clara’s memorial Tiffany window.

Courtesy Grandstreet Theatre

The dedicatory portion sometimes appears as if someone smudged the words. Is this Clara’s handiwork? Certainly her essence, or “sunshine”—in the form of youngsters’ vibrant enthusiasm for the theatre—lingers. Some believe that Clara herself never strays far.

Deer Lodge Prison

The historic prison at Deer Lodge served Montana from 1870 during territorial days until 1979. Today it is a museum, but over the course of more than a century, thousands of prisoners lost their identities within its walls. Some horrific events occurred there. One took place on March 8, 1908, when George Rock and W. A. Hayes attacked Warden Frank Conley and his chief deputy, James Robinson, in an attempted escape. Conley shot both Rock and Hayes, hitting Rock in the head and Hayes twice, once through each lung. These shots should have been fatal, but the bullets stopped neither man. The two prisoners were still able to fatally slit Robinson’s throat with a pocketknife and slash Conley so severely it took 103 stitches to close the wounds. Conley carefully nursed Rock and Hayes so that they would be healthy when, convicted of murder, both were hanged in the prison yard as an example to the other men. These were the only hangings within the walls, but not the only violent deaths. And the prison is a place that captured men’s souls. Little wonder that both visitors and staff report the sounds of murmuring voices, the doors of empty cells clanging shut, the sounds of heavy boots patrolling the cell blocks, and unseen hands plucking at their clothing.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go

Friday Photo: Speculator Mine

Happy weekend! It's going to be a busy one for me. I'm signing books at Barnes and Noble in Bozeman on Saturday, and that evening I'm leading a ghost tour in Nevada City starting at 6:30. Get in touch with the Montana Heritage Commission if you'd like to join me. In the mean time, here's a stark stereograph of Butte and another ghost story:

There was always work in the mines at Butte. In fact, there was such demand for miners that immigrants who spoke no English, upon arriving at Ellis Island in New York, were herded onto trains bound for Butte, Montana. But it was dangerous work. In the miles of interconnected tunnels, miners worked their shifts. Above ground, soot blocked the sunshine, sulfur choked the air, and cyanide let nothing grow. Butte surely lured her men with promises of the American Dream, then crushed them in her metal, suffocated them in her tunnels, and killed them with her dust.  The steel headframes that loom against the horizon earned their own nickname: gallows frames, or widow makers. They supported the hoists above the mineshafts where waiting cages carried the men deep into the hill.

This stereo view by N.A. Forsyth shows Butte c. 1910
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, ST 001.100

It’s no surprise that Butte is a haunted place. On June 8, 1917, a carbide lamp at the North Butte Mining Company’s Speculator Mine ignited frayed electrical insulation in the Granite Mountain Shaft. Fire spread, and carbon monoxide and other deadly gasses swept through the tunnels, killing more than 160 men. Some died instantly, but others had time to scrawl poignant goodbye letters to their families, in the darkness, as the oxygen ran out.  Facsimiles of their final words fringe the monument overlooking the mine. The mine reopened in 1940, and for three miners who worked a first shift, it was a chilling experience. Once underground, the men heard the sounds of heavy breathing. And why wouldn’t they? A tragedy like that in the Granite Mountain shaft—sealed for more than twenty years—left an indelible imprint of men in their final hours, deep in the earth, gasping for air as the oxygen ran out.


Finger in the Door

A house in Helena’s southeast neighborhood was long home to Annabelle Richards and her family. Annabelle loved the spirits that lived there, but others were not so tolerant. When the Richards moved to Washington, D.C., for a period of years, a series of tenants lived in the house.

Annabelle never learned exactly what the spirits did to frighten her tenants. Long after Annabelle moved out of the house, however, one of them related this incident. A mother and her five-year-old daughter briefly lived in the house. The mother was afraid the lock on her daughter’s bedroom door might malfunction, so she took the doorknob off the door leaving a hole where it had been. The child always slept with her cat curled up by her side. One night she awoke, and the cat wasn’t there. She searched the room and finally saw him at the foot of her bed staring at something. She saw that his eyes were fixed on something. The cat’s eyes got bigger and bigger, and her fright grew. She knew she would have to see what her cat was staring at so intently. So she gathered up all the courage she could and followed her cat’s gaze. What she saw gave her nightmares for years to come. The cat’s eyes rested upon the place where the doorknob used to be. Sticking through the hole was a finger, and it was pointing directly at her.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go

Sedman House

Montana legislator Charles Bovey placed some eighty endangered structures from across Montana at Nevada City. Now under state ownership, Nevada City is a good place for ghost hunting. The diverse pasts of its buildings raise myriad possibilities. The Sedman House is one of those special places where old energy seems to linger. Sometimes in the mornings when employees open the house for tourists, they find the bedding rumpled in an upstairs bedroom and furniture moved. Paranormal investigators and tourists have taken photographs in the house that include eerie images.  The house sits today at the west end of the main street but it was originally built at Junction City, a few miles away.


Photo by Ellen Baumler

It was the in-town residence of the Sedman family who ranched in the Ruby valley. Oscar Sedman was serving in the 1881 legislative session in Helena when he was fatally stricken with Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Sedman became the first legislator to die during a session. He left a wife and four children. In the next few years, a son and a daughter  died. Clara Sedman died of diphtheria; she was eight years old. Mrs. Sedman eventually remarried and moved to Missoula and the Sedman House became a boarding house. Later it fell vacant, home to chickens and other livestock. Charles Bovey rescued the house and moved it to Nevada City. In recent years, during living history demonstrations, tourists have commented that they really liked the living history at the various buildings throughout the town, especially the little girl in Victorian dress jumping rope on the porch of the Sedman House. But curiously, there is no living history presented at the Sedman House, and there is no little girl.

P.S. A few of my personal encounters with Virginia City ghosts

Friday Photo: Boulder Hot Springs

One dark evening a few years ago a group assembled on the stairway of the unused wing at the historic Boulder Hot Springs Hotel. There were a dozen adult students, led by Patrick Marsolek of Helena, who wanted to practice their intuitive skills. None of the participants knew the history of the hot springs, which stretched back to the mid-nineteenth century.

A postcard view of Boulder Hot Springs in the 1940s.
From the collection of Kennon Baird via Helena As She Was

The property manager allowed the group access to the long-abandoned wing. After exploring the dark corridors and many rooms with flashlights, the students gathered on the stairway which led to this unused area. The idea was to share their individual impressions. While women made up most of the group, there were several men. Each of the male students claimed that they felt a seductive female presence. Although historically unsubstantiated, locals claim prostitutes once worked in a portion of this wing. Even more eerie were the impressions of at least half the other students who said they heard children’s laughter, children running in the corridors, and balls bouncing down the hallways. None of the students knew that after the destructive Helena earthquakes in 1935, Boulder Hot Springs opened this wing to St. Joseph’s Children’s Home. The children lived at the hotel for a year while the orphanage was repaired. Finally one last student remained to share her experience. She had curled up comfortably in a corner of the landing. As she stood, she commented, “I feel just like a cat and I need to stretch.” A hotel staff member heard this comment and looked incredulously at the woman. “Oh my goodness,” she exclaimed. “You were curled up in our elderly cat’s favorite napping place. She died right there last week.”

Flathead Monster

I’ll be telling spooky stories at the Belgrade Public Library tomorrow (Thursday, October 18)  at 6:30. The program is a Humanities Montana sponsored event and is free and open to the public. Hope to see you there!

Captain James Kerr, piloting the U.S. Grant on Flathead Lake in 1889, made the first recorded sighting of a mysterious creature in Flathead Lake. He and his passengers saw a 20-foot object swimming in the steamboat’s path. Passengers panicked. One man fired at it and missed. The boat nearly capsized and the creature disappeared. Since then, there have been nearly 100 sightings.

Documented sightings of "something" in Flathead Lake
Compiled by Laney Hanzel, from Montana Outdoors

One of the most credible was that of retired army major George Cote and his son Neal in 1985. Trolling in Yellow Bay, they saw an object "…as long as a telephone pole and twice as large in diameter." As it slowly undulated, they counted four to six humps above the water. It then sped away, stopped, looked back, and disappeared underwater. They knew that no one would believe them and kept quiet. Then in 1987, Major Cote again saw the creature as he drove along old Highway 93 near Lakeside. This time the entire head, body and tail were visible. Cote wrote of his encounters to Fish Wildlife and Parks in 1990. As a veteran fisherman, he knew what he saw. He had no doubt that it was a huge creature. FWP biologist Laney Hanzel has never seen the monster but has observed huge holes in nets officials have pulled from the lake. Even renowned Whitefish author Dorothy Johnson believed there was something in the lake. In a letter to the editor of the Flathead Courier, Johnson wrote: "I don't think the monster should be done with tongue in cheek. You have eyewitness accounts by people who were scared and didn't think it was funny. I remember hearing about something in Flathead Lake more than forty years ago, so don't give the Polson Chamber of Commerce credit for dreaming it up…."  And back in the dim past, the Kootenai Indians had a name for the lake they passed down through generations. They called it “Monster Lake.”



Mine Spooks

Waino Nyland came to Butte as a child from Finland in the early 1900s. He remembered that the first disaster his family experienced occurred when a lever broke on a hoisting engine as a cage was taking four men down into the mines. The cage fell twenty-two hundred feet, killing the riders. The bodies of the four men, one of them Nyland’s next-door neighbor, came out of the wreckage in pieces. The men’s spirits, according to Nyland, still haunt the mine. If you look down the shaft when the time is right on certain days, four pairs of lonely eyes stare back at you, looking up from the bottom of their deep, dark grave. Most don’t like to talk about ghosts, but all Butte miners have heard unexplained noises deep in the mines, had shovels or buckets disappear, and know about the phantom ring. Every hoisting engineer has answered a ring for a hoist-up where no one is working. If he sends a cage down in answer to the ring, it invariably comes back empty. And all miners know to watch out for the white goat on Anaconda Hill. He can turn up anywhere, because all Butte mines are connected, and sneak up from behind. If you are too close to the edge of a shaft, he’ll butt you right in.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go

Friday Photo: Spirit Cat

William Chessman built the Original Governor’s Mansion in Helena as a family home in 1887.  From 1913 to 1959, it served as the home of Montana’s governors.  By 1959, however, the mansion’s elegance had faded. Dark and shuttered, the old mansion sat quiet and empty. For several years during the 1960s, before it became a house museum, the city hired a caretaker who lived at the mansion. She was surprised at the number of visitors who rang the doorbell. She would often answer the door to find children of former governors, all grown up, standing on the porch. She always invited them in, let them poke around in the unused rooms, and listened with delight to their stories about growing up in the state’s executive residence. One story in particular was common among many of these former residents. It was about a little cat that roamed the mansion’s hallways. It was a friendly little kitty, and it always came to the children, begging for attention. It would come bounding down the hallway, and purring, rub against the children’s legs. Time and again, the lucky child who had the cat’s attention would bend down to scoop it up. But just as the child’s hands closed over its little body, the ghost cat would disappear. Several generations of tour guides have spent time alone in the mansion in the last thirty years. Today, they sometimes find shades pulled up when they were left down. Small things might be out of place. A picture, for example, might be turned to the wall. Or a closet door that is always kept shut might be discovered wide open. But no one has seen the cat. Evidence that a cat once lived in the mansion would help substantiate the children’s story, but how could one prove such a thing? An incredible find in the Montana Historical Society Archives offers just such proof. It shows the Chessman family in the 1890s on their front lawn. A professional photographer is taking a portrait of the family’s sleek black cat.

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives

Nevada City Hotel

Spirits wander in the Nevada City Hotel. The 1860s front portion was a stage stop, its log walls disassembled and rebuilt where the original Nevada City Hotel once stood. A two-story employees’ dormitory, circa 1912, from the Canyon Hotel at Yellowstone Park form the hotel rooms. Guests have related odd incidents, but the most dramatic event happened in February 2001.  A Global Stage production crew filmed a scene of Henry Ibsen's Enemy of the People in the Nevada City Hotel’s saloon. The temperature dipped below zero in the unheated hotel. The guest rooms and corridors, upstairs and down, were locked. Fifty people—cast, crew, and local extras—crowded into the bar. State employee John Ellingsen remembers it well: “The director called ‘quiet on the set’ and the camera began to roll. Everyone held their breath, afraid to make a sound. Suddenly there were footsteps in the room above. ‘Cut! Who's up there?’ yelled the director. The crewmembers and I rushed upstairs. When I unlocked Room 7, the room over the bar, it was dark, cold, and empty. But the floor kept creaking, slowly and deliberately, during the entire filming. It was even captured on tape.” Several years ago on a Halloween haunted tour of the Nevada City Hotel, I led my group up the stairs of the old stage stop. We peeked in Room 7, and there was nothing out of the ordinary. Across the hall in Room 1 I turned the key in the lock. The door swung open. Two young boys behind me clutched at my jacket, and the adults gasped as we all heard the footsteps. They were coming from underneath the bed.


The second floor of the Nevada City Hotel



Copper King Mansion

A group of friends sat around the dining room table one evening at the Copper King Mansion, once the home of William A. Clark. Suddenly they heard a strange moaning sound. It started out low, gathered strength, then ended abruptly. Again came the low-pitched moan from some deep place within the house. They knew it was coming from the third floor, and that someone would have to investigate. The thought filled them with dread. They agreed to go together. As they ascended the grand staircase, one step at a time, the sound rose and fell like a ghastly, ghoulish greeting. They reached the third floor, and the moaning had risen to a deafening, all-encompassing crescendo. It was loud; it was eerie; and it left the eight adults clutching each other. The monstrous, groaning sigh ebbed and died, but rose again immediately. They flung open the door to the ballroom and stopped at once and stared. A pipe organ stood against one wall. Outside, the wind was blowing, and it whistled into the ballroom through a small broken pane of stained glass. The realization began to dawn. The wind’s target was a bass pipe and the death-rattle moan was only the rise and fall of the wind hitting a low note!

Friday Photo: Quartz Street Fire Station

Butte’s Quartz Street Fire Station has a past that refuses to be forgotten. Built in 1900, the station housed twenty-two men, Chief Peter Sanger, and his family. Sanger’s first wife Margaret died in the family’s apartment in 1904. He remarried in 1908, and his second wife, Louisa, like Margaret before her, took up a post by the window where she watched for her husband’s safe return. In January 1915, Sanger’s truck collided with a Walkerville streetcar en route to an alarm. Hundreds attended his funeral at the station. After several more generations of firefighters had come and gone, the station became the Butte–Silver Bow Public Archives in 1981. Traces of its past include a wall of long-disconnected alarm boxes installed by Chief Sanger. Archivists and volunteers can tell you that they have heard the disconnected alarm bells clang as if the firemen never left. After the building has closed and darkness edges in, some say you can hear the men banter back and forth, reenacting scenes played out in the past hundreds of times. One late afternoon the building was empty, and the director was out in the parking lot. She was certain she saw an older woman gazing out the east window, drying her hands on a dish towel. Some time later a photograph of Louisa Sanger came to light. She was standing in the same window, drying her hands on a dish towel, gazing out to the street.

From Spirit Tailings: Ghost Tales from Virginia City, Butte, and Helena
Original photo from Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives

Recent major renovations have erased the tangible elements of the former station. Time will tell if the work has erased the spirits, too.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go

Elinor Knott

For me, October means telling ghost stories by the dozen, which is what I'll be doing tomorrow night. Join me here at the Historical Society at 6:30 Thursday evening for "How We Miss Them." In the mean time, here's another ghost story to tide you over until then.

Elinor Knott was one of the many madams at the Dumas Hotel in Butte. On a winter night in 1955, Knott packed her suitcase, put on her hat, and sat down to wait. Her lover had promised to leave his wife and come for her. They would leave Butte to start a new life together. But the next morning a friend discovered Knott’s body in her rooms at the Dumas. The coroner pronounced her dead of natural causes. Dark whispers among acquaintances suggested that something was amiss. Although officials declared her destitute, friends knew Knott owned jewelry, a red Cadillac, and a Harley Davidson motorcycle. These never surfaced and there was no inquest into her death. The coroner pronounced it suicide by a lethal combination of alcohol and drugs. A few years ago, a woman who had worked at the Dumas in the 1970s returned to Butte on a visit. She told of a curious experience. She said she was staying alone at the Dumas one night. She was in the bathroom upstairs at the end of the hall, with the door open. She had a clear view of the hall and the corner stairway. She saw a woman wearing a hat and carrying a suitcase walk past the bathroom door and descend the stairs. She was so shocked she didn’t move until the top of the woman’s head disappeared. She hurried down the stairs after her, but there was no sign of the woman. The front and back doors were locked and barred shut. Some time later, an artist commissioned to paint a mural for the city of Butte rented Knott’s former apartment to use a studio. Something compelled her to paint portrait after portrait of a woman she had never seen. She couldn’t seem to paint anything else.


Courtesy F.O.G (Friends of Ghosts)

 One of the canvasses, rescued from the trash, shows a middle-aged woman with a coy smile and a quaint little hat.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go

Dorothy Dunn

I'm booked across the state through October to tell the ghost stories I've uncovered in my research on Montana history. I thought I'd share a few on here. Warning: spine-tingling tales ahead!

Spirits shroud the ghost town of Bannack, where sluices once ran and whiskey flowed. Vigilantes bestowed violent beginnings. But dig deeper. The town’s windswept cemetery where spirits rest, or don’t rest, is evidence of tragedies even more indelible than hangings and shootings. In August of 1916, sixteen-year-old Dorothy Dunn, her cousin Fern, and a friend waded into a dredge pond and stepped off a shelf into deep water. None could swim. A passerby saved Fern and her friend, but lovely, vivacious Dorothy drowned. The site of the accident to this day is known as Dorothy’s Hole. Bertie Mathews, whose parents ran the Meade Hotel, took the death of her best friend Dorothy very hard. Some time after the tragedy, Bertie was upstairs in the hotel where she saw the apparition of her friend. Bertie recognized Dorothy’s long blue dress. The experience scared her, and she seldom talked about it. Since then, many others have seen Dorothy upstairs in the hotel. Visitors report cold spots, and children who know nothing of Dorothy claim to have talked with a girl in a long blue dress.


The Meade Hotel, where Dorothy's ghost has been seen and felt.
John Vachon, photographer. Library of Congress LC-USF34-065619-D

Story from Montana Moments: History on the Go