Happy Halloween

Montana Heritage Commission photo

George Ives swung from the gallows on this spot in Nevada City on December 21, 1863. This remarkable photograph, taken by Heritage Commission staff on the 143rd anniversary of his hanging, captured the strange image of an unidentified man. It is not George Ives; he was not bald. But perhaps it is the image of Charlie Bovey, who recreated the town of Nevada City, placing endangered buildings from all over Montana  along the streets. Charlie died in 1978 in Cabin #5, behind the Nevada City Hotel.

Here is a close-up of the man's face:

Spooky, right? I hope your Halloween is as wonderfully spooky as this photo.

A Halloween to Remember

Alicia “Lettie” Conrad never let adversity get the better of her. Kalispell’s beautiful Conrad Mansion is now a museum, but back in October 1910, Lettie nearly lost her home to a disastrous fire. The entire town turned out to fight the blaze. Despite scorched walls and water damage, the house and its contents survived. Lettie devised a way to thank those who helped fight the fire. She planned a spectacular Halloween party and invited the entire town. Soggy fallen plaster, piled furniture, and a gaping hole in roof became the setting for Dante’s Inferno. Five hundred guests made their way to “hell” in the basement by way of a circular stairway built in the elevator shaft. Clammy wet canvas hung over the doorways, strings hung down along the dark path like cobwebs. On the first floor, Spanish moss dripped over the balcony and on the chandeliers. Dozens of lifelike cardboard and silk bats hung on invisible silken thread; fans kept the bats flying. The second story was purgatory, where a mass of wet, slick plaster covered the floors and mounds of it shaped like volcanoes covered the soggy beds. Special lighting simulating flames shot out of the craters. The third floor was paradise. Piled-up furniture covered in fresh flowers served as pathways; their sweet scent covered the acrid smell of smoke. After the tour, the guests gathered in the great hall. Just before the orchestra tuned up for the dancing, Lettie thanked all those who helped save her home. The dancing commenced and there was food and music until dawn. There will never be another Halloween party like it.

Haunting of the Judith River Ranger Station

The Judith River Ranger Station has a homey ambiance where the past is everywhere. Some lucky guests have experienced this firsthand.

In the summer of 2009, a crew of six archaeologists, students, and volunteers excavated a portion of the long-abandoned mining camp of nearby Yogotown. The Judith Ranger Station served as headquarters for the crew. My husband Mark and daughter Katie were project volunteers. They, along with director Chris Merritt of the University of Montana, took the upstairs bedrooms while the rest of the crew camped nearby. The weather on the first night was hot and very still.

Mark awakened to the sounds of breakfast cooking in the kitchen downstairs. He could hear banter between the kitchen and the dining room, someone chopping something on the cutting board, and bacon or sausage sizzling. Mark thought it must be about 6 AM, and almost time to get up. Then he fell asleep again. He awakened sometime later to utter silence. It was still pitch dark, and so he knew it was not time to get up. Suddenly it struck him that with all that activity downstairs, there were no cooking smells. He began to worry that maybe some animal had gotten into the house. So he got the flashlight and looked at the time. It was 3:30. He tried to get Katie to go with him to check, but she wouldn’t get up. He went downstairs and found nothing amiss, so he returned to bed and both he and Katie went back to sleep.
Katie awakened a while later. The night had been hot and stuffy, but a cloud of cold air seemed to surround her. She lay there shivering in the deep quiet. Then she heard a very loud rhythmic creaking, like someone was coming up the stairs. The next morning, Mark asked if anyone had been up in the night. Everyone said they had slept soundly. Then as they all milled around waiting for breakfast, someone sat down in the living room rocking chair. It creaked loudly, and Katie suddenly realized that she had not heard footsteps on the stairs, but rather the rocking chair’s distinctive creak.

Ghostly Encounter

I heard voices in the empty kitchen and the air felt strangely heavy. I had stayed in the 1860s Daems House before, but never alone. It was once home to an early-day Virginia City physician. The spacious house, actually two houses joined together, originally served as both the physician’s office and family’s home. It is now under state ownership. On this particular evening, something was off-kilter. I had recently written about Martha Daems—married back in 1913 to a grandson of the doctor. My writing brought some scandalous family skeletons out of the closet. It occurred to me that maybe the house was unhappy with me. I pushed that idea aside. I loved this historic home’s timeworn rooms and the state’s valiant efforts to restore them. So I took advantage of the solitude. I made a sweep of the house with my digital camera.

Scrolling through the photos, I noticed orbs—bubbles of light that some believe are evidence of the supernatural—in a number of the frames. Odd, I thought. I struggled to shut and lock the back door in the adjoining room. The lock was difficult, so I made double sure that it was secure, pulled down all the shades, turned out the lights, and fumbled my way to bed in the dark. I awoke with a start around 1 a.m. The house was utterly silent, but something wasn’t right. What was it? Then it dawned on me that the room was no longer dark. I crept out of bed, stepped into the back room, and a scream stuck in my throat. The back door that I had so carefully secured stood wide open; silver moonlight flooded into the house, touching everything with an eerie metallic glimmer. I instantly knew that the heaviness—whatever it was—had gone out the door.
Later that same week, in August of 2009, I again stayed alone at the Daems House.  I took more photographs, but none included orbs. Virginia City has its secrets, and locals have their stories. And I have my own story about the Daems House to add to the list.

Hangman’s Tree

A lone Ponderosa pine, just west of Helena's present-day Blake Street between Highland and Hillsdale, served as the town’s Hangman’s Tree. It was the only tree left standing in 1865 after miners had denuded the countryside for cabins and sluices. Mary Sheehan Ronan attended school up the hill in a simple cabin at Rodney and Broadway. From the schoolyard the children had a clear view of the lone Ponderosa. One morning as they arrived at school, the children saw the limp form of a man dangling from the tree. The boys ran up and down the gulch, speculating about the “bad man” who received such awful punishment.  Mary later wrote: “I hated the talk. It made me shiver… that dreadful, pitiful object, with bruised head, disarrayed vest and trousers, with boots so stiff, so worn, so wrinkled, so strangely the most poignant of all the gruesome details. I tried to forget, but I have never forgotten.” At least eleven men suffered this fate on the famed Hangman’s Tree. The last of the eleven hangings took place in 1870 when vigilantes hanged Arthur Compton and Joe Wilson for the attempted murder of a local rancher. Photographer Mary Ann Eckert captured the grisly scene in a graphic, horrific photograph.

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 948-121

Until recently a copy of it graced the hallway of a Helena elementary school, a strong message that crime doesn’t pay. In 1875, thousands thronged the neighborhood to cut a souvenir sliver from the tree when Reverend Shippen, a Methodist minister, cut it down. He claimed recent flooding had undermined its roots and the tree was so unstable that he feared it would fall on his barn and kill his horse. Many years later, while workers were digging a foundation for a new house, the huge roots of the Hangman’s Tree came to light. They were just as sturdy and secure as they must have been when the tree was young.

P.S. Tales of hauntings abound throughout the neighborhood around the tree. Read about them in Beyond Spirit Tailings, now available as an ebook.

Friday Photo: Newlyweds

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 957-755

Clarence Goodell married Millie Priest on August 15, 1880. Millie's headdress marks her as a bride, but like most brides at the time, she probably designed her wedding dress to be worn again.

P.S. The Montana Historical Society has a fabulous collection of wedding dresses.

Birdie Brown

The rutted road was a familiar one to Fergus County locals during the days of Prohibition. You had to be careful—bad hooch could cause blindness and even death. Those looking for a place to party knew to point their cars toward Black Butte and Birdie (or Bertie) Brown’s place. She was as nice a woman as they come, and her still—according to locals—produced some of the best moonshine in the country. Birdie was among a very small number of young African American women who homesteaded alone in Montana. She was in her twenties when she settled in the Lewistown area in 1898. She later homesteaded along Brickyard Creek in 1913.

Birdie Brown's Homestead in Fergus County. Courtesy Great Falls Tribune.

During Prohibition in the 1920s, Birdie carved a niche for herself. Her neat homestead where she lived with her cat was a place of warm hospitality. Birdie’s parlor was legendary. In May 1933, just months before the end of Prohibition and Birdie’s livelihood, the revenue officer came around and warned her to stop her brewing. But as Birdie multitasked, dry cleaning some garments with gasoline and tending what would be her last batch of hooch, the gasoline exploded in her face. She lived a few hours, long enough to request that someone take care of her beloved pet. But the cat that followed her everywhere was never found. Birdie’s once orderly homestead now lies in a state of collapse, tragically transformed into a ghost of its former self. Roundup artist Jane Stanfel, who has painted Birdie’s homestead, makes a strange observation. Although it’s been nearly eighty years since Birdie’s passing, every so often someone catches a glimpse of a black cat perched in her parlor window.

Ghost on the Little Rosebud

Bob Ferguson was a cowboy who lived alone on a ranch on the Little Rosebud, a tributary of Rosebud Creek. He ran some cattle and seemed to prosper. In May of 1890, Ferguson disappeared. Neighbors noted that he was missing after a few weeks, and searched for him, but they found no trace of him. During the spring roundup, all the cowboys kept an eye out for him especially since he had been one of their own. Sure enough, one of them eventually came upon Ferguson’s body buried in the red shale hills near his cabin. It appeared that he had been killed by the Cheyenne. Ferguson left a sister who sold the ranch to a man named Beattie. Not long after Beattie and his wife had moved in, they began to experience a nightly rapping on the cabin door. When Beattie flung it open, no one was there. When Mrs. Beattie’s husband was away, as he sometimes traveled, she was not a timid woman and had no hesitation in opening the door. But no one was ever there, and she declared that there was something wrong with the ranch. Beattie thought perhaps someone was playing a trick on him who wanted to drive him away since this was prime ranch land. So he hung onto the ranch. His wife died and he remarried, and the second Mrs. Beattie also experienced the rapping. Finally the government bought the ranch as part of the Cheyenne Reservation. Many Cheyennes applied for this desirable land. The family that secured it moved in and immediately was plagued with the mysterious nighttime rapping. They did not stay long, nor did the next occupants, nor the next. The buildings were abandoned and crumbled back to the earth, and no one can tell where the haunted ranch used to be, or if Bob Ferguson still roams his property.

Friday Photo: Dudes

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, F. W. Byerly collection

The dudes in today's photo are admiring Cliff Lake in the Beartooth Mountains, probably in the 1930s or early 1940s.

Butte's House of Mystery

The Montana Standard of September 2, 1936, reported on the demolition of a mysterious building on the corner of Galena and Wyoming in the heart of Butte’s historic red light district.

 1916  Sanborn-Perris map of Butte shows the House of Mystery on the corner of Galena and Wyoming. Note the label “Female Boarding” on neighboring buildings denoting prostitution.

The long-abandoned building had been slated for demolition before, but the owner had always managed to avoid it. This, time, however, the public eyesore was coming down. As WPA workers began to gut the interior, they discovered the secrets it had long disguised. From the street it appeared to be a two story structure with street entrances to a dozen cribs—tiny offices where the women of the neighborhood had once plied their trade. In one of the crib windows, a display of women’s underwear lay in a pile, its fabric rotting and threadbare. But deeper within the building, workers discovered a three-story maze of hallways that criss-crossed each other, hidden passageways, false floors, tiny closets, and trick wiring. Electrical wires passed through the closets in such a way that the lights could be stealthily switched off from inside. Why would someone need to suddenly and clandestinely throw the building into darkness? When workmen pulled up the flooring with their crowbars, they exposed another dark secret in the basement: a buried room dug out of the bedrock with three filthy beds where someone, at some point in time, had obviously hidden. On one of these beds lay a faded photograph, taken by an Oakland, California, photographer, of two young Chinese boys, one dressed in a traditional embroidered tunic and trousers, the other boy in early nineteenth century American dress. Tunnels from this dugout room ran beneath Wyoming and Galena streets, but bedrock stopped both midway. Today a parking lot sits on this corner, and while the house is long gone, its mystery lingers in the tall tales of Butte.

Meriwether Lewis and a Forensic Mystery

The Masonic Grand Lodge in Helena owns one of Montana’s most mysterious and intriguing treasures. Meriwether Lewis’s Masonic apron is not only a historically significant artifact, it is also a beautiful piece of artful handiwork. Hand-painted symbols and emblems significant to Masonry embellish the hand-sewn silk apron. In times past, members wore their aprons to reveal Masonic affiliation while traveling in dangerous situations. Meriwether Lewis certainly followed this practice on the expedition, and was the first Mason to travel in Montana. Lewis was traveling along the dangerous Natchez Trace in Tennessee when he died of gunshot wounds under mysterious circumstances in 1809. Whether he committed suicide or was murdered remains in question. Family members believed that the apron was in his breast pocket when he died.

Photo via Discovering Lewis and Clark

The apron passed through several generations until 1924 when the Masons of Missouri purchased it from the widow of a distant Lewis relative. In 1960, Montana’s retiring Grand Master, Joseph Hopper of Billings, bought the apron for five hundred dollars and gave it to the Grand Lodge Museum in Helena. Several dark rust-colored stains mar the front. Samples of the stains tested at the University of Oregon revealed both deer and human blood, but only a sample of Lewis’s DNA could determine if the human blood on the apron belonged to Lewis. How Lewis died is still debated, but during refurbishing of his tomb in 1928, an examination of his skull revealed a bullet hole in the back, unlikely evidence of suicide. A Tennessee coroner’s jury in 1996 agreed evidence warranted exhumation of Lewis’s remains. This would also open the door for further testing of the apron’s human blood for DNA. But the National Park Service, caretaker of Lewis’s grave and monument, has denied the request.

Friday Photo: Inside a Homestead Cabin

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, PAc 90-87.34-8

Evelyn Cameron snapped this rare photo of the interior of a homestead cabin circa 1900. Bread is rising in the pan by the oven.

P.S. Remember this cramped homestead cabin?
P.P.S. Have you seen the beautiful postcards in Evelyn Cameron's Montana?

Frankenstein’s Lab

Kenneth Strickfaden is not a household name, but everyone who has ever enjoyed the old Boris Karloff movies is familiar with his work, and he has a Montana connection. Strickfaden was born in 1896 in Deer Lodge where his father was in the real estate business. Strickfaden served overseas during World War I, and by the 1920s he worked as a studio electrician in California.  He was an electrical genius and had a knack for creating special effects. In 1931, he brought his unique skills to the set of the movie Frankenstein. Strickfaden was tasked with equipping Dr. Frankenstein’s tower laboratory. He was asked to create the lightning-powered engines that would jolt actor Boris Karloff to life. The first set designs called for a simple, modern laboratory. But Strickfaden was a master of science fiction contraptions. His elaborate spark-blasting machines whirred, chugged, cracked, and smoked from way too much voltage. You could almost smell the scorched metal. Levers, machines, and jars of electrical arcs set the standard for a mad scientist’s laboratory.

Courtesy Frankensteinia

Strickfaden resurrected the laboratory, stored in his garage, many more times for films including the Flash Gordon serials, The Munsters TV series in the mid-1960s, and Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein in 1974. Strickfaden himself once even stepped in for Boris Karloff during a scene in MGM’s The Mask of Fu-Manchu. It was a good thing too. Strickfaden held a large sword with a streaming arc of lightning. The electrical blast threw him clear across the room. He was shaken, but fortunately not barbecued.