A Christmas Ghost

There is a beautiful house on Helena’s lower West Side that has been home to a number of tenants in the past twenty-five years. Some of those who have been associated with the house report odd experiences that I have detailed in Haunted Helena: Montana’s Queen City Ghosts. For the Scott family, the house was a magical place that holds special memories of family and one unique Christmas dinner. The house was built in 1877, and its longtime owner was Christmas Gift Evans, whose pioneer hardware firm of Sanford and Evans was a well-known, reputable Helena business. Chris Evans was born in Deerfield, New York, on Christmas Day in 1840. His parents felt so blessed at his birth that they named him Christmas Gift.

The Christmas Gift Evans House, listed in the National Register of Historic Places, is a rare example of the French Second Empire style. Its Mansard roof has elegant wrought iron cresting and inside, the handsome dark woodwork evokes another time. Original built-in furniture includes a dining room breakfront with exquisite beveled glass. The house has seen its share of tragedy including the death of Evans. Suffering from circulatory problems in 1915, Evans died in the house after the surgical amputation of his leg.

Christmas Gift Evans, born on Christmas Day, 1840, still likes to celebrate his birthday.
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives

Garth Scott was a single parent with two children when the family moved into the house in 2004. During the year they lived there, the Scotts thoroughly enjoyed the historic home and created some wonderful family memories. But it was Christmas that year that was especially memorable. Garth’s mother cooked a huge family dinner for some thirty family members who gathered around the dining room table. They took many photographs to capture Christmas memories. An extra guest appears in many of the photos, reflected in the beveled glass of the breakfront. The image of a man with a distinctive goatee does not match any of the guests seated at the table.

The family later discovered a portrait of Evans in a drawer of the breakfront. The identity of the image is certain. Christmas Gift Evans, perhaps in celebration of his birthday, apparently shared the family’s Christmas dinner.

Haunted Fort Assinniboine

Empty buildings with hollow windows sprawl across the windswept prairie off U.S. 87 outside Havre, Montana. Fort Assinniboine, established in 1879, once housed some five hundred soldiers and their families. As the largest fort in Montana, its famous residents included General “Black Jack” Pershing. Stationed at the fort in the mid-1890s, “Black Jack” earned his nickname as first lieutenant in the African-American Tenth Cavalry unit.  The fort closed in 1911, and over the decades the remaining structures served as a state agricultural experiment station, church retreat, farmers’ gathering place, shelter for the homeless, and a 4-H camp.

Although some of the fort’s buildings, listed in the National Register of Historic Places, remain intact, the hollow windows of this ghostly shell recall the fort’s former residents. Photo courtesy Havre Chamber of Commerce.

Former Hill County legislator Toni Hagener tells of an experience an elderly acquaintance once shared with her. He attended camp at the fort in the 1930s and recalled bunking in the enlisted men’s barracks. Upstairs, the fort’s records and ledgers lined the walls, leaving a narrow path down the center of the long room. It was forbidden territory, but this pathway offered the boys an irresistible sport. At every opportunity they snuck upstairs, took an open volume, got a running start, and flopped down for an exhilarating slide on the wooden floor.
One night, the boy awoke to an odd rustling overhead. Sneaking upstairs to investigate, he saw an old man sitting cross legged on the floor; his long grizzled hair hid his face. A quartermaster’s report lay open in his lap as he slowly turned the pages. The boy slipped back downstairs, woke his buddy, and together they climbed the stairs. Both saw the old man, turning pages. They returned to their bunks to watch the stairway. No one came down. At first light, the boys checked upstairs. The old man was gone.

In 1954, fire claimed these barracks where the boy had encountered the ghost of an old soldier, turning pages in the quartermaster’s ledger. 1955 NPS photo by R. H. Mattison.

The memory stayed fresh as the boy grew up. Fire left the barracks a burned-out shell in 1954, prompting the man to further speculate on the old timer’s identity. He concluded it was the ghost of an old soldier, searching for something in the ashen ruins. He could picture the scene in his mind’s eye, a ghost within a ghost.

Fort Benton’s Hoo Doo Block

Vigilantes hanged desperado William Hynson at Fort Benton in 1868. The hanging on Block 25, some believed, triggered a series of dark events on that site. Sheriff John Morgan built a livery stable, a hand-dug well, and a home on Block 25 around the time of Hynson's hanging. Morgan's wife died and his house burned down. Soon after, during a skirmish in the streets of Fort Benton, an Indian was hanged on Block 25 and the bodies of several Blackfeet were thrown into Morgan’s well. It was thereafter known as the Place of Skulls. By 1870, Morgan had died and his livery passed to others. A small log house on Block 25 served as the county jail.  On November 28, 1872, it burned down with three men inside. Officials found the charred remains of two men. Officials speculated that the third prisoner killed the other two and escaped. Locals whispered that the block was cursed, although Morgan’s livery continued to do a brisk business under other owners. Rumors circulated, however, that the ghost of a the dead prisoners spooked the livery’s horses, wandering over the other empty, overgrown lots of Block 25.

Block 25 in 1884 included Ferdinand Roosevelt’s first furniture store, destroyed in a freak wind, the River Press offices, and the livery business. Sanborn fire Insurance Map, MHS Research Center.

On the site of the jail in 1884, Ferdinand C. Roosevelt’s furniture store was nearly finished when a freak wind tore the boards apart and blew the entire frame structure into the river. The wind touched nothing else.  Roosevelt rebuilt. In 1885, fire claimed the store, Roosevelt’s huge inventory, and nearly destroyed the River Press next door. Property owners did not rebuild on Block 25. Brothers Ed and George Lewis rebuilt the livery in 1895, then Ed died in 1897. By 1900 only George Lewis’s new livery stood on the east half of Block 25. In a final burst of evil energy, fire consumed it. George Lewis promptly relocated his business. Finally, A brave citizen built a home where the jail once stood. Renumbering of the townsite blocks, twice, helped erase the stigma of the Hoo Doo Block. W. S. Stocking wrote in 1906 that forty years later, only the one dwelling stood there: “…and good luck seems to attend the occupant—from which it may be argued that the ‘hoodoo’ has exhausted its power for evil."

Wendigo

Does anyone remember that very scary 1961 episode of Great Ghost Stories retelling novelist Algernon Blackwood’s powerful 1910 short story "The Wendigo?"  The final scene shows the mythical creature, in the body of a starving human, doomed to roam the cold, snow scattered forests of the north, picking at the bark of a tree for nourishment. Others, including Theodore Roosevelt in his book The Wilderness Hunter and Stephen King in Pet Sematary, have written stories of wendigos.

Illustration by Matt Fox in "The Wendigo" by Algernon Blackwood in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, June 1944.

The mythical wendigo is said to roam the northern regions from the Atlantic Ocean to the Rocky Mountains and as far north as the Arctic Ocean, hungry for human flesh, but also feeding on moss, frogs, and mushrooms. Most northern Native American tribes have stories explaining how a human can turn “wendigo” by an act of cannibalism, through the presence of a demon, through a dream, or by the sorcery of a shaman.  In times of starvation, the wendigo myth served as a deterrent to cannibalism, even to save one’s life. Suicide or resignation to death was preferable to turning wendigo. Among the Assiniboine and Cree, a wendigo ceremony was performed in times of famine to reinforce this taboo. Anthropologists have studied a phenomenon called “Wendigo psychosis.” There are historical cases of this condition which apparently resulted when a person resorted to cannibalism and then developed an insatiable taste for human flesh. A famous documented case involved Swift Runner, a Plains Cree trapper in Alberta, who butchered and ate his wife and five children, even though the starving family was within twenty-five miles of food at a Hudson’s Bay post. Swift Runner, suffering from this psychosis, became a homicidal cannibal, later confessed and was executed at Fort Saskatchewan in 1878.

Ghostly Visitors at the Bonanza Inn

Halloween is over, but I can't resist sharing one last ghost story.

The Bonanza Inn in Virginia City dates to the mid-1860s. It was built as the Madison County Courthouse, but three Catholic Sisters of Charity arrived from Leavenworth, Kansas, to convert it to St. Mary’s Hospital for miners in 1876. Mining waned, and the sisters moved on in 1879, but they, and some of their patients, left unusual legacies.

From the 1950s, guests have reported ghostly visits. A female spirit soothes the sick and comforts the depressed. Some claim to have seen the shadowy nun moving along Idaho Street or sitting in a pew in the Episcopal Church. I set out to discover her identity. One of the sisters was Irene McGrath, an 18-year-old novice who endeared herself to Virginia City. Community women, concerned about her safety among the rough miners, made a pact to secretly follow her whenever she went out alone. Years later as superior at St. James Hospital in Butte, Mother Irene cared for a patient who had known her at Virginia City. From her Mother Irene was overwhelmed to learn of this service. It’s not surprising that she might come back to repay the debt.

Not all encounters at the Bonanza Inn are comforting. In the summer of 1975, the Bonanza Inn housed the production crew filming The Missouri Breaks with Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson. The occupant in Room 1 was ill and declined dinner in Ennis. As he dozed alone in the building, a loud knocking jolted him awake. He flung open the door to find no one there. Then behind him came a sharp knock at the window.  He whirled around, pulled up the shade: no one was there. Then at the door, at the window, at the door—he gathered his belongings and thereafter slept in his car.

Room 1 sat locked and unused for twenty years. In 1997, the State of Montana acquired the building for housing state workers and others. Fear paralyzed one of the first overnight guests in Room 1. She awakened to see a male figure looming at the foot of her bed, wearing a wide brimmed hat and duster. She watched him fade away. Another guest in Room 1 felt someone watching her through the window. Drawing back the curtain, she found a figure wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a duster, staring at her.  During renovations to the building, another worker spent a scary night as something under his bed plucked at the bedsprings.
I stayed in Room 7 in the summer of 2000. Coming out of the steamy bathroom after a shower, a strong unpleasant odor hit me, like that of the geriatric ward where I worked as a candy striper in high school. The cloying smell lingered then dissipated. Another guest in Room 7 awakened to the sound of water splashing, as in a bowl. Later she discovered that the sisters used basins for washing wounds and bathing patients.

One hot and still August afternoon I lay down to rest in Room 2, thinking about my lecture that evening. I had the Bonanza Inn all to myself. At first they were so soft I didn’t notice. Then I could hear the small female footsteps in sturdy shoes at the far end of the hallway. She came closer, pausing midway down the hall. I clearly heard a key turn in a lock. The door clicked open and softly closed. I heard a few bumps and clunks, and then more footsteps behind the closed door. Slowly they grew faint and then faded away. I felt honored that Sister Irene visited me.

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.

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.

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.

Smith Mine Disaster

Thirty-nine corrugated metal structures mark the site of the Smith Mine, a ghostly reminder of a once vibrant mining district near Bearcreek in Carbon County. The Montana Coal and Iron Company began developing the Smith Mine after the Montana, Wyoming and Southern Railroad arrived in 1906. By 1907, it produced 8,000 tons of high-grade coal. The company mechanized the mine, and throughout the 1930s, it continued to invest in new equipment, building a new crushing plant, elevator, cleaning plant, coal sheds and scales, electrical substation, and other above-ground structures to support the underground operation. By 1943, miners working three shifts a day, six days a week produced almost 500,000 tons of coal annually to meet coal needs for the nation during World War II.  But investments in safety lagged behind other improvements, and in the 1940s, many Smith miners still used open-flame carbide headlamps (as opposed to safer electric lamps). The highly gaseous mine also lacked good ventilation or rock-dusting equipment to control coal dust. On February 27, 1943, this proved a deadly combination when a methane gas explosion in Smith Mine #3 killed seventy-four miners and, later, one rescuer in the worst coal mining disaster in Montana history. There were only three survivors. Although the company closed the #3 adit after the explosion, it continued to work its other mines, raking in record profits through 1945. Declining demand, lower quality coal, competition from diesel and natural gas, and bad management led to the operation’s closure in 1953. Sometimes visitors to the lonely site, listed in the National Register of Historic Places, report anguished cries. They seem to come from deep within the earth and carry on the breeze.

The Smith Mine #3 site in 1968. Library of Congress, HAER MONT,5-RELO.V,2--1

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.”

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