Haunted Helena:: Montana's Queen City Ghosts

Haunted Helena:: Montana's Queen City Ghosts

by Ellen Baumler
Haunted Helena:: Montana's Queen City Ghosts

Haunted Helena:: Montana's Queen City Ghosts

by Ellen Baumler

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Overview

Helena was born of the gold rush, nurtured by the wealth of its financiers and raised on its political struggles. The lawless gold camp and its vigilante hangings left an indelible imprint on the modern community. Restless spirits from Helena's turbulent past still linger around town. Historian and award-winning author Ellen Baumler blends history with the supernatural as she expertly weaves the past with the present in a ghostly web. Firsthand accounts and historical records add credibility to these spooky but true tales. Explore the legacy of the hangman's tree and meet the ghosts of historic Last Chance Gulch. These stories and more bring to light the shadowy places in Helena where the past sometimes comes to life.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781609499341
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing SC
Publication date: 09/09/2014
Series: Haunted America
Pages: 112
Sales rank: 1,110,729
Product dimensions: 5.80(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Ellen Baumler has been the interpretive historian at the Montana Historical Society since 1992. She earned her PhD in English, classics and history from the University of Kansas. Ellen is a longtime member of the Humanities Montana Speakers Bureau, a 2011 recipient of the Governor's Award for the Humanities and an award-winning author. She is a popular storyteller, best known for weaving the past with the present in a ghostly twist.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

SHADOWS OF THE GOLD CAMP

The gold in the gravel of Last Chance Gulch fueled financial empires and built Montana's capital city. The legacy of the gold rush lives on in Helena's flamboyant architecture and luxurious West Side homes that dazzle visitors today. But Helena is also a place of secrets, nestled in its crooked bed along the famous gulch. Besides a colorful history, Helena has a clandestine past of layered energy, where shadows lurk in darkened doorways, intense emotions linger and roaming spirits leave no footprints.

Tribal histories and archaeology tell us that generations of Native Americans trekked through the game-rich Helena valley, planting the first layer of energy. Early people knew the valley as a place where earthquakes made the ground tremble. They left their handprints and mysterious paintings on nearby cliff walls and their stone tools and projectile points scattered across the valley. Members of the Lewis and Clark expedition also traveled through, noting in their journals the Gates of the Rocky Mountains.

Antelope, rattlesnakes and grizzly bears were plentiful when four prospectors happened upon the gulch on July 14, 1864. Known to posterity as the Four Georgians for the placer mining method they practiced, the down-on-their-luck foursome was en route to Virginia City for supplies. They decided to give it one more try, dug holes and crouched along the banks of the clear stream with their gold pans, swishing and swirling water and gravel. Their discovery touched off changes to the valley.

Miners churned up the wilderness and stripped the forests. By 1869, Last Chance Gulch had given up nearly $18 million worth of the golden treasure, and the gulch looked nothing like it had a few years previous. But log cabins built close together were vulnerable to the fires that haunted early residents. Their survival depended on goods freighted far distances. If fire claimed their food supply, there was no immediate replacement. And this anxiety provided a third kind of energy. Early businessmen were in such a hurry to build fireproof stores and offices that brick and stone buildings covered the diggings before the gold had entirely played out. Legend has it that as late as 1913, excavation for the Placer Hotel yielded enough gold to pay for the building and then some. Helena is literally built on gold.

In the earliest days of the gold camp, miners worked at a feverish pitch. At the south end of Last Chance Gulch, where it divides into Grizzly and Oro Fino Gulches, a prospector from California built a cabin. The log dwelling served as the entrance to his claim, and he worked it, digging (or "drifting") into the hillside. He was an older man who kept to himself, and perhaps that is why there was talk about him. Some believed that he was a murderer and a fugitive. There was something else about this miner. He had the Midas touch. Every bucket of rock he dug yielded gold. Everyone knew he had amassed a huge hoard that he stored in his drift, and some were jealous.

Then one night the miner disappeared. He wasn't exactly missed, as no one cared where he had gone, but it was strange that he wasn't around anymore. What he had in his drift was common knowledge, and many a miner cast his gaze longingly toward the old man's cabin. Late one night, two men took courage and "jumped" the old man's claim. They entered the cabin and spread out their bedrolls, thinking that they would investigate the drift in the morning. They settled into sleep. Suddenly, both men jolted awake.

The back of the cabin led into the old man's diggings, and from the tunnel came an unearthly white-bright light that spilled out into the cabin and filled it with a strange glow. This light was weird and frightening. Then came a blood-curdling, piercing scream of agony, and at the mine's threshold, surrounded by the bright light, were two men locked in a death grip, one on top of the other. As the old miner struggled with all his might, the man on top raised his arm. In his hand, he held a dagger that glinted as it caught the light. Thus poised, for a fleeting moment, the light revealed his face — a friend known to the two claim jumpers. Down came his arm in a rapid movement as the knife pierced the old man's heart. In a flash, the vision was over, and the cabin was again enveloped in darkness. The two men fled the cabin and slept no more that night.

The next day, they told their tale and identified the man they had seen wielding the dagger. But suspicion had already begun to take hold, and this added credence to the conclusion others had already drawn. A search revealed the old miner's cold, stiff body far back in the drift, with the savage, gaping wound that took his life. The gold he had worked so hard to find was missing.

The Helena Daily Independent recounted this story some years after the fact on November 28, 1875, speculating that in some eerie coincidence, the two claim jumpers had the same dream. The paper does not bring up the other possibility: that the claim jumpers actually saw the apparition. Did the energy of the miner's last desperate moments and the thief's murderous rage cause the unholy event to play again in front of the claim jumpers? Either way, it solved the mystery of the miner's disappearance.

Longtime Helena resident Gus Beaver, who passed away at ninety- three in 2004, lived most of his life at the south end of Last Chance Gulch. He knew all the lore of the neighborhood. In an interview in 1996, Gus claimed that Chinese miners working underground in the nearby hills were murdered when white miners blasted the entry to their tunnel, sealing them inside. Gus believed their spirits were restless. He told a homeowner whose property was on that site not to locate her children's bedroom in the daylight basement. "Because," said Gus, "the children might be awakened by those dead miners scratching on their windows." While no record of such disaster has come to light, there may be a thread of truth to the story. Perhaps the spirit of that other old miner wanders the south end of the gulch, searching for the gold that went missing when he gave up his life in the drift.

When the Four Georgians made their discovery, the territory of Montana, created on May 26, 1864, was less than two months old. Carved from the huge Idaho Territory, Congress created Montana to bring more accessible government and law enforcement to the remote mining camps. The Montana gold camps suffered because the capital of Idaho Territory and the seat of government were in Lewiston, Idaho, miles across the rugged, sometimes impassable Continental Divide. The gold rushes brought unsavory characters and a dangerous criminal element. With no law enforcement or government presence, the miners' courts, patterned after those in California, were ill equipped to handle the vicious crimes that threatened Montana's early settlements.

Law enforcement was slow in coming. Vigilantes took the law into their own hands to rid the new, booming settlements of this criminal element. Their actions are still controversial. In the space of several months in late 1863 and early 1864, vigilantes hanged some two dozen men at Bannack and Virginia City. A splinter group operated in Helena, where the infamous Hangman's Tree saw ten named victims and several other unknown men hanged on its limbs between 1865 and 1870.

The Murderer's Tree, as it was first known, stood east of the settlement at the head of Dry Gulch, between present-day Highland and Hillsdale Streets, just west of Blake Street. The ancient Ponderosa pine, according to those who knew it well, had massive lower branches that tangled in weird, fantastic contortions. The branches, bleak and devoid of foliage, protruded some twenty feet from its gnarled, moss-covered trunk. Miners, even in their need to cut logs for cabins and sluices, let it stand, looming over the eastern outskirts of the gold camp.

Violence in Montana's mining camps affected everyone, and the Murderer's Tree quickly became a community icon. Twelve-year-old Mary "Mollie" Sheehan, later Mrs. Peter Ronan, recalled in her memoir, Girl from the Gulches, that one morning in 1865 or 1866, as she and her classmates reached the crest of the Broadway hill on their way to school, they saw a man hanging from the tree. He stayed there for three days as a warning, and the boys flocked to view the "bad man" at every opportunity. Mollie hated the talk and recalled "that 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." All her life she tried to forget, but nearly seventy years later, as she dictated her memories to her daughter, Mary still remembered.

David Hilger, who came to Helena as a youngster with his family in 1867, recalled climbing the tree's dead branches and examining rope burns on its lower limbs. He and his friends played marbles beneath it. On April 30, 1870, their game was interrupted for the lynchings of Arthur Compton and Joseph Wilson. The two were being held in the county jail when citizens forced it open, took the two to the steps of the courthouse and conducted an open-air trial in protest of the fledgling, slow-to-act government. The "jury" found them guilty of the robbery and attempted murder of a local rancher. The crowd voted to hang the two and marched them to the accepted place of execution, by this time known as the Hangman's Tree. Once the double hanging was over, according to Hilger, the boys resumed their game. These were the last two recorded hangings on the Hangman's Tree.

In 1875, Reverend W.E. Shippen paid a woodcutter $2.50 to chop the Hangman's Tree into firewood. He claimed that flooding loosened the roots of the dead tree and that it was in danger of toppling onto his barn and killing his horse. He did not anticipate the public outcry at the removal of the tree. Citizens lined up by the hundreds to cut souvenir slivers from its trunk. Years later, in 1913, workers digging a foundation hit roots of the tree and discovered that there was no flood damage; the roots were still secure. The reverend likely made up an excuse to remove the macabre symbol.

Records show that several of the tree's victims were buried in various cemeteries, but the burial places of others are unknown. At least two coffins have surfaced in the neighborhood where the Hangman's Tree once stood. In 1900, a workman digging a foundation for an addition in a backyard uncovered one coffin. A crew hit the other working on gas lines on Davis Street in 1931. Were these victims of the Hangman's Tree? Both burials were close to the spot where the tree once stood.

David Hilger, who witnessed that last double hanging, examined the contents of the pine box discovered in 1931. According to newspaper accounts, a few shreds of clothing included the remains of the victim's boots. Hilger compared the boots, which were high-topped and had ornamental stitching, with a photograph of the hanging of James Daniels, which took place in 1866. The boots seemed to match those in the photograph. They were further described as "wrinkled." If the remains were those of Daniels, this could be the hanging Mary Ronan recalled and described.

The vigilante mentality and violent beginnings leave their marks on any community that springs from these kinds of roots. There is a fascination with the details, like Mary Ronan's recollection of wrinkled boots. A grisly photograph of the Compton and Wilson hangings in fact subdued generations of children. That photograph hung in the hallway of Jefferson Elementary School for many years, presumably as a warning that crime does not pay. And in the neighborhood where all these hangings took place, emotions must loiter in the soil, in the buildings, in the very air. Imagine the last painful gasps of all those men whose lives were snuffed out in such a violent manner. How could any of them rest in peace?

Pathways became more defined, and the neighborhood grew around the Shippen home, although the reverend was long gone. By the mid-1880s, a first generation of residents had settled there. And they and others who came after felt the energy that sometimes hung thick in the air. Even today, residents sometimes hear voices outside in the night, footsteps in their attics, and one family claims to have seen menacing apparitions in their bedroom.

Architect Herb Dawson, whose home was on Hillsdale, had a number of experiences in his house. Most frightening was an episode that occurred late one night as he was stripping paint from the parlor woodwork. A knife on the mantle behind him flew across the room and hit the wall inches from his head. Herb also found many marbles throughout his house and on the front porch.

During the remodeling of another house, workmen had applied new drywall and plaster. They locked the house and left the walls to dry. No one had access to the house, and no cats or other animals were inside. When the workmen returned, they found claw-like scratches marring every wall, and the plaster had to be reapplied. Residents find marbles, too, scattered among their homes and gardens, like those Hilger and his friends left beneath the infamous tree. Whether you believe in the lingering energy expended in this neighborhood, not just of the victims but also of those who participated in the hangings, the neighborhood does have a unique ambience. And it began soon after the final victims took their last breaths.

On a night in the dim past, when the Hangman's Tree still stood sentinel over the barren landscape and the memories of all those terrible deaths were very fresh, a citizen had a ghoulish encounter. He detailed the incident in a letter to the editor published in the Rocky Mountain Gazette on September 29, 1872. He wrote that business had detained him late into the evening. It was a Saturday night and clouds heavy with snow hung low overhead. He was anxious to get home to his family and the comfort of a warm room. As he walked rapidly down Rodney Street, he felt the most peculiar compulsion to change directions. Unable to resist the strange pull, he abruptly turned east, away from his destination, and headed toward the Hangman's Tree. His eyes adjusted to the darkness as he left the small puddles of light cast by homes along the street. He could easily see the tree's stark and lifeless outline, its limbs outstretched.

When he was about twenty paces from the tree, he saw the form of a man. It appeared to be hanging a few feet below a lower limb. So startled was he that he momentarily lost his composure and had the horrific thought that vigilantes had been at their work again. He regained control of his emotions and approached the tree to discover what criminal had met his end there. The figure was dressed in dark clothing, and his back was turned. A dog's frantic barking from a distant house broke the silence, and a light wind riffled the tree's dead branches. It became clear that where there should have been a rope extending from the limb, there was none. The figure was simply suspended in midair, and it was not a solid person but rather delicately transparent.

Suddenly the figure raised its arms and inexplicably changed positions, showing its face. It was a ghastly, pasty white. The figure then spoke two words. "October 7," it said, followed by a wrenching groan and the apparition's disappearance. There was nothing there in the darkness but the dead Ponderosa pine. The man who witnessed this strange event tried to convince himself that it was only a freak of his imagination, a trick of the darkness, but he knew what he saw. He concluded that it was the ghost of one of the men executed on the tree. What the date meant, he could not discover. No recorded execution occurred on October 7, and no event has since surfaced to make the date noteworthy. We might conclude that this first recorded supernatural occurrence in the neighborhood of the Hangman's Tree set the energy of all those victims free, explaining why events continue to make life in that neighborhood a little more than just interesting.

CHAPTER 2

GHOSTS ON THE GULCH

If buildings had souls, Helena would be an incredible repository for them. The community is justly proud of the flamboyant Victorian-era architecture that has survived along the gulch. The Boston, St. Louis and Atlas Blocks in particular illustrate why Helena's post-railroad architecture earned it the nickname "Queen City of the Rockies." However, during 1970s urban renewal, the city demolished more than 230 historic structures, discontinued traffic along Last Chance Gulch and created the downtown Walking Mall. Pieces and parts of vanished landmarks lie scattered like bones in a graveyard along what was once Helena's main thoroughfare. Now these remnants are ghostly reminders of the times when trolleys clanged and rumbled along the busy street.

When shadows grow long and the sun begins to set, night falls quickly over Last Chance Gulch. Darkness softens the metal features of the sculpted miners at their sluice box on the South Walking Mall. Half a block to the north, nightfall blurs the rugged profile of the heroic-size bronze sculpture Bullwhacker, whose airborne whip forever cracks over the ghosts of plodding oxen. Survival depended on these hardy men and the beasts of burden that carried supplies to the early mining camp. You might think that the night beckons those ghosts of so very long ago, and perhaps it does sometimes call them out. But it's my theory that the energy of our earliest pioneers has dwindled, and more recent ghosts haunt the gulch today.

There is one exception. Helena has myths and legends associated with its downtown tunnel system that once delivered steam heat to businesses from a central heating plant at Sixth Avenue and Fuller Street. Common in urban areas across the West, they are reputed to have served clandestine purposes. However, Helena's tunnels are associated with neither the Chinese nor the red-light district, as many believe, but rather they may have facilitated liquor trade and perhaps political shenanigans during Prohibition. Some basements beneath Helena's oldest buildings have bricked-in archways and filled-in openings.

(Continues…)


Excerpted from "Haunted Helena"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Ellen Baumler.
Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements,
Introduction: It Begins at Home,
1. Shadows of the Gold Camp,
2. Ghosts on the Gulch,
3. Lily's Legacy,
4. The Haunting of Reeder's Alley,
5. A Spirited Neighborhood,
6. For Fern,
7. Dead Men Walking,
8. Something Extra,
9. Haunted Landscapes,
10. Captured Moments,
About the Author,

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