February 25, 2025 • 56 mins
Some towns refuse to die. Long after their last residents have vanished, something remains — eerie voices, shadow figures, and legendary folktales. In this episode, we explore five of the most haunted ghost towns in America: Bannack, MT, a lawless gold rush town with a murderous past; Bodie, CA, with a legendary curse; Wonder Valley, CA, a weird stretch of desert; Riverton, AL, a town drowned beneath a reservoir but with a very real mystery; and Garnet, MT, which became a ghost town twice. If ghosts are real, these are the places they live.
With special guest, filmmaker Adam Stilwell!
Theme Music by Matt Glass https://www.glassbrain.com/ Instagram: @astudyofstrange Support the Show! astudyofstrange.substack.com/ Website: www.astudyofstrange.com Hosted by Michael May Email stories, comments, or ideas to astudyofstrange@gmail.com!©2022 Convergent Content, LLC
LINKS!
https://southwestmt.com/blog/bannack-haunting-montana/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txwrib3-2nY
https://windriver.org/podcast/spirits-of-riverton-unveiling-the-haunting-tales-of-downtown/
https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/949N-XYN/maggie-williams-1894-1909
http://files.usgwarchives.net/al/colbert/cemeteries/riverton.txt
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/128552246/dorothy-dunn
https://www.glaciersir.com/blog/5-spooky-secrets-about-garnet-ghost-town/
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Warning this episode contains detailsthat some listeners
may find disturbing.
Imagine this if you will.
You're visiting a town, a town
that hasn't had a full timeresident in over 100 years.
Some of the abandoned buildingshave crumbled into heaps of debris,
(00:22):
while others remain standing.
And in those buildingsis still the original furniture
and items from the homeownerswho have long since passed.
You can reach out and touch these items,touch history,
and feel the presence of thosewho once lived in this place.
(00:42):
Then the wind blows
and you hear what sounds like a voicecalling your name.
This is a common experiencein many of America's ghost towns,
and in the United States.
A large number exist out west dueto the booms and busts of the Gold Rush.
Paranormal activity and strange
happenings have been reportedin a lot of these towns,
(01:06):
these supernatural events oftenattributed to the town's violent history.
Tonight we look at five of the mosthaunted ghost towns
and ask if there is any truthto the paranormal reports.
This is a study of strange.
(01:42):
I havean earnest obsession with ghost towns.
There's an eeriness factor.
Some of them are supposedly haunted,which definitely adds to that obsession.
But it's more than that.
There's a sense of adventureif you're lucky enough to explore them,
and they provide a direct,tangible connection to the past,
like a living museum.
I'm Michael May,that's all I'm going to say about that.
(02:02):
I was going to say a little more Adam,and I was like, nope, that's it.
So I'm
I'm Michael, I'm your host.
And todayAdam Stillwell is joining me, a filmmaker.
Who are you best known as?
The, the free fall.
Is that probably your most popularpiece of.
Probably.
That's the last thing I did that inthe triangle or my my direct, real films.
(02:22):
Yeah. Nice. Nice. And the triangles, like
2016 16.
Yeah, yeah. And they.I just won the rights back.
So we're, that will be backout there again soon, but it's
we pulled it all down to,see where we can go with it next.
Well, fantastic.
He's, Adam is a fantasticfilmmaker and writer and producer.
Do you want to tell anybody elseabout anything about yourself?
(02:45):
Oh, I you know, I might be,with the help of, chats with Michael,
getting into the podcast gamethrough audio series world.
At some point, and then. Yeah.
No, my, the movie The Free Fallis actually out on Hulu and Disney Plus,
if you want to check it outand see how weird my brain
(03:05):
actually has.
Yes. Everybody shut in in Canada zone.
Is it Shawn Ashmore?
Shawn Ashmore, the handsomest man? Yes.
Yeah, man.
His eyes. Yeah. Creamy.
So yes, they are. They?
Yes they are.
He's a great dude. Great dude. Yep.
And on on.
Oh, and Andrea Lando, who just,she was just on the new Kathy Bates.
(03:28):
Matlock. Matlock. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Absolutely awesome.
So you I wanted you on this episodebecause you briefly mentioned
you were like, ooh, ghost towns.
And you should panicbecause you're from Montana.
Is that correct?
I, I am from Montana,and, it's Ghost Town Central.
There's all different types of ghosttowns up there, but Bannock is, the,
(03:49):
the famous one and, Yeah,I actually went there on my eighth grade,
history trip.
So I. Oh, so.
Yes. Not to spoil anything,but I am going to talk about panic today.
So excited to have you.
Oh no no no no, that's not an apology.
That's like,
I'm glad because I want to discussthese things because I love ghost towns.
(04:10):
And I've been to a quite a handful
in California specifically,maybe even 1 or 2 in Nevada.
I've even been to, like, abandonedmining sites just out when you're like, in
BLM landand you're wandering around or like,
I've filmed stuff and you're like,oh my God, this is an old plane.
And there's just like mining equipmentleft in some huts.
(04:31):
And it's fascinating. It's super eerie.
The reason I haven't done a ghost townbefore on
this showis because I like to do a lot of research.
They're really hard to research
because all the claims of the spookythings are all just like folk tales.
So luckily today I picked some places
that you can find some specific research.
(04:51):
Not a lot,but some specific research that may make
you think about some haunted things,which I love.
But yeah.
So when we get to Bannack,it'll be really interesting
to talk to somebodythat's been on the ground.
That's really cool.
Now, do you believe are youdo you like horror things?
Obviously. Do you believe in ghosts?
So this is this is an interesting,
(05:11):
that's very interesting question for mebecause I have seen UFOs.
I, I've experienced the effects of voodoo.
I've wandered
the woods enough to knowthat if Sasquatch was out there
and he was going to eat a little kidor anyone, he would have gotten me,
but, ghosts.
(05:33):
I've never seen one.
But they scare the shit out of me.
They,
so I, I don't know, there's part of methat just feels they must be real.
I don't believe anything completelyuntil I see it or experience it.
Right.
But, that fear and I've, I don't know,
I've been to places where I've felt
(05:56):
different.
But, you know,you never know if that's yourself
or if that's, you know, something else,
of the place,which I think is a really cool part
about ghosts in general,is that it's usually attached to a place,
you know, unless it's a person.
But I think that's more demons.
Yeah. Good point.
Yeah. Yeah.
(06:17):
And that's interesting
talking about ghost townsbecause, yeah, a lot of the accounts,
which is what makes it so hard tolike research and try to find specifics.
But there's a lot of accountsof these place.
All the places I'm going to mention today,
there are accounts just like thiswhere people are like,
I just feel like I'm being watched. Yeah.
And because of the very interestinghistory with places like this
(06:38):
and you try to attach certain energiesto a location.
Yeah.
You know, I have no answers about this.People that listen to the show.
No, I'm a I'ma bit of a skeptic of these things,
but I do I do believe in sort of theseweird energies that can get connected
with history and time and place and,yeah, it's it's a fascinating thing.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, ghosts to mego along with aliens and time travelers,
(07:00):
and yet they can kind of mesh like, I'm
not sure a ghost is just the spirit of,
you know,someone who died in the area or something.
It could be something altogetherdifferent as well.
Yeah, but, yeah,the eyes watching you. That's creepy.
Yeah.
Yeah, they definitely are. Right. So.
(07:21):
I'm going to dive in to some ghost towns
here, and I'm going to start us offwith a bit of a bang.
It might be.
Might be the most famousor talked about ghost town in America.
And that is Bodie, California.
Have you ever been to Bodie?
I have not.
Okay,so I've been to Bodie, once a very, very.
I couldn't stay long.
(07:41):
And it's an amazing placebecause I love history, and it feels like
I mentioned it earlier.Like living museums.
Like I just wandered around was like.
Oh, wow.
Oh, the inside of here, you can still seea glass jar from 1901 or whatever.
Like, it's really fascinating.
So I'll give youa little background. First,
located in the Sierra Nevada mountains
near the border of Nevada, Bodie existedbecause of California's gold rush.
(08:04):
Once it's raining, that can't talk today.
There you go.
Once a thriving mining hub, Bodie now lies
in a state of what they call arresteddecay.
As it's preserved as a California statehistoric park.
It was established in 1859by William Bodie
after he found some gold in the area,and he had been tireless.
Tyler tirelessly.
(08:26):
I have a sore throat,so it's hard talk today.
The normal I apologize.Tirelessly is a tough one.
It's a tough. One,yeah. Do your thing. Do things.
Tirelessly. Yeah.
He had been tirelessly searching for goldfor about ten years,
and his luck had turnedbecause he found it.
However, he soon died in a blizzardgetting stuck in a blizzard.
(08:47):
Poor guy.
And so he missed this.
The boom and bust of the townthat took on his namesake.
But gold in the areathere was aplenty in eight.
And in 1861 a mill was built,and then there was
a massive influxof thousands of hopeful miners,
and they all were licking their lips,dreaming of the yummy, yummy gold.
And at its peak,
(09:07):
the town boasted of a population of near10,000 people, complete with saloons.
Apparently there were over 60 saloonsin this place.
There was.
There were brothels.
There is a Chinatown. There were banks.
It was definitely like,you know, a budding, budding,
kind of likea Deadwood sort of boomtown of the time.
Yeah.
And there was an issue with it, though,which is Bodie is very remote.
(09:32):
It's not easy to get in and out of.
And because of that remoteness,
there became a reputation for the town,I'll call it, for lawlessness.
Gunfights became, like,very prominent in the area,
and not just of folktale.
They're very real.
And there's a lot of accounts,there's newspaper articles.
(09:53):
There are so many gunfights and murders.
It was just a very, very dangerous place.
And on that note, I'mgoing to have you read something, Adam.
Cool.
If you don't mind,let me find out which one it was.
Number one. Let's. Yeah. Number one.
So this is from a newspaper article
I forgot to write down the date,but I think it's sometime in the 1860s.
(10:15):
I want to say like 1865.
So go ahead.Go ahead and write it when you're ready.
All right.
Bodie, January 15th Thomas H.
Treloar, who was murdered by Joseph deRoesch Friday morning, was buried today.
The vigilantes committee were all overtown last night searching for the roach
and went through several houses as wellas the jail, but he could not be found.
(10:39):
Great indignationis felt against Deputy Sheriff Farnsworth
through the through,whose negligence or worse
the escape was effected and VigilanceCommittee were after him last night
to make him produce the prisoneror make consequences.
There is less excitement tonight.
The coroner's juryhave brought in a verdict, finding that
(11:00):
Treloar came to his deathat the hands of Darrow's
a willful, premeditated murder.
Deputy Sheriff Corrigan is censor
censored for for gross neglect,
and Deputy Sheriff Farnsworth is declaredcriminally careless.
Farnsworthleft town tonight to avoid being lynched.
(11:21):
Yeah, so let's just git. It's legit.
I just. Wanted to.
That doesn't tie into a specificghost story or haunted story of the town,
but I just wanted to give an example of,like, it's super dangerous.
There's murder.
Even the sheriffs, the law enforcement,they're all bad, too.
These places are so trendy,you know, like the gold places,
the oil places,and they're just trendy and dirty.
(11:46):
That's trendy and.
Dirty.
And if you believe in ghosts,that is a nice foray
into potentially some spirited hunts.
Absolutely.And those are places that people come.
They live,they kill, they leave, you know.
So yeah, lots of ghost towns have similar,you know, back stories in fact.
(12:07):
Do you mind reading number twoas well? Sure.
It's just a different story,but something simple.
Oh. Got it. Yeah.
Cold blooded murder in Bodie.
Felix Donnelly, who had who had some
who had had some previous difficultywith William Degan,
walked up to the ladderand shot him four times in the back.
Deegan emptied his revolverone one shot taking effect
(12:28):
in the abdomen of a bystander.
Deegan had been concerned in many shooting
a phrase for fear of lynching.
Deegan was removed from Bodie.
So a lot of a lot of fear of lynching,which is.
Yeah, verifying. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, I'dget out of there too, but yeah.
(12:49):
Yes. And that just
goes to show you as well, like, you know,there is law enforcement in these places.
But even then mob ruleis still the rule of law in these places.
And if people are upsetenough, you're you're just a goner.
Sure.
Yeah. So it's, pretty scary place.
I'm glad I didn't live there back then.
Yes. Yeah.
(13:09):
So, Bodie, the town had a lot of successand prosperity for a short period of time.
As the 20th centuryneared, gold deposits started to dwindle.
Miners started going elsewhere, lookingfor other, you know, things to mine.
And there were also two fires40 years apart.
But there are still two fireswhich kind of decimated the town in 1932,
was one of them then.
(13:29):
The earlier one was 1892.
And by 1915 Bodie had declined to.
I mean, there just weren't many peoplethat live there at all.
By 1915and in 1962, the it became a state park.
So the state took overand tried to preserve it as best they can.
And there's about 200 of itsoriginal buildings still standing.
(13:51):
Wow. Yeah,yeah. It's really it's a big one.
Yeah it is,but isn't bannock like that too?
I mean, bannock seems. No.
Yeah okay.
Okay.
Not not not nearly that big.
I don't as far as I recall.
And remember. Cool.
Yeah.
So now for some creepy tales of Bodie.
If you stroll through Bodie,the sensation, the most common occurrence.
(14:11):
You and I already talked about it,but it's this feeling of being watched.
And many people that that visit thereget this feeling.
And they say thatit kind of lingers with them.
Some even claim it follows them home.
And then there's some ghost stories too.
So among the most well known
apparitions is a ghost of an old womanin what's called the Gregory House.
(14:32):
And sometimes she's seen knittingin a rocking chair.
And there's also a common apparitionof what's
believed to be a Chinese maidwho is said to haunt the town,
particularly if you have kids,like if you go with kids.
The maidapparently try to play with the kids or.
Yeah.You know, touch the kids or whatever.
And in the town cemetery visitorshave also reported hearing disembodied
(14:54):
giggles, which I think is one of the mostterrifying sounds in the world.
A disembodied giggle. Yes, yes.
And that is supposedlythe ghost of a young girl.
And then there's a place called the MindaSenior House,
I think is what it's called.
And this is one of the favorites of minethat I've just read about recently,
which apparently, if you visit the house,some people claim to smell Italian food
(15:16):
and they'll try to trace the scent to belike, oh, is someone cooking around here?
And as they do, they'll hear distantsounds of like a dinner party,
but then nothing will actually be there.
That'soriginal, haunting by sense of smell.
It's.
You don't get that one a lot.
Yeah, I'll get that little I.
Know I have.I can't remember when I went to Bodie.
(15:37):
I want to say it was like 2009or something like that.
I actually I just knew of it being a ghosttown, meaning an abandoned town.
I actually hadn't heardany of the ghost stories when I went.
I did not feel anything. Again.
I'm very skeptical of that stuff
anyway, but I loved itlike it was just such a fascinating place.
And I do think that that, you know, again,these places have a weird energy.
(15:58):
There's a direction next to history.
It's right there.
You can touch it, you can see it,you can step on it.
So I'm not surprised at allthat people sense very strange things.
Question like.
Oh yeah. Yeah.
Question for you is that is itthe type that there's people working there
and it's kind of placeor do you just walk in and you're,
you're the only person there kind.
Of there are people that work there.
(16:19):
It's been so long I don't remember
if there's like literally a hutwith Rangers there,
but I do know that Rangers work thereand just doing some research
for this episode, I found an interviewwith a Ranger, on site.
So I don't know if she's thereall the time.
It was just sort of like doing a roundsand passing through, right?
But she claimed she was like,I don't believe in ghosts.
But there are a couple thingsweird have happened to me here,
and one of them is one of my first nightsworking here.
(16:41):
I kept hearing someone call my nameand no one was there.
And it was like this very specific voicesaying her name.
Not just like a weird wind, you know,whispery sound.
Interesting?
Yeah. So there are people that work there.
I just, I don't know if they're there or.
But it's not one of thosewhere there's like shops in every,
every building and that they'reselling things out of there.
(17:02):
All right.
If I again, it's been so longsince I could be I could be wrong.
So listeners,
if you know,please feel free to correct me,
email me at the Cityof Strange at gmail.com.
But I think there was a placeyou could buy stuff.
I just don't rememberif it was a converted old building
or if they had built something.
I sure don't remember.
There's this some that are more of like,you know, a carnival
(17:23):
like calico has or, you know, like,there's an elevator definitely does.
Yeah.
In every place.
And it's like, yeah, I'm not goingto really be scared here, you know?
But if you go, it sounds like this one's
kind of in the middlewhere they had a little bit of that.
But it's not just some dead townin the middle of nowhere.
No, no.
And it'sbecause it's part of a state park.
I do think they promote it.
They try to get peopleto come and visit it.
It was relatively busywhen I was there too.
(17:45):
So it's not like you're not justI wish it was just me wandering around.
Yeah.
Or like there's other people that arecamping somewhere nearby and families
driving through and stuff.
So there's a lot going on.
But in terms of like just storiesI've read of ghost towns
being actually associatedwith some weird haunted stories.
It's like the main one I come across.
So yeah, if anybody gets a chance to go,definitely do it.
(18:08):
All right.
So I'm going to shiftgears for the next one.
I'm going to go to Alabama,to a town called Riverton.
And this one is a little differentbecause primarily you think of ghost towns
in the statesbeing associated with the gold rush,
rush or some othersort of mining rush type of situation.
Riverton is different.
It is a town that floodedbecause of a dam being built,
(18:31):
and so it's nowalmost completely underwater.
And I came across this town to the reason
I want to doincluded as a better way to say it.
I came across an article calledThe Strange Death of Maggie Williams, who?
Yeah, nice. And
it was flooded in 1938 when
(18:51):
the Pickwick Damwas built on the Tennessee River.
So let's see,where do I want to start this story?
Adam?
Let me see.
I'm going to I'll give some backgroundand then I'll talk about Maggie Williams.
That's the way I'll do this.
So prior to this town,
being flooded,it was an important and strategic point
(19:12):
in on the TennesseeRiver there during the Civil War,
it was involved in numerous bombardments.
It also had a few other names beforeit started to be called Riverton
in the 1890s.
And as the town was flooded,only one part of the town
continued to be above water,and that is the cemetery,
and I have actually toured the location
(19:33):
on Google Maps using modern technology.
And. Reallybeautiful today, you never really realize
there's like a townthat got flooded there.
The cemetery is still there.
There is a churchthat's like a modern church.
It's, you know, new and nice, andthere's homes along the street and stuff.
But the cemeteryis definitely still there.
And that's where we can tiein the story of Maggie
(19:57):
Williams and story goes like this.
In 1909, Maggie Williams was 15.
She was playing at a friend's house,and she developed a headache.
She went home soon after that,and that night or the next morning,
she fell into a coma.
And then very quickly,they pronounced her dead.
She had no heartbeat, no blood pressure.
(20:18):
All the typical things of a person.
Sadly. Dying.
And now people who dress the body claimedvery quickly that she looked alive.
And I don't think they were doingthey didn't sort of modern
whatever they call it, when they preservedthe body.
There were different back then.
Not quite as good as they are now.
But people said that she looked asleep.
(20:40):
She didn't look dead. No.
Rigor mortis started to set. Set in.
And during the funeral of Maggie Williams,
the coroner was so concernedthat they may have messed up
that he pricked her hand with a pen,but no blood came out.
And then just also triplemake sure he lit a match
and held it under her handand nothing happened.
(21:02):
Wow. So it's like,okay, no, no, no, this is just weird.
She is dead.
So they closed the coffinand they buried her.
But later I can't find out how much later.
But later hunters were in the areaand it was at night,
and they saw this strange lightmoving around Maggie's grave.
And as they approach to find outwhat this was, the light lifted up
(21:26):
and sort of moved to the topof the headstone before disappearing.
Allegedly, over the years, moreand more people have seen
this strange lightmoving around her grave.
Some people have taken picturesof the grave, and they claim to see
as the slight outline of a woman's faceor girl's face.
And also, apparentlyrose bushes won't grow on the ground.
(21:48):
Now, I can't prove or disprove
any of those alleged haunting things,but the story is real.
I've looked up the grave site.
I've looked at historical record of herdying.
You can find all these things.
I'll providelinks to it in the show notes as well.
And so?
So she's real. It's a real story.
She died at 15.
(22:09):
How real?Do you know? The lights and stuff.
Alright, that very wellmight just be sort of local legend.
Sure.
But it's it's just a fascinating story.
And one that I really,really enjoy for her.
But yeah.
Yeah.
I love the image of this dead teenager
getting a match lit under her handto see if she's really dead.
(22:32):
You know, that's pretty creepy.
Beautiful image.
You got to think about that time period.
Still, it's a little past sort of the peak
of of spiritualismand stuff in the country.
But people were still honestly,it was a slightly morbid time.
This isn't long afterpeople were taking photos of their dead
relatives, like with them,
and they dress them up and take a photolike they were still alive.
(22:55):
And so it's just a fascinating timeperiod in history
and the relationship with the deceasedwas very different than it is now.
It's a little more open.
So it is as weird
as it seems to have someone light a match,it kind of makes sense.
Like I don't think people would be likegrossed out by it or anything.
I think they'd be like,yeah, let's make sure she's really dead.
Like, absolutely.
(23:15):
Yeah.
Let's see if she flinches or whatever.
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
Well, and just a quick sidenote to the dancing lights.
Have you done an episode on the MarfaLights?
Marfa in Texas? No.
But here's the funny thing.
I have been reading about itsince I started the podcast,
and I have such a long episode lined up,
(23:39):
and I've got to figure out a wayto narrow it down because I'm tying
it into other supposedly sitesaround the world that are similar.
Yeah. What are you going to sayabout the Marfa Lights?
So I've been there and I investigated.
Really.
That's going to tangent,but you got to tell me about it.
I saw the lights, I investigated.
We'll talk.
(24:02):
Nice.
Yeah. Nice. Well, now I'm very excited.
Yeah. You.
When I have red lights, I literally havered like three books on the subject too.
There's a guy that did a tonof investigation and he wrote a book,
and then people apparentlyhad a lot of opinions about his book.
So he wrote a follow up book.
Yeah, dude, it's a thing.
People are passionate about itare out there.
It's a really cool town, too, by the way.
(24:23):
Very like worthgoing to great restaurants.
Like museums, art.
It's like a very artistic kind of town.
Like, cool.
They're in the middle of nowhere.
It's very alien vibes.
Love a fun place to camp. And then.
Yeah, there's a hole every night.
There's a giant group on this rest stopwhere everybody gets together and
(24:46):
you see them.
I tooka drive trying to figure it out, but,
you know, we'll get into it now.All right.
Well, I'm so excited.
It's pretty cool. Yeah.
So in terms of Riverton, I couldn'tfind a lot of other ghost stories,
but that Maggie Williams storywas so fascinating, I had to cover it.
I did find one other accountthat I can't find.
(25:09):
You know,I can't find a historical record for this.
But there's allegedly another local legend
that there was a familythat lived in Riverton,
and the whole family was murderedby Union soldiers during the Civil War,
except for a daughter and a young NativeAmerican girl that also lived with them.
And the localsbelieve that those two escaped
(25:32):
and went off into the mountainsin the woods of the area and survived.
And then decades later,people say that they see a young, quote
unquote quoting them,a young Indian girl and a young white girl
sort of traversing through the hillsin these sort of ghostly apparitions.
So that's the only other sortof ghost story I could find for the area.
(25:53):
That's cool.
And that brings us to the third townwe'll talk about today.
And I might as well dive into Bannack,Montana, the place you have been to.
How far away did you livegrowing up in Montana from Barnett boy?
I Montana's huge, by the way.
People don't understand how vast of that.
(26:13):
But, we are used to driving,you know, a couple hours to get anywhere.
And I believe itwas, I'm from the northwest.
It was Whitefish, GlacierNational Park area.
I believe it was near the end before,
on our eighth grade history trip,before we had to turn around and go back.
(26:33):
So it's pretty far.
I believe it's maybe four hours.
Or so. Maybe three.
Yeah. Cool. Do you.
I don't want to put you on the spot.
If you don't want to do this,you don't have to.
But do you remember much about Bannock?Do you want to share?
Like what you remember or no. Of the town.
I do, I remember, you know,
I may have gone again after thatjust because,
(26:55):
you know, being a fool
and just loving horrorand anything, you know, exciting.
In Montana,there's, you know, not a lot to do.
So you create your, your excitement.
So, but,I do remember that it's not like, Bodie,
whereas there's, I feel like it'skind of more of a traditional small
(27:19):
ghost town where it's like,like, Deadwood, where there's
just kind of one little main street,maybe a couple.
There was, like,maybe another little street.
But most of thestuff, the church, the bar,
and the
main stuff you hear about the few threeor 4 or 5 buildings
are on kind of a mainclassic old Wild West little strip.
(27:41):
And then I really.
Yeah, I think there's a couple more thingsdown below.
But yeah, it was gorgeous.
It's kind of, in the middle of nowhereis is where in my head I remember.
Yeah.
And back then, and the last time I was
there, it was.
No one was there like,it was, it was, it was.
(28:03):
Maybe we I can't rememberif we had to drive through.
It is a national park.
Yeah.
It that doesn't sound right for this.
It literally is.
Maybe you have to drive through a placewhere maybe back then
sometimes, maybe because we were a schoolthere was a ranger there.
But I guarantee there maybe nowMontana is getting a lot more attention
(28:24):
in the last few years,so maybe there is someone, but
it was a placewhere you'd probably just drive right by,
one of those little hutsand nobody would be there.
And you just go in and you'd bethe only one there, and you walk in.
You could walk into any building,walk around the town.
So it was a real, a very real version of,you know, getting, getting a ghost
(28:47):
town experience where, I've been to calicoand stuff, which I love.
I love that, too. It's fun.
But calico is more,you know, there's it's like an event.
You pay, you walkin, there's tons of people in every place.
This is literally you're just the.
It is a ghost townas ghost town as ghost towns get.
That's cool.
Yeah, yeah, it looks from, just the thingsI've looked at online and stuff.
(29:09):
It does look likethere are a number of buildings and stuff,
because some ghost towns are morejust like rubble.
Sure. Yeah.
It's like Bannock definitelystill has some of the buildings and. Yes.
And the things you said you liked aboutBodie are, are there they they have
you can walk in and there they kept itvery much the way it was.
I'm not sureif they've done any renovations since,
(29:31):
but it feels like a placethat is just was left,
and they've just preserved it in a way,without changing anything.
Yeah. Which is very creepy.
And all the haunting stuffmakes it much more, you know,
you feel those eyes, you know.
For. Sure.
Yeah, I I've got to find a new wayto respond when I talk to people
(29:54):
and we talk about something scaryor weird, and I'm like, nice.
Hahahahahahaha.
No. I got to be careful.
But we love it. Yeah, we love it.
Yeah. I mean, it's definitely a part.
I mean, that's the stuff.
You know, I am a horror filmart filmmaker to this day,
and I always will be inspiredby the unknown.
And the darkness is that was in Montana.
That was some of the most exciting stuffwe got, you know,
(30:17):
was, was to go to a place like thatand to hear the stories and,
you know, tell each other the stories.
And, and when we went, you know,there's a story
that we'll probably get into of aof a crying baby or something.
And, and sure enough, we,we went there and we heard it,
but it was my dumb ass friendAdam Pittman,
you know, good with and hired andand did it and, you know, scared the shit
(30:38):
out of all of us. But, you know,those are the things that's.
Yeah, that's our filmmakingthat's still, you know, have to.
Anyway. That's funny.
So hereI'll give a little background for people.
So the town was dusk. Sorry.
It was founded in 1862after the discovery of gold.
It quickly went from.
And yeah, it went from 0 to 400 residentswithin just a few months, apparently.
(31:02):
And then a few months after that,it was 5000 people.
And then it seems like a few monthsafter that it was 10,000 people.
Like that growthjust makes my head explode.
Yeah.
And it was the it wasn't the Montanawas not a state yet in Montana.
It was just a territory.
And it was the first capitalof the Montana Territory.
Did you do you remember that at all?I did not know that. Yeah.
(31:23):
That's cool.
It did not last long.
That was very short lived.
But it was the first capitalof the Montana Territory.
And the town died out relatively quickly
because the rich stuff began to,you know, disappear as happens.
Also, it was known similar to Bodie.
It was known for violenceand greed and murder.
(31:47):
And I wrote this sentence, so I'll say it,even though I don't know if I like it,
maybe a little too on the nose.
But today,many believe the town is haunted.
They even believe.
Or they even believe they even hosta Halloween party on Halloween.
Nowadays, where people dress upand go hang out. Bodie for the night.
Which I would absolutely do.
Yeah, I've heard that's big.
(32:07):
I've heard that's big. Yeah.
So why do people claim it's haunted?
Well, obviously
we've talked already todayabout the history of these kind of places,
but also the outlaws in this place,have made it quite.
I guess there's just notorious talesto tell.
And the big one of this townthat is real, very real story.
(32:28):
You can look upis a guy named Henry Plummer.
Does that name sound familiar?Do you remember hearing about this guy?
Yeah, absolutely.
So the town was so lawless and dangerousthat it needed a sheriff, obviously.
And Henry Plummer got the job.
However, he was a criminal himself. Yes.
Of course.
Quickly turned into being an outlaw.
He led a gang of road agents and thieves.
(32:50):
They robbed wagons.
They were committing murder.
No one knows quitehow many people died at his hands
or the hands of his gang,but some estimated to be over 100.
They also apparently were killing peoplefrom Bannock all the way south into Utah.
So their crime spree was, very wide.
Traveled a lot of miles, I guess.
(33:11):
And Plummerand his men terrorized the region,
and he soon was capturedand without trial.
Is the old West.
He was just hung.
He was hung and killed in town.
Some of his men were lynched.
And, of course, that kind of horrifyingconnection to a city.
You would imagine that people sayhe haunts the place, and that is, in fact,
(33:33):
what they say he does,that his spirit is still wandering
the streets of Bannack, Montana. Yes.
And there's a specific connectionI found, around the general store,
which is one of the buildingsthat's still there.
Apparently, people it's one of thoseplaces people hear disembodied voices.
And a lot of people,I assume, I guess is a good way to put it.
(33:56):
They assume it's HenryPlummer talking and stuff, and it's it's
sort of his energy reliving the daythat he's being dragged out and hung.
I think he was killednear by the general store.
It's why they say that another creepyaccount of the town is the Bessette house.
I don't know if I'm saying that. Right.
And this is a hot spotof paranormal activity, which involves.
(34:18):
This is the ghost kids, and probablywhere the baby crying comes in.
Yeah.
The original owner of the home
used it as a quarantineor like, a children's hospital.
So I think they had some births.
They had sick babies, they had sick kidsthat they would take care of.
We don't know how many kids died there,but probably a lot.
(34:38):
It is the 19th century.
So, there's probably a lot of that.
And so there's a lot of strange anomalies.
And again, baby crying.
Although I guess your friend isn't thereright now.
So if you visited her, baby's crying.
It's not Adam's friend anymore.
I don't know,he only lives like, three hours away.
Okay.
It's probably they're. Making. The noise.
(34:59):
And then another spirithanging around town is Dorothy Dunn.
And this is the daughter of the hotel,the hotel's manager there in the town.
And she's often seen on the propertyin a blue dress.
And quite often her voice is heardtalking to people, specifically
talking to childrenthat are visiting the town.
And so, like I do,I've tried to look up like,
(35:21):
okay, where are these stories coming from?What can I find out?
That's real?
Dorothy Dunn's story and all theselittle things I did are definitely real.
Like the that house was used as a hospitalor sort of doctor's office for children.
Dorothy Dunn is very real.
And there are a lot of newspaper articlesyou can actually look up
and read about her.
She died drowning near the town in 1916.
(35:45):
And I will have you readone of the newspaper articles.
So that's numberthree in that thing I see.
When you're ready.
Dorothy Dunn overcome in swimminghole near Bannock.
Bravery of young boy saves two companionsof Miss Dunn after hard struggle.
A most deplorable accidentoccurred at 2:00 last Friday
(36:06):
when Dorothy Dunn, a 16 year old girl,met her death by drowning.
And had it not been for the braveryof Smith Paddock, a 12 year old boy,
Ruth Warnick and Fern Dunnwould have met the same fate.
The three girls had gone to GrasshopperCreek to wade and bathe in the creek.
They waited out into a hole dugout by the old
(36:28):
dredging boats,not realizing their danger.
Suddenly, all three stepped off the ledgeinto nine feet of water.
Yes, so poor Dorothy Dunn died.
They had her funeral.
They, you know, announced itin all the papers, the local papers.
And people turned out, not only was herdad the manager of the hotel,
(36:48):
but I think her uncle owneda ton of the property in the area.
And this is after, like,the town was already sort of like a
smaller population, but people are stillthere wasn't quite a ghost town yet.
So it's a very sad story.
So obviously her,her connection to this area is runs
deep and I don't know why.
Or at least I can't find out why.
(37:10):
There's a blue dress,because people claim that they see
this apparitionwearing a blue dress in the hotel.
I couldn't find reason for that.
I don't think she was wearing a blue dresswhen she died.
I think she was wearingsort of that early 20th century
bathing suit, which is like a darkblack dress, probably.
Right.
But people claim this, this blue dressapparition, and it must be Dorothy's.
(37:33):
And she sadly passed away in the area.
Yeah.
So that is that's panic.
Yeah. Yeah.
And I've heard, I've heard that the
that childrenor the ones that often see that
which I always find interesting and creepyand it makes sense
because a lot of timesyou'll be with a kid and you know,
(37:54):
if we saw something,we might not even pay attention.
But like a, you know, a child,they're going to speak up and.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And also people, you know, claim
that children are a little more opento these kinds of things.
I absolutely like to see these things.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's a lot of interestingnow that you say there's
(38:14):
a lot of interesting children connectionswith all the Bannock stories, because.
Yeah, that other house with thedisembodied voices in the hospital.
That's really interesting.
Well, also, it's cool
where the blue dress comes in, like,whether it's her or not is
like when there's a specific detaillike that, you know, like,
if somebody says that, if a kid says it,if if it keeps coming up, there's
(38:35):
just there's something about that to methat, you know, lends
more to the possibilitythat if two completely different people
who have not been hereand don't know each other,
they see someone in a blue dress,that's a detail that's,
you know, can help
with the with the proof that absolutely,they're saying something similar.
(38:56):
Couplefun things real quickly about, our boy,
what what's his name? The,
Plumber. Plumber. Yeah.
So, Yeah.
So he the the name of his, his clan,I believe, was the innocence, which I.
Yeah. Yeah, that's.
And really fucking cool.
I mean, sorry, sorry.
(39:17):
But, you could cut that out. But,
I thought that was awesome. And there.
Yeah, apparently, in that town, and,you know,
you never know if it's true or not,but that, like, 22 of them were, like,
hung like, or something crazy, like, oh,which is a lot of death at the same time.
Yeah.
And then even crazier.
And I don't know if this is true,but apparently and they told us this when,
(39:39):
when we were there, which as a kidin eighth grade was pretty awesome.
But, and actually speaksto what we were all up to in Montana,
even back in the day,I would have never done this,
but it speaks to the mischief anyway,his grave was robbed twice,
and the second timehis head was taken and putting in the bar,
(40:01):
and it sat in the bar for a whilebecause that was the place he loved.
And, I don't know why,but that's that's a story that I've that.
That is that's a fascinating story.
And honestly, I'm upset with myself fornot having put that into today's episode.
We got to.
Wrap that up. Thank God so much for that.
That is.
(40:22):
That is. Amazing.
Would walk into a barand if you just saw a head back, just
who knows what state it was in.
I was about to say,I wonder what state it was in.
And did they, like,preserve it in formaldehyde or something?
Or was it just this decomposedskeletal remains?
You know.
Every everyone who's listening,their imagination can do the work.
(40:42):
That's what's beautiful about it.
That's insane.
Yeah, I did it.
I didn't write a ton about his gangbecause there's so many different tales
about how many of them were hung.How many? Yeah.
How many?
Like, it's one of those very muchthose old west west tales where it's like
150 of his friends were shot in the streetand or.
No, it's 15 of them were.
Oh, yeah. We've heard so nice.
(41:04):
Yeah.
Well, in Montana, like,
even when beyond just being there,we've heard so many tales about him.
He was he'sdefinitely one of those guys. Yes.
Well, I'm going to shift gearsbecause this other,
this next place has such a very differentbackground in history to it.
It is Wonder Valley, California.
Have you ever heard of Wonder Valley?
(41:25):
No, but that sounds great.
Yeah.
So this is I,
I had to put it, you know, the algorithmthat we live in, in an age of algorithms,
I can't say I can't make the titlefour of the Most Haunted, ghost Towns.
And one interesting one, I got to say,five of the most haunted ghost towns.
This place.
There are claims that it's haunted,
(41:46):
but I don't have many details about why,but it's so, I'm fascinated
by the story, and I don't even know why,so I had to put it on the list.
Wonder Valley is in the Mojave Desert inthe Mojave
is full of odd places,odd communities, odd people.
And one such place is Wonder Valley.
Now, unlike Bodie and Bannack,which succumb to the gold rush there,
(42:07):
the boom
and bust of the gold rush, I should sayWonder Valley is a modern ghost town.
Its story, in short,is that of a budding community
that was quickly abandonedin the middle of the 20th century.
And what happened in this oncepromising town,
and what ghost might still hauntin its forgotten.
Post, begins.
In the 1950s, the United States governmentsought to encourage homesteading
(42:31):
and land development in California'shigh desert through the small tract Act.
That is Really Hard to Sayand Small Tract Act of 1938.
Individuals could claimfive acre plots of land for free,
as long as they promise toimprove the land by building a structure,
and this prompted a rush of hopeful
settlers,which were primarily artists and veterans.
(42:55):
Retirees, I'll call themjust hippies before the hippie movement,
and they all moved into this areato claim land and build homes.
And initially,the community seemed full of promise.
There were simple cabins, oftennot larger than a single room.
These cabins affectionately were calledjackrabbit homesteads
(43:17):
because there were a lotof jackrabbits in the area,
and by the
1960s, Wonder Valley had a smallbut vibrant community full of individuals.
Must share this with truecherished solitude.
Man, talking today is tough.
You're on a good episode.
You get to hear me messed up a lot.
They they wanted their independence
in this town, and they wanted to livein the beauty of the desert.
(43:39):
And, yeah, I just, you know,
it's these hippies right before thethe peak of the hippie movement. Yes.
And have you ever spent much timein sort of the desert of.
Oh, Vernon, Nevada.
Yeah. I love it.
And, honestly,
being from the woods of Montana,it's it it's similar in the fact of.
Yeah, it it's it's a brutal placeto like the weather can be brutal.
(44:03):
You are kind of in the middle nowhere.
And very interesting folksend up, in those places.
The, the most interesting folks
I've ever come across in my entire lifeare in desert communities in this area.
And it's weird.
It's this weird, like,you think, oh, hippies, free love hippies.
But then they also carry ak47s as a well,shoot you if you get on their property.
(44:27):
There's a survival aspect.
There's a, in Montana, I always say
it's kind of the furthest northyou people could.
We're trying to get away from thingsbefore having.
I lived in our southof the Montana border.
So a lot of these places are placeswhere people are going to that don't
necessarilywant to abide by the normal rules.
(44:50):
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
And there's like I've been toI it's always work.
That's like that's when I travel the most.
And it's like film projectswhere we're filming and doing
documentary stuff and it'll be placeswhere it's like a nudist colony
that's literally not on the map,and there's no registration for it.
But yet people live there full time and,
(45:11):
yeah, it's it's some crazy, crazy people.
And and it's honestly,it's just very fascinating.
Which is probably why I wanted to do thisstory. Yes.
And so what happened to Wonder Valleyis that this novelty of isolation began
to wear off within,like the first ten years of it
being settled, because itit is very harsh.
(45:31):
It is very hard to live in the middleof the desert with limited resources
and economic hardship.
And so people started to move away.
And by the 70sthere were very few people left.
And then by the 80s, essentially
the homesteads had been abandonedand it's just left there.
And the ghost town that remainstoday is one of,
(45:53):
I'm going to call it, contrasts.
I wrote down in my notes,like rows of cabins, deserted cabins,
and then stunning beauty behind it.
So it's like decomposing homesand the beauty of the Mojave landscape.
And the reason I put it onthis list is people do visit it.
You know,
there are people that travel and want togo to all these odd places in the desert,
(46:16):
and when they go, it's primarily
voices in the windis what I kept reading about.
So people will be wandering aroundthese old homesteads window blow,
and they'll start to hear their nameor words or people,
which sounds like people talking,and they'll get freaked out and get that
feeling of being watched, likewe've talked about so many times today.
(46:38):
And and those are the main storiesof this,
odd place of Wonder Valley, California.
The Hills Have eyes.
It's very.
Have eyes. Yeah.
Yeah.
And the I mean,the wind really does whip in those places,
and that's a great onebecause you can hear,
(46:58):
you know, inside of the wind if you if youconvince yourself you can hear a lot.
Yeah, yeah.
You can't really the wind is I,I'm always fascinated with the wind
because it can createwhat you think are voices.
And and that's not to just completely sayI'm debunking all these haunted stories
of the town. Sure, sure.
It's just to say that the wind does playreally interesting tricks on your mind.
(47:21):
Especially in the desert.
Yeah. And, and it it's super creepy.
It's super creepy.
That's a great one.
I need to check that town out. Yeah.
I should have. Looked at it.
Yeah, I should have looked athow far away it is from us in LA.
I don't think it's thatterrible of a drive.
Yeah, the Mojave hits. Yeah.
I mean, there's so much interesting.
That's an interesting road trip. Yeah.
(47:44):
Cool.
All right, so my last one today,our fifth haunted town.
I'm doing this for you.
I picked another Montana townthat I actually don't know much about.
Garnet Montana. I've heard you name.
I've heard the name.
All right.
I just came across this just being likeI should find another Montana town
for freedom.
Cool.
So, Garnet, Montana, there are manyremaining structures and people.
(48:10):
There aren't many, many people.
There's people visiting my.
Garnet is in the mountains
of Granite County, Montana.
Do you know where that is? Boy?I'm looking.
I looked it up yesterday,and now I don't remember
exactly where I think it's southwest.
Is it southwest?
It is.
(48:31):
Yeah. No, it's rightkind of where I'm from.
Oh, nice. Nice.
Yeah.
It's in the north.
Kind of northwest,right outside the Flathead
Reservation,which is where I'm from. Swaim.
So it's in it
lies in a place called First Chance Gulch.
And the.
It's it's an interesting town,because from what I can tell, it wasn't
(48:51):
necessarilya boom town from the gold rush.
It was more of a townthat started to develop because of people
in surrounding areasfinding minerals and gold.
And this was like a central placethat they would go to.
Because it had let me see,what was it called?
It was a machinethat would like grind the stone and stuff,
(49:13):
so people would come there and get their,their minerals processed.
I don't know the right term.
I'm not a miner so I don't, butI think everybody kind of follows my idea.
Oh it's a stamp mill, stamp mill.
And that was built in 1895.
And so a little townpopped up with that stamp
mill in 1897 and that is Garnet, Montana.
(49:35):
In 1898.
The population was around a thousandby 1900, though it was only 300 people.
So this town
quickly popped up with a populationand then very quickly diminished in size.
But the town became a ghost town twice,
so it essentiallyright after 1900, became a ghost town.
(49:57):
And then in 1934, gold prices rose
and miners returned to this area
because they wanted to to try to harvestmore gold out of the ground.
And then World War Two happened
and the cost of mining increasedbecause of all that.
So by 1940, the town was a bust again.
So it became a ghost town twice,which is incredibly fascinating.
(50:19):
That's cool. People come and visit.
Apparently thousands of visitors come to,you know, like you do at ghost towns.
You come and visit, you want tocheck it out and see the old places.
And with that comes ghost stories.
And one of the ones I found hereis that Kelly's
Saloon, a saloon there,which was built in 1898.
(50:39):
It was one of the most popular saloons
out of the handfulthat were built in the town.
It was also a brothel,and if you're stay after dark,
visitors claim that you can hear musicand the sound of like clinking
glasses and saloondrinkers laughing and talking at the bar.
There's also the Wells Hotel.
(51:00):
I don't believe this is still stand.
I think it's partly still standing,and it's believed that
a lot of guests died in this hotel,
and light from the windowscan be seen at night,
and sometimes an apparition or figurestanding in the window.
And then when people go up, there'sthere's no one there.
One of the best parts about this is therea cabins for rent in Garnet, Montana?
(51:25):
Yeah.So you have the courage to stay there?
I would absolutely do it.
You can go and stay in town.
So that is my my.
Awesome. Yeah,I totally know where this is.
It's just west of Missoula,which is, Oh, yeah.
Wherea University of Montana is a little town.
There's great concertsthere in the summer and stuff.
So if you want to check that outand then go over to Garnet,
(51:47):
it's I remember now seeing there's a,
off the highway there, highway 90,I believe,
or the one that goes to Seeley Lake.
I know what it's called,but there's definitely signs it's
a little more like calico,where it's a little more of, you know.
Touristy. A touristy kind of.
I mean,as far as I could tell from the sign.
(52:08):
And then that they have places you canstay, which is really, really cool.
Yeah.
But I now remember
seeing the sign and wanting to go,but I don't think I have ever gone.
Yeah, that's that's really cool.
Well, yeah.
And if listeners, if anybody has a ghosttown, you want me to cover that I didn't.
Or one you think is way more haunted,or even one you've been to that
(52:28):
you've experienced something, pleaseemail me a study of strange at gmail.com.
We'll do a follow up.
Even happy to have someone come on to talkabout their experience in these places.
Like I've said too many times
today, I'm so fascinated with ghost towns,and I'm glad I found a way to do it.
I, you know,I typically do deep dives, but I was like,
no, I'll do a listicle about ghost townsbecause I just I love ghost towns
(52:50):
and I want to talk about themand visit them all. So yeah.
And that's such a fun thing
because you put a number of them in thereand people listening could go,
that one's near me. Let's go check it out.
Absolutely. Yeah. You should.They're really worth it.
Whether you're into spooky things or not,just from a historical perspective.
I love going to them.
And I've been to
so many of them in Californiathat I just I'm always fascinated.
(53:11):
I'm the nerdy guywandering around being like, oh.
My God, look at that.
That's the original wall for me to do.
And just geeking outabout little things like that.
Yeah.
Are there, do you know of any
are there any ghost townsyou've been to that I didn't mention?
If they will be haunted, but,you know. Yeah.
I mean, you know, calico,we've mentioned a couple times,
which is out in the desertand it's, it's a it's a super fun time.
(53:36):
And it's very commercialized,but it's it's really fun.
It's calico,the one that someone bought it
and they've been restoring it like one guythat, like, lives out.
Maybe like a maybe. I mean, it's pretty.
It's it's it's an attraction,you know, and it's pretty big.
And you pay to go inand you walk up and down the street,
but it's really cool,very, very, very fun.
(53:57):
And they keep thingsreal nice and clean there.
And they apparently.
Yeah, they
I asked if they do a Halloween like timescary version and they said, yeah.
So, that could be really interesting.
And they do have little hutsthat you can rent and,
and, and stand nearby and camping nearby.
Which is cool.
And then in Montana,there's a couple Virginia City and Nevada
(54:20):
City are right next to each other,and they're a little
they're a little more,a little more commercial.
But, Nevada City is actually just they'vemoved a lot of old buildings there.
You would love it.
Like they've restoredand they have tons of old buildings.
Not all of them were just there.
So it's less like a ghost townand more like a historical monument.
They've shot movies.
(54:41):
They're old Westerns and stuff.
And then Virginia City nearby is,a little.
It's it's a little less,commercialized than a native city,
but there's like a cool old barthere and stuff.
It's a it's a good time. Very interesting.
But, yeah, Bannock is the main creepy onethat I, that I know of.
(55:03):
And then, Yeah.
Very cool.
Okay.
Well,thank you so much for joining me today.
Adam was. Super fun. Yeah. And.
Yeah, I want to talk to youabout the Marfa lights.
So maybe. You. Know, circle back to. That.
I have to do an episodeof the Marfa Lights, and I'll.
I'll dive into my research again on that.
Well, either way, I'll give you aI'll give you my my low down and.
(55:25):
Yeah. Please do. Yeah. That's awesome.
And before you go, do you mind sharing
where people might find your work,where people want to find you?
Is there anything you want to,
you know, promote or push or send peopletowards before you go?
Yeah.
I mean, Instagram,it's still well, underscore Adam.
Or you could just type inAdam still, I'll probably pop up,
Twitter, which I barely is, is
(55:47):
you can type my name and see if I pop up,but it's pretty much Instagram.
And then, like I said before,
if you want to see the free fall,it's on, two days and that's.
Yeah. Well,thank you again. I'll talk to you soon.
Awesome. Thanks, brother.
Thank you for joining a study of strange.
Support the show by subscribingwherever you listen to podcasts
and get accessto additional mysterious, strange content
(56:09):
by subscribing to our Substack,which you can find on our website.
The study of strange.comin the support tab.
Thank you again and good night.
Warning this episode contains detailsthat some listeners
may find disturbing.
Imagine this if you will.
You're visiting a town, a town
that hasn't had a full timeresident in over 100 years.
Some of the abandoned buildingshave crumbled into heaps of debris,
(00:22):
while others remain standing.
And in those buildingsis still the original furniture
and items from the homeownerswho have long since passed.
You can reach out and touch these items,touch history,
and feel the presence of thosewho once lived in this place.
(00:42):
Then the wind blows
and you hear what sounds like a voicecalling your name.
This is a common experiencein many of America's ghost towns,
and in the United States.
A large number exist out west dueto the booms and busts of the Gold Rush.
Paranormal activity and strange
happenings have been reportedin a lot of these towns,
(01:06):
these supernatural events oftenattributed to the town's violent history.
Tonight we look at five of the mosthaunted ghost towns
and ask if there is any truthto the paranormal reports.
This is a study of strange.
(01:42):
I havean earnest obsession with ghost towns.
There's an eeriness factor.
Some of them are supposedly haunted,which definitely adds to that obsession.
But it's more than that.
There's a sense of adventureif you're lucky enough to explore them,
and they provide a direct,tangible connection to the past,
like a living museum.
I'm Michael May,that's all I'm going to say about that.
(02:02):
I was going to say a little more Adam,and I was like, nope, that's it.
So I'm
I'm Michael, I'm your host.
And todayAdam Stillwell is joining me, a filmmaker.
Who are you best known as?
The, the free fall.
Is that probably your most popularpiece of.
Probably.
That's the last thing I did that inthe triangle or my my direct, real films.
(02:22):
Yeah. Nice. Nice. And the triangles, like
2016 16.
Yeah, yeah. And they.I just won the rights back.
So we're, that will be backout there again soon, but it's
we pulled it all down to,see where we can go with it next.
Well, fantastic.
He's, Adam is a fantasticfilmmaker and writer and producer.
Do you want to tell anybody elseabout anything about yourself?
(02:45):
Oh, I you know, I might be,with the help of, chats with Michael,
getting into the podcast gamethrough audio series world.
At some point, and then. Yeah.
No, my, the movie The Free Fallis actually out on Hulu and Disney Plus,
if you want to check it outand see how weird my brain
(03:05):
actually has.
Yes. Everybody shut in in Canada zone.
Is it Shawn Ashmore?
Shawn Ashmore, the handsomest man? Yes.
Yeah, man.
His eyes. Yeah. Creamy.
So yes, they are. They?
Yes they are.
He's a great dude. Great dude. Yep.
And on on.
Oh, and Andrea Lando, who just,she was just on the new Kathy Bates.
(03:28):
Matlock. Matlock. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Absolutely awesome.
So you I wanted you on this episodebecause you briefly mentioned
you were like, ooh, ghost towns.
And you should panicbecause you're from Montana.
Is that correct?
I, I am from Montana,and, it's Ghost Town Central.
There's all different types of ghosttowns up there, but Bannock is, the,
(03:49):
the famous one and, Yeah,I actually went there on my eighth grade,
history trip.
So I. Oh, so.
Yes. Not to spoil anything,but I am going to talk about panic today.
So excited to have you.
Oh no no no no, that's not an apology.
That's like,
I'm glad because I want to discussthese things because I love ghost towns.
(04:10):
And I've been to a quite a handful
in California specifically,maybe even 1 or 2 in Nevada.
I've even been to, like, abandonedmining sites just out when you're like, in
BLM landand you're wandering around or like,
I've filmed stuff and you're like,oh my God, this is an old plane.
And there's just like mining equipmentleft in some huts.
(04:31):
And it's fascinating. It's super eerie.
The reason I haven't done a ghost townbefore on
this showis because I like to do a lot of research.
They're really hard to research
because all the claims of the spookythings are all just like folk tales.
So luckily today I picked some places
that you can find some specific research.
(04:51):
Not a lot,but some specific research that may make
you think about some haunted things,which I love.
But yeah.
So when we get to Bannack,it'll be really interesting
to talk to somebodythat's been on the ground.
That's really cool.
Now, do you believe are youdo you like horror things?
Obviously. Do you believe in ghosts?
So this is this is an interesting,
(05:11):
that's very interesting question for mebecause I have seen UFOs.
I, I've experienced the effects of voodoo.
I've wandered
the woods enough to knowthat if Sasquatch was out there
and he was going to eat a little kidor anyone, he would have gotten me,
but, ghosts.
(05:33):
I've never seen one.
But they scare the shit out of me.
They,
so I, I don't know, there's part of methat just feels they must be real.
I don't believe anything completelyuntil I see it or experience it.
Right.
But, that fear and I've, I don't know,
I've been to places where I've felt
(05:56):
different.
But, you know,you never know if that's yourself
or if that's, you know, something else,
of the place,which I think is a really cool part
about ghosts in general,is that it's usually attached to a place,
you know, unless it's a person.
But I think that's more demons.
Yeah. Good point.
Yeah. Yeah.
(06:17):
And that's interesting
talking about ghost townsbecause, yeah, a lot of the accounts,
which is what makes it so hard tolike research and try to find specifics.
But there's a lot of accountsof these place.
All the places I'm going to mention today,
there are accounts just like thiswhere people are like,
I just feel like I'm being watched. Yeah.
And because of the very interestinghistory with places like this
(06:38):
and you try to attach certain energiesto a location.
Yeah.
You know, I have no answers about this.People that listen to the show.
No, I'm a I'ma bit of a skeptic of these things,
but I do I do believe in sort of theseweird energies that can get connected
with history and time and place and,yeah, it's it's a fascinating thing.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, ghosts to mego along with aliens and time travelers,
(07:00):
and yet they can kind of mesh like, I'm
not sure a ghost is just the spirit of,
you know,someone who died in the area or something.
It could be something altogetherdifferent as well.
Yeah, but, yeah,the eyes watching you. That's creepy.
Yeah.
Yeah, they definitely are. Right. So.
(07:21):
I'm going to dive in to some ghost towns
here, and I'm going to start us offwith a bit of a bang.
It might be.
Might be the most famousor talked about ghost town in America.
And that is Bodie, California.
Have you ever been to Bodie?
I have not.
Okay,so I've been to Bodie, once a very, very.
I couldn't stay long.
(07:41):
And it's an amazing placebecause I love history, and it feels like
I mentioned it earlier.Like living museums.
Like I just wandered around was like.
Oh, wow.
Oh, the inside of here, you can still seea glass jar from 1901 or whatever.
Like, it's really fascinating.
So I'll give youa little background. First,
located in the Sierra Nevada mountains
near the border of Nevada, Bodie existedbecause of California's gold rush.
(08:04):
Once it's raining, that can't talk today.
There you go.
Once a thriving mining hub, Bodie now lies
in a state of what they call arresteddecay.
As it's preserved as a California statehistoric park.
It was established in 1859by William Bodie
after he found some gold in the area,and he had been tireless.
Tyler tirelessly.
(08:26):
I have a sore throat,so it's hard talk today.
The normal I apologize.Tirelessly is a tough one.
It's a tough. One,yeah. Do your thing. Do things.
Tirelessly. Yeah.
He had been tirelessly searching for goldfor about ten years,
and his luck had turnedbecause he found it.
However, he soon died in a blizzardgetting stuck in a blizzard.
(08:47):
Poor guy.
And so he missed this.
The boom and bust of the townthat took on his namesake.
But gold in the areathere was aplenty in eight.
And in 1861 a mill was built,and then there was
a massive influxof thousands of hopeful miners,
and they all were licking their lips,dreaming of the yummy, yummy gold.
And at its peak,
(09:07):
the town boasted of a population of near10,000 people, complete with saloons.
Apparently there were over 60 saloonsin this place.
There was.
There were brothels.
There is a Chinatown. There were banks.
It was definitely like,you know, a budding, budding,
kind of likea Deadwood sort of boomtown of the time.
Yeah.
And there was an issue with it, though,which is Bodie is very remote.
(09:32):
It's not easy to get in and out of.
And because of that remoteness,
there became a reputation for the town,I'll call it, for lawlessness.
Gunfights became, like,very prominent in the area,
and not just of folktale.
They're very real.
And there's a lot of accounts,there's newspaper articles.
(09:53):
There are so many gunfights and murders.
It was just a very, very dangerous place.
And on that note, I'mgoing to have you read something, Adam.
Cool.
If you don't mind,let me find out which one it was.
Number one. Let's. Yeah. Number one.
So this is from a newspaper article
I forgot to write down the date,but I think it's sometime in the 1860s.
(10:15):
I want to say like 1865.
So go ahead.Go ahead and write it when you're ready.
All right.
Bodie, January 15th Thomas H.
Treloar, who was murdered by Joseph deRoesch Friday morning, was buried today.
The vigilantes committee were all overtown last night searching for the roach
and went through several houses as wellas the jail, but he could not be found.
(10:39):
Great indignationis felt against Deputy Sheriff Farnsworth
through the through,whose negligence or worse
the escape was effected and VigilanceCommittee were after him last night
to make him produce the prisoneror make consequences.
There is less excitement tonight.
The coroner's juryhave brought in a verdict, finding that
(11:00):
Treloar came to his deathat the hands of Darrow's
a willful, premeditated murder.
Deputy Sheriff Corrigan is censor
censored for for gross neglect,
and Deputy Sheriff Farnsworth is declaredcriminally careless.
Farnsworthleft town tonight to avoid being lynched.
(11:21):
Yeah, so let's just git. It's legit.
I just. Wanted to.
That doesn't tie into a specificghost story or haunted story of the town,
but I just wanted to give an example of,like, it's super dangerous.
There's murder.
Even the sheriffs, the law enforcement,they're all bad, too.
These places are so trendy,you know, like the gold places,
the oil places,and they're just trendy and dirty.
(11:46):
That's trendy and.
Dirty.
And if you believe in ghosts,that is a nice foray
into potentially some spirited hunts.
Absolutely.And those are places that people come.
They live,they kill, they leave, you know.
So yeah, lots of ghost towns have similar,you know, back stories in fact.
(12:07):
Do you mind reading number twoas well? Sure.
It's just a different story,but something simple.
Oh. Got it. Yeah.
Cold blooded murder in Bodie.
Felix Donnelly, who had who had some
who had had some previous difficultywith William Degan,
walked up to the ladderand shot him four times in the back.
Deegan emptied his revolverone one shot taking effect
(12:28):
in the abdomen of a bystander.
Deegan had been concerned in many shooting
a phrase for fear of lynching.
Deegan was removed from Bodie.
So a lot of a lot of fear of lynching,which is.
Yeah, verifying. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, I'dget out of there too, but yeah.
(12:49):
Yes. And that just
goes to show you as well, like, you know,there is law enforcement in these places.
But even then mob ruleis still the rule of law in these places.
And if people are upsetenough, you're you're just a goner.
Sure.
Yeah. So it's, pretty scary place.
I'm glad I didn't live there back then.
Yes. Yeah.
(13:09):
So, Bodie, the town had a lot of successand prosperity for a short period of time.
As the 20th centuryneared, gold deposits started to dwindle.
Miners started going elsewhere, lookingfor other, you know, things to mine.
And there were also two fires40 years apart.
But there are still two fireswhich kind of decimated the town in 1932,
was one of them then.
(13:29):
The earlier one was 1892.
And by 1915 Bodie had declined to.
I mean, there just weren't many peoplethat live there at all.
By 1915and in 1962, the it became a state park.
So the state took overand tried to preserve it as best they can.
And there's about 200 of itsoriginal buildings still standing.
(13:51):
Wow. Yeah,yeah. It's really it's a big one.
Yeah it is,but isn't bannock like that too?
I mean, bannock seems. No.
Yeah okay.
Okay.
Not not not nearly that big.
I don't as far as I recall.
And remember. Cool.
Yeah.
So now for some creepy tales of Bodie.
If you stroll through Bodie,the sensation, the most common occurrence.
(14:11):
You and I already talked about it,but it's this feeling of being watched.
And many people that that visit thereget this feeling.
And they say thatit kind of lingers with them.
Some even claim it follows them home.
And then there's some ghost stories too.
So among the most well known
apparitions is a ghost of an old womanin what's called the Gregory House.
(14:32):
And sometimes she's seen knittingin a rocking chair.
And there's also a common apparitionof what's
believed to be a Chinese maidwho is said to haunt the town,
particularly if you have kids,like if you go with kids.
The maidapparently try to play with the kids or.
Yeah.You know, touch the kids or whatever.
And in the town cemetery visitorshave also reported hearing disembodied
(14:54):
giggles, which I think is one of the mostterrifying sounds in the world.
A disembodied giggle. Yes, yes.
And that is supposedlythe ghost of a young girl.
And then there's a place called the MindaSenior House,
I think is what it's called.
And this is one of the favorites of minethat I've just read about recently,
which apparently, if you visit the house,some people claim to smell Italian food
(15:16):
and they'll try to trace the scent to belike, oh, is someone cooking around here?
And as they do, they'll hear distantsounds of like a dinner party,
but then nothing will actually be there.
That'soriginal, haunting by sense of smell.
It's.
You don't get that one a lot.
Yeah, I'll get that little I.
Know I have.I can't remember when I went to Bodie.
(15:37):
I want to say it was like 2009or something like that.
I actually I just knew of it being a ghosttown, meaning an abandoned town.
I actually hadn't heardany of the ghost stories when I went.
I did not feel anything. Again.
I'm very skeptical of that stuff
anyway, but I loved itlike it was just such a fascinating place.
And I do think that that, you know, again,these places have a weird energy.
(15:58):
There's a direction next to history.
It's right there.
You can touch it, you can see it,you can step on it.
So I'm not surprised at allthat people sense very strange things.
Question like.
Oh yeah. Yeah.
Question for you is that is itthe type that there's people working there
and it's kind of placeor do you just walk in and you're,
you're the only person there kind.
Of there are people that work there.
(16:19):
It's been so long I don't remember
if there's like literally a hutwith Rangers there,
but I do know that Rangers work thereand just doing some research
for this episode, I found an interviewwith a Ranger, on site.
So I don't know if she's thereall the time.
It was just sort of like doing a roundsand passing through, right?
But she claimed she was like,I don't believe in ghosts.
But there are a couple thingsweird have happened to me here,
and one of them is one of my first nightsworking here.
(16:41):
I kept hearing someone call my nameand no one was there.
And it was like this very specific voicesaying her name.
Not just like a weird wind, you know,whispery sound.
Interesting?
Yeah. So there are people that work there.
I just, I don't know if they're there or.
But it's not one of thosewhere there's like shops in every,
every building and that they'reselling things out of there.
(17:02):
All right.
If I again, it's been so longsince I could be I could be wrong.
So listeners,
if you know,please feel free to correct me,
email me at the Cityof Strange at gmail.com.
But I think there was a placeyou could buy stuff.
I just don't rememberif it was a converted old building
or if they had built something.
I sure don't remember.
There's this some that are more of like,you know, a carnival
(17:23):
like calico has or, you know, like,there's an elevator definitely does.
Yeah.
In every place.
And it's like, yeah, I'm not goingto really be scared here, you know?
But if you go, it sounds like this one's
kind of in the middlewhere they had a little bit of that.
But it's not just some dead townin the middle of nowhere.
No, no.
And it'sbecause it's part of a state park.
I do think they promote it.
They try to get peopleto come and visit it.
It was relatively busywhen I was there too.
(17:45):
So it's not like you're not justI wish it was just me wandering around.
Yeah.
Or like there's other people that arecamping somewhere nearby and families
driving through and stuff.
So there's a lot going on.
But in terms of like just storiesI've read of ghost towns
being actually associatedwith some weird haunted stories.
It's like the main one I come across.
So yeah, if anybody gets a chance to go,definitely do it.
(18:08):
All right.
So I'm going to shiftgears for the next one.
I'm going to go to Alabama,to a town called Riverton.
And this one is a little differentbecause primarily you think of ghost towns
in the statesbeing associated with the gold rush,
rush or some othersort of mining rush type of situation.
Riverton is different.
It is a town that floodedbecause of a dam being built,
(18:31):
and so it's nowalmost completely underwater.
And I came across this town to the reason
I want to doincluded as a better way to say it.
I came across an article calledThe Strange Death of Maggie Williams, who?
Yeah, nice. And
it was flooded in 1938 when
(18:51):
the Pickwick Damwas built on the Tennessee River.
So let's see,where do I want to start this story?
Adam?
Let me see.
I'm going to I'll give some backgroundand then I'll talk about Maggie Williams.
That's the way I'll do this.
So prior to this town,
being flooded,it was an important and strategic point
(19:12):
in on the TennesseeRiver there during the Civil War,
it was involved in numerous bombardments.
It also had a few other names beforeit started to be called Riverton
in the 1890s.
And as the town was flooded,only one part of the town
continued to be above water,and that is the cemetery,
and I have actually toured the location
(19:33):
on Google Maps using modern technology.
And. Reallybeautiful today, you never really realize
there's like a townthat got flooded there.
The cemetery is still there.
There is a churchthat's like a modern church.
It's, you know, new and nice, andthere's homes along the street and stuff.
But the cemeteryis definitely still there.
And that's where we can tiein the story of Maggie
(19:57):
Williams and story goes like this.
In 1909, Maggie Williams was 15.
She was playing at a friend's house,and she developed a headache.
She went home soon after that,and that night or the next morning,
she fell into a coma.
And then very quickly,they pronounced her dead.
She had no heartbeat, no blood pressure.
(20:18):
All the typical things of a person.
Sadly. Dying.
And now people who dress the body claimedvery quickly that she looked alive.
And I don't think they were doingthey didn't sort of modern
whatever they call it, when they preservedthe body.
There were different back then.
Not quite as good as they are now.
But people said that she looked asleep.
(20:40):
She didn't look dead. No.
Rigor mortis started to set. Set in.
And during the funeral of Maggie Williams,
the coroner was so concernedthat they may have messed up
that he pricked her hand with a pen,but no blood came out.
And then just also triplemake sure he lit a match
and held it under her handand nothing happened.
(21:02):
Wow. So it's like,okay, no, no, no, this is just weird.
She is dead.
So they closed the coffinand they buried her.
But later I can't find out how much later.
But later hunters were in the areaand it was at night,
and they saw this strange lightmoving around Maggie's grave.
And as they approach to find outwhat this was, the light lifted up
(21:26):
and sort of moved to the topof the headstone before disappearing.
Allegedly, over the years, moreand more people have seen
this strange lightmoving around her grave.
Some people have taken picturesof the grave, and they claim to see
as the slight outline of a woman's faceor girl's face.
And also, apparentlyrose bushes won't grow on the ground.
(21:48):
Now, I can't prove or disprove
any of those alleged haunting things,but the story is real.
I've looked up the grave site.
I've looked at historical record of herdying.
You can find all these things.
I'll providelinks to it in the show notes as well.
And so?
So she's real. It's a real story.
She died at 15.
(22:09):
How real?Do you know? The lights and stuff.
Alright, that very wellmight just be sort of local legend.
Sure.
But it's it's just a fascinating story.
And one that I really,really enjoy for her.
But yeah.
Yeah.
I love the image of this dead teenager
getting a match lit under her handto see if she's really dead.
(22:32):
You know, that's pretty creepy.
Beautiful image.
You got to think about that time period.
Still, it's a little past sort of the peak
of of spiritualismand stuff in the country.
But people were still honestly,it was a slightly morbid time.
This isn't long afterpeople were taking photos of their dead
relatives, like with them,
and they dress them up and take a photolike they were still alive.
(22:55):
And so it's just a fascinating timeperiod in history
and the relationship with the deceasedwas very different than it is now.
It's a little more open.
So it is as weird
as it seems to have someone light a match,it kind of makes sense.
Like I don't think people would be likegrossed out by it or anything.
I think they'd be like,yeah, let's make sure she's really dead.
Like, absolutely.
(23:15):
Yeah.
Let's see if she flinches or whatever.
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
Well, and just a quick sidenote to the dancing lights.
Have you done an episode on the MarfaLights?
Marfa in Texas? No.
But here's the funny thing.
I have been reading about itsince I started the podcast,
and I have such a long episode lined up,
(23:39):
and I've got to figure out a wayto narrow it down because I'm tying
it into other supposedly sitesaround the world that are similar.
Yeah. What are you going to sayabout the Marfa Lights?
So I've been there and I investigated.
Really.
That's going to tangent,but you got to tell me about it.
I saw the lights, I investigated.
We'll talk.
(24:02):
Nice.
Yeah. Nice. Well, now I'm very excited.
Yeah. You.
When I have red lights, I literally havered like three books on the subject too.
There's a guy that did a tonof investigation and he wrote a book,
and then people apparentlyhad a lot of opinions about his book.
So he wrote a follow up book.
Yeah, dude, it's a thing.
People are passionate about itare out there.
It's a really cool town, too, by the way.
(24:23):
Very like worthgoing to great restaurants.
Like museums, art.
It's like a very artistic kind of town.
Like, cool.
They're in the middle of nowhere.
It's very alien vibes.
Love a fun place to camp. And then.
Yeah, there's a hole every night.
There's a giant group on this rest stopwhere everybody gets together and
(24:46):
you see them.
I tooka drive trying to figure it out, but,
you know, we'll get into it now.All right.
Well, I'm so excited.
It's pretty cool. Yeah.
So in terms of Riverton, I couldn'tfind a lot of other ghost stories,
but that Maggie Williams storywas so fascinating, I had to cover it.
I did find one other accountthat I can't find.
(25:09):
You know,I can't find a historical record for this.
But there's allegedly another local legend
that there was a familythat lived in Riverton,
and the whole family was murderedby Union soldiers during the Civil War,
except for a daughter and a young NativeAmerican girl that also lived with them.
And the localsbelieve that those two escaped
(25:32):
and went off into the mountainsin the woods of the area and survived.
And then decades later,people say that they see a young, quote
unquote quoting them,a young Indian girl and a young white girl
sort of traversing through the hillsin these sort of ghostly apparitions.
So that's the only other sortof ghost story I could find for the area.
(25:53):
That's cool.
And that brings us to the third townwe'll talk about today.
And I might as well dive into Bannack,Montana, the place you have been to.
How far away did you livegrowing up in Montana from Barnett boy?
I Montana's huge, by the way.
People don't understand how vast of that.
(26:13):
But, we are used to driving,you know, a couple hours to get anywhere.
And I believe itwas, I'm from the northwest.
It was Whitefish, GlacierNational Park area.
I believe it was near the end before,
on our eighth grade history trip,before we had to turn around and go back.
(26:33):
So it's pretty far.
I believe it's maybe four hours.
Or so. Maybe three.
Yeah. Cool. Do you.
I don't want to put you on the spot.
If you don't want to do this,you don't have to.
But do you remember much about Bannock?Do you want to share?
Like what you remember or no. Of the town.
I do, I remember, you know,
I may have gone again after thatjust because,
(26:55):
you know, being a fool
and just loving horrorand anything, you know, exciting.
In Montana,there's, you know, not a lot to do.
So you create your, your excitement.
So, but,I do remember that it's not like, Bodie,
whereas there's, I feel like it'skind of more of a traditional small
(27:19):
ghost town where it's like,like, Deadwood, where there's
just kind of one little main street,maybe a couple.
There was, like,maybe another little street.
But most of thestuff, the church, the bar,
and the
main stuff you hear about the few threeor 4 or 5 buildings
are on kind of a mainclassic old Wild West little strip.
(27:41):
And then I really.
Yeah, I think there's a couple more thingsdown below.
But yeah, it was gorgeous.
It's kind of, in the middle of nowhereis is where in my head I remember.
Yeah.
And back then, and the last time I was
there, it was.
No one was there like,it was, it was, it was.
(28:03):
Maybe we I can't rememberif we had to drive through.
It is a national park.
Yeah.
It that doesn't sound right for this.
It literally is.
Maybe you have to drive through a placewhere maybe back then
sometimes, maybe because we were a schoolthere was a ranger there.
But I guarantee there maybe nowMontana is getting a lot more attention
(28:24):
in the last few years,so maybe there is someone, but
it was a placewhere you'd probably just drive right by,
one of those little hutsand nobody would be there.
And you just go in and you'd bethe only one there, and you walk in.
You could walk into any building,walk around the town.
So it was a real, a very real version of,you know, getting, getting a ghost
(28:47):
town experience where, I've been to calicoand stuff, which I love.
I love that, too. It's fun.
But calico is more,you know, there's it's like an event.
You pay, you walkin, there's tons of people in every place.
This is literally you're just the.
It is a ghost townas ghost town as ghost towns get.
That's cool.
Yeah, yeah, it looks from, just the thingsI've looked at online and stuff.
(29:09):
It does look likethere are a number of buildings and stuff,
because some ghost towns are morejust like rubble.
Sure. Yeah.
It's like Bannock definitelystill has some of the buildings and. Yes.
And the things you said you liked aboutBodie are, are there they they have
you can walk in and there they kept itvery much the way it was.
I'm not sureif they've done any renovations since,
(29:31):
but it feels like a placethat is just was left,
and they've just preserved it in a way,without changing anything.
Yeah. Which is very creepy.
And all the haunting stuffmakes it much more, you know,
you feel those eyes, you know.
For. Sure.
Yeah, I I've got to find a new wayto respond when I talk to people
(29:54):
and we talk about something scaryor weird, and I'm like, nice.
Hahahahahahaha.
No. I got to be careful.
But we love it. Yeah, we love it.
Yeah. I mean, it's definitely a part.
I mean, that's the stuff.
You know, I am a horror filmart filmmaker to this day,
and I always will be inspiredby the unknown.
And the darkness is that was in Montana.
That was some of the most exciting stuffwe got, you know,
(30:17):
was, was to go to a place like thatand to hear the stories and,
you know, tell each other the stories.
And, and when we went, you know,there's a story
that we'll probably get into of aof a crying baby or something.
And, and sure enough, we,we went there and we heard it,
but it was my dumb ass friendAdam Pittman,
you know, good with and hired andand did it and, you know, scared the shit
(30:38):
out of all of us. But, you know,those are the things that's.
Yeah, that's our filmmakingthat's still, you know, have to.
Anyway. That's funny.
So hereI'll give a little background for people.
So the town was dusk. Sorry.
It was founded in 1862after the discovery of gold.
It quickly went from.
And yeah, it went from 0 to 400 residentswithin just a few months, apparently.
(31:02):
And then a few months after that,it was 5000 people.
And then it seems like a few monthsafter that it was 10,000 people.
Like that growthjust makes my head explode.
Yeah.
And it was the it wasn't the Montanawas not a state yet in Montana.
It was just a territory.
And it was the first capitalof the Montana Territory.
Did you do you remember that at all?I did not know that. Yeah.
(31:23):
That's cool.
It did not last long.
That was very short lived.
But it was the first capitalof the Montana Territory.
And the town died out relatively quickly
because the rich stuff began to,you know, disappear as happens.
Also, it was known similar to Bodie.
It was known for violenceand greed and murder.
(31:47):
And I wrote this sentence, so I'll say it,even though I don't know if I like it,
maybe a little too on the nose.
But today,many believe the town is haunted.
They even believe.
Or they even believe they even hosta Halloween party on Halloween.
Nowadays, where people dress upand go hang out. Bodie for the night.
Which I would absolutely do.
Yeah, I've heard that's big.
(32:07):
I've heard that's big. Yeah.
So why do people claim it's haunted?
Well, obviously
we've talked already todayabout the history of these kind of places,
but also the outlaws in this place,have made it quite.
I guess there's just notorious talesto tell.
And the big one of this townthat is real, very real story.
(32:28):
You can look upis a guy named Henry Plummer.
Does that name sound familiar?Do you remember hearing about this guy?
Yeah, absolutely.
So the town was so lawless and dangerousthat it needed a sheriff, obviously.
And Henry Plummer got the job.
However, he was a criminal himself. Yes.
Of course.
Quickly turned into being an outlaw.
He led a gang of road agents and thieves.
(32:50):
They robbed wagons.
They were committing murder.
No one knows quitehow many people died at his hands
or the hands of his gang,but some estimated to be over 100.
They also apparently were killing peoplefrom Bannock all the way south into Utah.
So their crime spree was, very wide.
Traveled a lot of miles, I guess.
(33:11):
And Plummerand his men terrorized the region,
and he soon was capturedand without trial.
Is the old West.
He was just hung.
He was hung and killed in town.
Some of his men were lynched.
And, of course, that kind of horrifyingconnection to a city.
You would imagine that people sayhe haunts the place, and that is, in fact,
(33:33):
what they say he does,that his spirit is still wandering
the streets of Bannack, Montana. Yes.
And there's a specific connectionI found, around the general store,
which is one of the buildingsthat's still there.
Apparently, people it's one of thoseplaces people hear disembodied voices.
And a lot of people,I assume, I guess is a good way to put it.
(33:56):
They assume it's HenryPlummer talking and stuff, and it's it's
sort of his energy reliving the daythat he's being dragged out and hung.
I think he was killednear by the general store.
It's why they say that another creepyaccount of the town is the Bessette house.
I don't know if I'm saying that. Right.
And this is a hot spotof paranormal activity, which involves.
(34:18):
This is the ghost kids, and probablywhere the baby crying comes in.
Yeah.
The original owner of the home
used it as a quarantineor like, a children's hospital.
So I think they had some births.
They had sick babies, they had sick kidsthat they would take care of.
We don't know how many kids died there,but probably a lot.
(34:38):
It is the 19th century.
So, there's probably a lot of that.
And so there's a lot of strange anomalies.
And again, baby crying.
Although I guess your friend isn't thereright now.
So if you visited her, baby's crying.
It's not Adam's friend anymore.
I don't know,he only lives like, three hours away.
Okay.
It's probably they're. Making. The noise.
(34:59):
And then another spirithanging around town is Dorothy Dunn.
And this is the daughter of the hotel,the hotel's manager there in the town.
And she's often seen on the propertyin a blue dress.
And quite often her voice is heardtalking to people, specifically
talking to childrenthat are visiting the town.
And so, like I do,I've tried to look up like,
(35:21):
okay, where are these stories coming from?What can I find out?
That's real?
Dorothy Dunn's story and all theselittle things I did are definitely real.
Like the that house was used as a hospitalor sort of doctor's office for children.
Dorothy Dunn is very real.
And there are a lot of newspaper articlesyou can actually look up
and read about her.
She died drowning near the town in 1916.
(35:45):
And I will have you readone of the newspaper articles.
So that's numberthree in that thing I see.
When you're ready.
Dorothy Dunn overcome in swimminghole near Bannock.
Bravery of young boy saves two companionsof Miss Dunn after hard struggle.
A most deplorable accidentoccurred at 2:00 last Friday
(36:06):
when Dorothy Dunn, a 16 year old girl,met her death by drowning.
And had it not been for the braveryof Smith Paddock, a 12 year old boy,
Ruth Warnick and Fern Dunnwould have met the same fate.
The three girls had gone to GrasshopperCreek to wade and bathe in the creek.
They waited out into a hole dugout by the old
(36:28):
dredging boats,not realizing their danger.
Suddenly, all three stepped off the ledgeinto nine feet of water.
Yes, so poor Dorothy Dunn died.
They had her funeral.
They, you know, announced itin all the papers, the local papers.
And people turned out, not only was herdad the manager of the hotel,
(36:48):
but I think her uncle owneda ton of the property in the area.
And this is after, like,the town was already sort of like a
smaller population, but people are stillthere wasn't quite a ghost town yet.
So it's a very sad story.
So obviously her,her connection to this area is runs
deep and I don't know why.
Or at least I can't find out why.
(37:10):
There's a blue dress,because people claim that they see
this apparitionwearing a blue dress in the hotel.
I couldn't find reason for that.
I don't think she was wearing a blue dresswhen she died.
I think she was wearingsort of that early 20th century
bathing suit, which is like a darkblack dress, probably.
Right.
But people claim this, this blue dressapparition, and it must be Dorothy's.
(37:33):
And she sadly passed away in the area.
Yeah.
So that is that's panic.
Yeah. Yeah.
And I've heard, I've heard that the
that childrenor the ones that often see that
which I always find interesting and creepyand it makes sense
because a lot of timesyou'll be with a kid and you know,
(37:54):
if we saw something,we might not even pay attention.
But like a, you know, a child,they're going to speak up and.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And also people, you know, claim
that children are a little more opento these kinds of things.
I absolutely like to see these things.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's a lot of interestingnow that you say there's
(38:14):
a lot of interesting children connectionswith all the Bannock stories, because.
Yeah, that other house with thedisembodied voices in the hospital.
That's really interesting.
Well, also, it's cool
where the blue dress comes in, like,whether it's her or not is
like when there's a specific detaillike that, you know, like,
if somebody says that, if a kid says it,if if it keeps coming up, there's
(38:35):
just there's something about that to methat, you know, lends
more to the possibilitythat if two completely different people
who have not been hereand don't know each other,
they see someone in a blue dress,that's a detail that's,
you know, can help
with the with the proof that absolutely,they're saying something similar.
(38:56):
Couplefun things real quickly about, our boy,
what what's his name? The,
Plumber. Plumber. Yeah.
So, Yeah.
So he the the name of his, his clan,I believe, was the innocence, which I.
Yeah. Yeah, that's.
And really fucking cool.
I mean, sorry, sorry.
(39:17):
But, you could cut that out. But,
I thought that was awesome. And there.
Yeah, apparently, in that town, and,you know,
you never know if it's true or not,but that, like, 22 of them were, like,
hung like, or something crazy, like, oh,which is a lot of death at the same time.
Yeah.
And then even crazier.
And I don't know if this is true,but apparently and they told us this when,
(39:39):
when we were there, which as a kidin eighth grade was pretty awesome.
But, and actually speaksto what we were all up to in Montana,
even back in the day,I would have never done this,
but it speaks to the mischief anyway,his grave was robbed twice,
and the second timehis head was taken and putting in the bar,
(40:01):
and it sat in the bar for a whilebecause that was the place he loved.
And, I don't know why,but that's that's a story that I've that.
That is that's a fascinating story.
And honestly, I'm upset with myself fornot having put that into today's episode.
We got to.
Wrap that up. Thank God so much for that.
That is.
(40:22):
That is. Amazing.
Would walk into a barand if you just saw a head back, just
who knows what state it was in.
I was about to say,I wonder what state it was in.
And did they, like,preserve it in formaldehyde or something?
Or was it just this decomposedskeletal remains?
You know.
Every everyone who's listening,their imagination can do the work.
(40:42):
That's what's beautiful about it.
That's insane.
Yeah, I did it.
I didn't write a ton about his gangbecause there's so many different tales
about how many of them were hung.How many? Yeah.
How many?
Like, it's one of those very muchthose old west west tales where it's like
150 of his friends were shot in the streetand or.
No, it's 15 of them were.
Oh, yeah. We've heard so nice.
(41:04):
Yeah.
Well, in Montana, like,
even when beyond just being there,we've heard so many tales about him.
He was he'sdefinitely one of those guys. Yes.
Well, I'm going to shift gearsbecause this other,
this next place has such a very differentbackground in history to it.
It is Wonder Valley, California.
Have you ever heard of Wonder Valley?
(41:25):
No, but that sounds great.
Yeah.
So this is I,
I had to put it, you know, the algorithmthat we live in, in an age of algorithms,
I can't say I can't make the titlefour of the Most Haunted, ghost Towns.
And one interesting one, I got to say,five of the most haunted ghost towns.
This place.
There are claims that it's haunted,
(41:46):
but I don't have many details about why,but it's so, I'm fascinated
by the story, and I don't even know why,so I had to put it on the list.
Wonder Valley is in the Mojave Desert inthe Mojave
is full of odd places,odd communities, odd people.
And one such place is Wonder Valley.
Now, unlike Bodie and Bannack,which succumb to the gold rush there,
(42:07):
the boom
and bust of the gold rush, I should sayWonder Valley is a modern ghost town.
Its story, in short,is that of a budding community
that was quickly abandonedin the middle of the 20th century.
And what happened in this oncepromising town,
and what ghost might still hauntin its forgotten.
Post, begins.
In the 1950s, the United States governmentsought to encourage homesteading
(42:31):
and land development in California'shigh desert through the small tract Act.
That is Really Hard to Sayand Small Tract Act of 1938.
Individuals could claimfive acre plots of land for free,
as long as they promise toimprove the land by building a structure,
and this prompted a rush of hopeful
settlers,which were primarily artists and veterans.
(42:55):
Retirees, I'll call themjust hippies before the hippie movement,
and they all moved into this areato claim land and build homes.
And initially,the community seemed full of promise.
There were simple cabins, oftennot larger than a single room.
These cabins affectionately were calledjackrabbit homesteads
(43:17):
because there were a lotof jackrabbits in the area,
and by the
1960s, Wonder Valley had a smallbut vibrant community full of individuals.
Must share this with truecherished solitude.
Man, talking today is tough.
You're on a good episode.
You get to hear me messed up a lot.
They they wanted their independence
in this town, and they wanted to livein the beauty of the desert.
(43:39):
And, yeah, I just, you know,
it's these hippies right before thethe peak of the hippie movement. Yes.
And have you ever spent much timein sort of the desert of.
Oh, Vernon, Nevada.
Yeah. I love it.
And, honestly,
being from the woods of Montana,it's it it's similar in the fact of.
Yeah, it it's it's a brutal placeto like the weather can be brutal.
(44:03):
You are kind of in the middle nowhere.
And very interesting folksend up, in those places.
The, the most interesting folks
I've ever come across in my entire lifeare in desert communities in this area.
And it's weird.
It's this weird, like,you think, oh, hippies, free love hippies.
But then they also carry ak47s as a well,shoot you if you get on their property.
(44:27):
There's a survival aspect.
There's a, in Montana, I always say
it's kind of the furthest northyou people could.
We're trying to get away from thingsbefore having.
I lived in our southof the Montana border.
So a lot of these places are placeswhere people are going to that don't
necessarilywant to abide by the normal rules.
(44:50):
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
And there's like I've been toI it's always work.
That's like that's when I travel the most.
And it's like film projectswhere we're filming and doing
documentary stuff and it'll be placeswhere it's like a nudist colony
that's literally not on the map,and there's no registration for it.
But yet people live there full time and,
(45:11):
yeah, it's it's some crazy, crazy people.
And and it's honestly,it's just very fascinating.
Which is probably why I wanted to do thisstory. Yes.
And so what happened to Wonder Valleyis that this novelty of isolation began
to wear off within,like the first ten years of it
being settled, because itit is very harsh.
(45:31):
It is very hard to live in the middleof the desert with limited resources
and economic hardship.
And so people started to move away.
And by the 70sthere were very few people left.
And then by the 80s, essentially
the homesteads had been abandonedand it's just left there.
And the ghost town that remainstoday is one of,
(45:53):
I'm going to call it, contrasts.
I wrote down in my notes,like rows of cabins, deserted cabins,
and then stunning beauty behind it.
So it's like decomposing homesand the beauty of the Mojave landscape.
And the reason I put it onthis list is people do visit it.
You know,
there are people that travel and want togo to all these odd places in the desert,
(46:16):
and when they go, it's primarily
voices in the windis what I kept reading about.
So people will be wandering aroundthese old homesteads window blow,
and they'll start to hear their nameor words or people,
which sounds like people talking,and they'll get freaked out and get that
feeling of being watched, likewe've talked about so many times today.
(46:38):
And and those are the main storiesof this,
odd place of Wonder Valley, California.
The Hills Have eyes.
It's very.
Have eyes. Yeah.
Yeah.
And the I mean,the wind really does whip in those places,
and that's a great onebecause you can hear,
(46:58):
you know, inside of the wind if you if youconvince yourself you can hear a lot.
Yeah, yeah.
You can't really the wind is I,I'm always fascinated with the wind
because it can createwhat you think are voices.
And and that's not to just completely sayI'm debunking all these haunted stories
of the town. Sure, sure.
It's just to say that the wind does playreally interesting tricks on your mind.
(47:21):
Especially in the desert.
Yeah. And, and it it's super creepy.
It's super creepy.
That's a great one.
I need to check that town out. Yeah.
I should have. Looked at it.
Yeah, I should have looked athow far away it is from us in LA.
I don't think it's thatterrible of a drive.
Yeah, the Mojave hits. Yeah.
I mean, there's so much interesting.
That's an interesting road trip. Yeah.
(47:44):
Cool.
All right, so my last one today,our fifth haunted town.
I'm doing this for you.
I picked another Montana townthat I actually don't know much about.
Garnet Montana. I've heard you name.
I've heard the name.
All right.
I just came across this just being likeI should find another Montana town
for freedom.
Cool.
So, Garnet, Montana, there are manyremaining structures and people.
(48:10):
There aren't many, many people.
There's people visiting my.
Garnet is in the mountains
of Granite County, Montana.
Do you know where that is? Boy?I'm looking.
I looked it up yesterday,and now I don't remember
exactly where I think it's southwest.
Is it southwest?
It is.
(48:31):
Yeah. No, it's rightkind of where I'm from.
Oh, nice. Nice.
Yeah.
It's in the north.
Kind of northwest,right outside the Flathead
Reservation,which is where I'm from. Swaim.
So it's in it
lies in a place called First Chance Gulch.
And the.
It's it's an interesting town,because from what I can tell, it wasn't
(48:51):
necessarilya boom town from the gold rush.
It was more of a townthat started to develop because of people
in surrounding areasfinding minerals and gold.
And this was like a central placethat they would go to.
Because it had let me see,what was it called?
It was a machinethat would like grind the stone and stuff,
(49:13):
so people would come there and get their,their minerals processed.
I don't know the right term.
I'm not a miner so I don't, butI think everybody kind of follows my idea.
Oh it's a stamp mill, stamp mill.
And that was built in 1895.
And so a little townpopped up with that stamp
mill in 1897 and that is Garnet, Montana.
(49:35):
In 1898.
The population was around a thousandby 1900, though it was only 300 people.
So this town
quickly popped up with a populationand then very quickly diminished in size.
But the town became a ghost town twice,
so it essentiallyright after 1900, became a ghost town.
(49:57):
And then in 1934, gold prices rose
and miners returned to this area
because they wanted to to try to harvestmore gold out of the ground.
And then World War Two happened
and the cost of mining increasedbecause of all that.
So by 1940, the town was a bust again.
So it became a ghost town twice,which is incredibly fascinating.
(50:19):
That's cool. People come and visit.
Apparently thousands of visitors come to,you know, like you do at ghost towns.
You come and visit, you want tocheck it out and see the old places.
And with that comes ghost stories.
And one of the ones I found hereis that Kelly's
Saloon, a saloon there,which was built in 1898.
(50:39):
It was one of the most popular saloons
out of the handfulthat were built in the town.
It was also a brothel,and if you're stay after dark,
visitors claim that you can hear musicand the sound of like clinking
glasses and saloondrinkers laughing and talking at the bar.
There's also the Wells Hotel.
(51:00):
I don't believe this is still stand.
I think it's partly still standing,and it's believed that
a lot of guests died in this hotel,
and light from the windowscan be seen at night,
and sometimes an apparition or figurestanding in the window.
And then when people go up, there'sthere's no one there.
One of the best parts about this is therea cabins for rent in Garnet, Montana?
(51:25):
Yeah.So you have the courage to stay there?
I would absolutely do it.
You can go and stay in town.
So that is my my.
Awesome. Yeah,I totally know where this is.
It's just west of Missoula,which is, Oh, yeah.
Wherea University of Montana is a little town.
There's great concertsthere in the summer and stuff.
So if you want to check that outand then go over to Garnet,
(51:47):
it's I remember now seeing there's a,
off the highway there, highway 90,I believe,
or the one that goes to Seeley Lake.
I know what it's called,but there's definitely signs it's
a little more like calico,where it's a little more of, you know.
Touristy. A touristy kind of.
I mean,as far as I could tell from the sign.
(52:08):
And then that they have places you canstay, which is really, really cool.
Yeah.
But I now remember
seeing the sign and wanting to go,but I don't think I have ever gone.
Yeah, that's that's really cool.
Well, yeah.
And if listeners, if anybody has a ghosttown, you want me to cover that I didn't.
Or one you think is way more haunted,or even one you've been to that
(52:28):
you've experienced something, pleaseemail me a study of strange at gmail.com.
We'll do a follow up.
Even happy to have someone come on to talkabout their experience in these places.
Like I've said too many times
today, I'm so fascinated with ghost towns,and I'm glad I found a way to do it.
I, you know,I typically do deep dives, but I was like,
no, I'll do a listicle about ghost townsbecause I just I love ghost towns
(52:50):
and I want to talk about themand visit them all. So yeah.
And that's such a fun thing
because you put a number of them in thereand people listening could go,
that one's near me. Let's go check it out.
Absolutely. Yeah. You should.They're really worth it.
Whether you're into spooky things or not,just from a historical perspective.
I love going to them.
And I've been to
so many of them in Californiathat I just I'm always fascinated.
(53:11):
I'm the nerdy guywandering around being like, oh.
My God, look at that.
That's the original wall for me to do.
And just geeking outabout little things like that.
Yeah.
Are there, do you know of any
are there any ghost townsyou've been to that I didn't mention?
If they will be haunted, but,you know. Yeah.
I mean, you know, calico,we've mentioned a couple times,
which is out in the desertand it's, it's a it's a super fun time.
(53:36):
And it's very commercialized,but it's it's really fun.
It's calico,the one that someone bought it
and they've been restoring it like one guythat, like, lives out.
Maybe like a maybe. I mean, it's pretty.
It's it's it's an attraction,you know, and it's pretty big.
And you pay to go inand you walk up and down the street,
but it's really cool,very, very, very fun.
(53:57):
And they keep thingsreal nice and clean there.
And they apparently.
Yeah, they
I asked if they do a Halloween like timescary version and they said, yeah.
So, that could be really interesting.
And they do have little hutsthat you can rent and,
and, and stand nearby and camping nearby.
Which is cool.
And then in Montana,there's a couple Virginia City and Nevada
(54:20):
City are right next to each other,and they're a little
they're a little more,a little more commercial.
But, Nevada City is actually just they'vemoved a lot of old buildings there.
You would love it.
Like they've restoredand they have tons of old buildings.
Not all of them were just there.
So it's less like a ghost townand more like a historical monument.
They've shot movies.
(54:41):
They're old Westerns and stuff.
And then Virginia City nearby is,a little.
It's it's a little less,commercialized than a native city,
but there's like a cool old barthere and stuff.
It's a it's a good time. Very interesting.
But, yeah, Bannock is the main creepy onethat I, that I know of.
(55:03):
And then, Yeah.
Very cool.
Okay.
Well,thank you so much for joining me today.
Adam was. Super fun. Yeah. And.
Yeah, I want to talk to youabout the Marfa lights.
So maybe. You. Know, circle back to. That.
I have to do an episodeof the Marfa Lights, and I'll.
I'll dive into my research again on that.
Well, either way, I'll give you aI'll give you my my low down and.
(55:25):
Yeah. Please do. Yeah. That's awesome.
And before you go, do you mind sharing
where people might find your work,where people want to find you?
Is there anything you want to,
you know, promote or push or send peopletowards before you go?
Yeah.
I mean, Instagram,it's still well, underscore Adam.
Or you could just type inAdam still, I'll probably pop up,
Twitter, which I barely is, is
(55:47):
you can type my name and see if I pop up,but it's pretty much Instagram.
And then, like I said before,
if you want to see the free fall,it's on, two days and that's.
Yeah. Well,thank you again. I'll talk to you soon.
Awesome. Thanks, brother.
Thank you for joining a study of strange.
Support the show by subscribingwherever you listen to podcasts
and get accessto additional mysterious, strange content
(56:09):
by subscribing to our Substack,which you can find on our website.
The study of strange.comin the support tab.
Thank you again and good night.
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