Distinctly Montana Magazine

d i s t i n c t ly m o n ta n a • fa l l 2 0 1 4 32 Searching for reStleSS SpiritS in the laSt BeSt place A s playwright Henrik Ibsen remarked, "There must be ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sand in the sea." Montana is no exception. The ghosts of miners and shopkeep- ers, cowboys and Natives, madams and johns still wander through their old haunts. Virginia City is especially well known for its restless spirits, but it not the only haunted place in Montana, not by a country mile: there are hundreds of stories about the Last Best Place's restless souls. Bannock, once a booming territorial capital, now a metaphysical ghost town as well, has had many odd yarns told about it. People brave enough to stay there during the winter months have reported mysterious honky-tonk music rising from the center of town, so loud it sounds like a party, and yet vanishing suddenly when approached. At Little Big Horn ghostly forms are said to appear and clash at night. And at the Old Prison Museum in Deer Lodge, visitors brave enough to go into the Hole, the solitary confinement cell that admits no light, have supposedly reported feelings of something malevolent clawing at them in the dark. But Your Humble Correspondent, despite a life-long interest in the supernatu- ral, has never seen a ghost. My grandmother sometimes claimed to be able to detect spirits and guardian angels, and to hear disembodied voices speaking. One memorable evening she exclaimed that she had just seen a figure which passed between her antique end table and the wall. I remember that as a kid I was simultaneously thrilled, scared, and a little jealous. So I set out to scare me up some ghosts, starting at the Butte- Silverbow Archives, which if we are to believe the Internet is one of Montana's most haunted locations. One Web site called Haunted Places claims that it has had over 200 "episodes" re- ported (www.hauntedplaces.org/item/butte-archives/), including books thrown across rooms, ringing alarms though power has been disconnected. One story has it that a visitor walked in on a group of phantom firefighters from a century past playing a card game. Turns out the Archives used to be the old firehouse. artICLE aND photoS by JoSEph ShELtoN

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