The wooden shack is so small we can hear one another breathe. We’re in the Cabbage Patch, a shantytown in uptown Butte, Montana. Four of its roughly 225 structures survived a 1940 demolition that cleared the site for new low-income housing. This one is thought to be the home of Ethel “Tess” Gill, a girl who went out to play in the dusty streets one day and never came back. In human form, anyway.
Our group stands motionless on the creaky floorboards, afraid to shift our weight, as Chris Fisk of Butte’s Spooks & Spirits Haunted Tours lowers his voice. “Tell us if you’re here, honey,” he says softly.
A typical tour would gloss over the Cabbage Patch. In the late 19th century, Butte made its fortune on copper, earning it the nickname “the richest hill on earth.” Copper kings built mansions while the city swelled into a Gilded Age metropolis with piles of money and few rules. But a select few got to enjoy that wealth. The Cabbage Patch was where everyone else landed: immigrants, widows, orphans, miners too injured to work, and some more unsavory characters, pushed to the edges of the boom. It had a rough reputation.
Fisk had heard stories of a little girl’s spirit in the house, but he couldn’t place their origin until he went digging in the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives for a presentation on Montana’s executions. There he found it: A serial killer had been in the Patch the same day a young girl named Ethel Gill was raped and killed. The local paper in 1898 called him a “monster in human form.” Maybe avoiding visitors like him is why, Fisk tells us, her ghost responds best to young mothers and children.
Is it her? Well . . . something is making the lights blink.
History with a pulse
Real-life horror stories, like the one that took place at Fulton Theatre, can often be more unnerving than fictional ones.
Felix Lipov/Shutterstock
I love a history tour. I love a museum. But when it comes to feeling history, nothing I’ve found comes close to a ghost tour. At their best, ghost stories are living folklore, and when they’re rooted in truth, they can entertain and educate all at once. For locals deepening their connection to a place and travelers trying to understand somewhere new, a ghost tour may be the most compelling way in.
Some tours rely on fright alone. My kind of ghost tour delivers verifiable, on-site facts alongside the chills: immersive edu-tainment, told through the people who rarely make it into our history books but whose stories are often as interesting as the ones that do, if not more so. These tours give new life to stories (often troubling ones) that might otherwise be suppressed or forgotten.
During Pennsylvania’s Lancaster Ghost Tour, a caped guide swinging an electric lantern led us to the Fulton Theatre, which bills itself as the country’s oldest continuously operating theater. Before the theater, though, the grounds held the city’s jail. In December 1763, a vigilante mob called the Paxton Boys broke in and killed the last of the peaceful Conestoga people, who had been sheltered there for their own safety. Guides say the screams still carry through the walls.
In Casper, Wyoming, I tried my hand at ghost hunting at Fort Caspar Museum, a reconstructed 1865 military post. Armed with an electromagnetic field (EMF) detector provided by the Casper Area Paranormal Society, I wandered the grounds and took in the stories of Native American tribes, pioneers on their westward journeys, and the U.S. Army soldiers who once called the fort home. I may have heard the faint sound of horse hooves. I definitely felt a shiver of unexpected cold air.
The ghost tours offered by Nashville Adventures unearth spirit-laden stories of everything from the musicians and mobsters of Printer’s Alley to the tomb of James K. Polk, the only U.S. president buried on a state capitol’s grounds and, even stranger, whose remains have been exhumed and moved twice (no wonder his spirit is restless). In Oklahoma City, US Ghost Adventures takes travelers back to the 1889 Land Run, when the open prairie became a boomtown in hours. The best ghost tours never ask you to believe in the supernatural. They ask you only to believe these people once lived.
What the textbooks couldn’t do
If Fort Caspar’s walls could talk, what would they say? A ghost tour through the museum in Casper, Wyoming, can offer some insight.
Courtesy of Fort Caspar Musuem
History gives a ghost story its bones, an immersive atmosphere kicks it up a notch, and a passionate guide does the rest. Fisk served as historian on the Travel Channel series Ghosts of Devil’s Perch, which investigated paranormal activity in Butte; he also taught history at Butte High for more than 25 years and was named the 2010 DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) National History Teacher of the Year. For 23 of those years, he led haunted tours in October as part of his classes, digging into the background of local urban legends.
“I think we all learned in school, Here’s your notes, you’re gonna have a quiz tomorrow,” says Fisk. “Good students will study it, but very seldom at that level are they going to internalize. They’ll remember bits and pieces. But you tell them it’s haunted, and you take them in there and prove to them it is . . . they’ll remember every detail and then some.”
That goes for the adults on his tours today, too. We all chase the latest buzzworthy hot spots when visiting a destination. A good ghost story asks what made the place tick in the first place.
And, of course, it’s fine to want the thrills. “People like to get scared. That’s why they love Halloween. It’s no different than buying a ticket to see Jaws or Friday the 13th,” says Fisk. “We know it’s going to scare the [expletive] out of us. We hope it does. That’s what we pay for.”
