Am I to Live Forever

This ghost story first came to light back in 2007, when the old Homestake Gold Mine was being converted into the Sanford Underground Research Facility. The scientists had plans for delicate physics experiments involving neutrino detectors. It wasn’t long after they started cleaning and sealing up the subterranean chambers that they made the discovery.

     At first, it was just a small fissure that wouldn’t stay sealed. No matter what they did, it kept reopening or appearing somewhere nearby. Air constantly flowed through it, sucking in or blowing out, depending on the outside air pressure. That airflow was a problem for the purity of the experiments, and they had to find a way to solve it.

     The scientists drilled a small, two-inch borehole into the rock, hoping to find out where the air was coming from. They eventually broke through to an open cavern, and that’s when they heard the voices. In shock, everyone stopped everything to listen.

      The sounds coming from the cavern were human! We attempted to communicate with them, but they didn’t answer. Someone speculated it was just the cave wind making noise, but as the people stood and listened, everyone, including the skeptics, said it sounded like human voices.

     One of the scientists said the cavern and the freshly bored, 18-foot shaft acted like a giant resonance chamber and natural voice box, creating harmonics that only sounded like human speech. She argued that if you imagined hard enough, you could hear voices. I heard them. Other people did, too. We all heard voices.

     My friend Mild Bill Hickok got me in that day. Mild Bill was a retired deputy sheriff, partly because he was the fourth generation of the actual Wild Bill Hickok and had a common-sense approach to cutting through nonsense.

     “Hear voices? If I imagine them hard enough?” Bill said. “No. It’s more like you don’t hear them because you imagine that you can’t. Only fools ignore their senses just because it feels too spooky for their science brains.”

     He was right, of course. Helpful or not, anything odd should be inspected as potential evidence, especially when you’re dealing with the weird things that Bill often becomes involved in.

     This wasn’t just cave wind. It was many voices, all at once. Men were yelling in confusion. I swear I heard a man screaming, “No, please stop! No!” Another voice, cold and taunting in a singsong: “I hear you, Tom. I’m going to catch you, Tom. Where are you hiding, Tom?”

     Throughout it all, a sorrowful wail begged over and over, “Am I to live forever!?” It was all very disconcerting.

     The scientists really didn’t know what to make of it, but the locals did. We knew without having to say it.

     When the long pipe camera reached the other side of the hole, it revealed a sensational, geode-like cavern glittering with gold! The miners called it a Christmas Room. It was a rare treasure pocket filled with veins of gold so pure and yellow that the whole chamber sparkled and shimmered in its reflections.

     That wasn’t all the camera showed. The golden treasure room, the Christmas room, was also a tomb. There were four skeletons, some with leathery skin still clinging to their skulls. Their mining tools were lying beside them; pickaxes, hammers, and drill bits, along with the remnants of their clothing. Someone had survived long enough to line up the four bodies along the golden cavern’s wall.

     Near the center of the cavern was a small fire pit, and sitting against the far wall, slumped as though sleeping, was a fifth skeleton. Beside it lay a tattered notebook and a pencil stub.

     Loose pages were scattered around the cavern floor. One page, visible through the long pipe camera, read, “Isaac is still here.” Another one, in all capital letters, said, “TOM DID IT.”

     The writing was erratic. The pages showed writing on top of writing. The lines overlapped each other, indicating they had been written in the dark and probably under great distress.

     The furthest point the camera could see revealed a massive ceiling cave-in. It also showed the sixth and final skeleton. The leg and arm bones were arranged in X shapes. It looked ominous. We could see chop marks on some of the bones, suggesting that the victim had been stripped of flesh and maybe even eaten.

     The old Homestake owners claimed the gold, and soon, plans were in motion to make a larger shaft to retrieve it. It was business as usual.

     The miners arrived. They drilled and blasted a small, rough shaft into the room, just enough for a local spelunker, Tori Kespar, a slender woman with nerves of steel and a love for cave exploring, to slither in. She would record the room for posterity and attempt to retrieve the remains.

     We watched the big-screen monitor as she recorded everything she saw, starting with the treasure room. It was a miner’s dream, pure, glittering veins of gold and crystals embedded in the walls, a fortune beyond my imagination.

     Next, we saw the bodies, the journal, and the scattered pages. Tori read the first lines of the journal aloud:

     “Three dead. Donald Bloomfield, Isaac Rikert, and I, Tom Hopper, survived. Found the Christmas room but were betrayed. Trapped in with the gold. We are doomed to die with a golden treasure we can not spend.”

     Tori read aloud from the tattered journal. It contained confessions of madness, cannibalism, and betrayal. Isaac had been accused, tortured, and killed, but later pages revealed it was Donald who had lit the dynamite.

     “Donald cut up Isaac today. Part by part. Isaac passed out, Donald chopped his head off.”
     “Donald ate the rest of Isaac today. Said he tasted like a dumb SOB.
     He laughed and laughed.”

     It didn’t stop there. Donald heard voices in the walls. On another page, he wrote:

     “The others talk to me. They are in the walls, all but Tom. That’s how I know he’s still alive. He doesn’t talk to me.”

     Everyone listened and watched in silence, fascinated as Tori narrated the pages.

     The various journal pages painted a grim picture of desperation and insanity. It was clear that the six men trapped in that cavern had been abandoned by the outside world. Three had survived, only to die in the cold dark. Hunger and fear gnawed at their sanity until there was nothing left but survival instincts and paranoia of the last two.

     Donald Bloomfield descended into madness faster than the others. The darkness had brought out something in him that had always been there.

     And then came one from the floor, maybe the most haunting of all:

     “I can’t control Donald anymore. He’s gone mad. I have to hide. I will light a fire with everything we have left, asphyxiating us both.”

     He had obviously failed, as the room showed no evidence of anything more than a small campfire. Presumably, Tom was now one of the four skeletons lined up along the golden wall.

     Tori bagged the victims, and they were pulled up the narrow shaft where forensic experts examined the remains. Some still had gold in their pockets. One man carried a gold Christian cross hammered out of the raw gold that lined the treasure room walls.

     One of the skeletons, we assumed Tom’s, had several loose pages with it. “TOM IS STILL HERE.” “TOM IS NOT HIDING.” “I HEAR YOU TOM.” Another page said, “YOU ARE THE GUILTY ONE TOM.”

     The confusion was maddening. The entries contradicted each other. One moment, Donald accused Tom of everything; the next, Tom was an innocent victim, hiding from someone much darker. The more we heard, the more we saw Donald Bloomfield’s desperation and deception.

     Within a few days, modern crews had stripped out the gold and sealed up the cavern. They had no plans to reopen the mine. Workers drilled a ventilation shaft from the surface down to the cavern to relieve the air pressure and funnel any remaining noises upward. The emptied treasure room was sealed with sound-absorbing insulation, and they left an expanding and contracting balloon apparatus in the chamber to help minimize the pressure changes.

     I couldn’t forget it, though, and neither could Mild Bill. The ‘Am I to live forever!?’ echoed in my head. It wasn’t a question. It was a desperate plea.

     We never did get our hands on those journal pages. The mine owners sealed them away along with the rest of the evidence. I remember what I saw and heard at the time, yet I wonder how much more there was that wasn’t shown to us.

     The cavern was closed off for good. No one was allowed down there anymore. The Christmas Room became a ghost story, a whispered legend among the locals.

     Sometimes, I imagine that I can still hear them. Like maybe the wind in Deadwood has a way of carrying those strange sounds, and if I listen closely, really listen, I might hear them again.

     At times, I hear that singsong voice after me. If I dwell on it, I end up spooking myself. “I hear you, Pete; I’m going to catch you, Pete; Where are you hiding, Pete?” Followed up by its plea, “Am I to live forever!?”

     This story isn’t for the faint of heart. I think it only affects those of us who were there, and I won’t blame you if you don’t believe it. After all, the official reports, if you can find them, of course, never mentioned anything about voices or screaming pleas.

     They never talk about the pages Tori read out loud, the ones with madness scribbled upon them, or the bones stripped of their flesh.

     Those of us who were there know the truth. As Mild Bill always says, ‘Deadwood Gold might represent eternal love, but it also keeps a forever record of its grievances. That’s why we have so many ghosts out here.’

     Not long after, news came out that the Homestake Mine historians had identified the crew. The old employment records showed that Isaac Bloomfield and his crew had worked for the mine but quit the day before, claiming they were leaving for more golden pastures.

     It was easy to speculate that they accidentally found the treasure room and intended to steal the easy gold. Yet, as can be typical with such treasures, one of the crew, in this case Donald Bloomfield, plotted to take it all for himself. But something went wrong and he was sealed in with the crew he was going to leave for dead.

     The mountain keeps its secrets well, yet every so often, it breathes. And if you listen closely enough, you might hear the ghosts of the Homestake.

     I’m starting to think a ghost is chasing me. “I hear you, Pete; I’m going to catch you, Pete; Where are you hiding, Pete?” I hope it’s only the one from Homestake.

     What chases you when you’re alone?

by Randy Peterson