Six Ghosts at the Homestake Mine

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 big 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 vertical 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 bore hole into the rock, hoping to find out where the air was coming from. They broke through to an open cavern, and that’s when they heard the sounds. In shock, everyone stopped everything just to listen.

     The sounds coming from the cavern were human! We attempted to communicate with them, they didn’t answer back. 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 26-foot shaft acted like a giant resonance chamber and natural voice box, creating harmonics that only sounded like human speech. She claimed that if you imagine hard enough, you can hear voices. I heard them. Other people did too. Most of us heard voices.

     My friend Mild Bill Hickok, got me in that day. Mild Bill was a Deputy Sheriff, partly because he was the fourth-generation of the actual Wild Bill Hickok but also had a common sense approach of cutting through nonsense.

     “Hear voices? If I imagine them hard enough?” Bill said. “No. 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, everything odd should be inspected as potential evidence when you’re dealing with the weird things that Bill often becomes involved in.

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

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

     The scientists really didn’t know what to make of it all. But the locals did. We knew.

     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. 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 it showed. The golden treasure room, the Christmas room, was also a tomb. There were four skeletons lined up along one side, some with leathery skin still clinging to bone in places and hair still matted against their skulls. Their mining tools were laying beside them; pickaxes, hammers, drill bits, along with the remnants of their clothing. Someone had survived long enough to line up the 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, which was 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 were overlapping each other indicating they had been written in the dark under great distress.

     The furthest point the camera could see showed a massive ceiling cave in. It also showed the sixth and last 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 even possibly eaten.

     The Homestake Mine historians wanted to know more about the men. They were jumping at the prospect of finding and solving an old Mine mystery. They wanted a chance to touch a unique and rare moment from the mine’s past.

     The old Homestake owners claimed the gold and soon plans were in motion to make a larger shaft and retrieve the gold. Business as usual.

     Miners came, they drilled and blasted a 14” to 20” rough shaft to the room. It was just enough for a local spelunker, Tori Jeffers, 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 imagination.

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

“I write this about one day after the cave-in. 2 days of water left.
Joe Tiller, Christopher Steuer and Rick Linton dead.
Donald Bloomfield, Isaac Rikert, and I, Tom Hopper, survived.”

“Found the treasure room but someone betrayed us, trapped us in with the gold. Now doomed to die with a golden treasure.”

     The story that unfolded on those pages was horrifying! It was also the account of a descent into madness.

“The SOB Isaac Rikert confessed, he lit the dynamite and failed to escape. All are dead except Tom and I, and the SOB, Isaac Rikert. He will pay for this.”

     It was clear that things had gone terribly wrong in that cavern. Tom and Donald, driven mad by hunger, despair, and revenge, had turned on Isaac. He had been chained up, tortured, and cannibalized.

“Tom cut up Isaac today. Part by part. As soon as Isaac passed out, Tom chopped his head off. He pretended to eat his fingers. I think he did.”

“Tom ate the rest of Isaac today. Said he tasted like a dumb SOB. I laughed and laughed. Left his bones in an unrespectful way.”

     It didn’t stop there. Donald heard the voices from the walls. He wrote:

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

     And then she read a loose page from the far side of the cavern.

“Isaac was innocent. Don and his wife Sarah did this. Don, losing his mind, has gone cannibal.”

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

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

     Donald Bloomfield had descended into madness faster than the others, or maybe the darkness had simply brought out something in him that had always been there. His handwriting was shaky. What started as desperate pleas for help turned into chilling confessions and wild accusations:

“Tom arranged the dead bodies today. They don’t stink anymore. I hear Isaac in the walls screaming for Tom to stop. Tom wasn’t listening.”

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

“I can’t control Donald anymore. He’s gone mad. He hears the others talk to him in the walls. I have to hide. If someone finds this, know that I tried to stay sane. I will light a fire of everything left, asphyxiating us both.”

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

     Tori bagged the victims, and they were hauled 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 from 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 HIDING.” “I HEAR YOU, TOM.” Another page said simply, “TOM IS THE GUILTY ONE.”

     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 the cavern’s chill crept into my bones.

     Within days, modern crews had stripped out the gold and sealed up the cavern. They had no plans to reopen the mine.

     The workers drilled a ventilation shaft from the surface down to the cavern to relieve the air pressure and funnel any 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, 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 owners of the mine 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 scientists were able to conduct their experiments without interruption. The cavern was closed off for good. No one is allowed down there anymore, not scientists, not historians and not reporters like me. The Christmas Room became a ghost story, a whispered legend among the locals.

     Sometimes I like to imagine that I can still hear them. That 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.

     I can imagine I hear the voice now after me. I dwell on it and spook myself sometimes. “I hear you, Pete. I’m going to catch you, Pete. Where are you hiding, Pete?” Followed up by its pleas, “Am I to live forever!?”

     This story isn’t for the faint of heart. I think it only effects 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 with madness scribbled upon them, or the bones stripped of their flesh.

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

     Follow up: Homestake Mine historians identified the crew. The old employment records showed that Isaac Bloomfield and his crew had worked for the mine and had quit the day before, claiming they were leaving for more golden pastures.

     It was easy to speculate they accidentally found the treasure room and had intended to steal the easy gold. As typical with such a treasure, one of the crew, in this case Donald Bloomfield, plotted to take it all for himself, but something went wrong and Donald 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 just hear the ghosts of the Homestake Mine.

     This reporter is glad the deep hard-rock mine is now at rest. It’s better suited to neutrino experiments than gold extraction these days.

by Randy Peterson