An Ancient Badlands Ghost

I was out looking for Fairburn Agates in the Buffalo Gap Grasslands, just West of Badlands National Park in SD, when, purely by chance of my position and the shadows of the day, I spied a distant badlands formation that looked a lot like a huge coyote or dog sitting on top of a butte. I photographed it and marked the geo position on my cell phone. I wanted to know if that butte was named after a Coyote. I thought it should be if it weren’t.

Later that day, I showed my photo of the butte to one of the local Park Rangers. He told me of a butte described like that, which was a marker in some of the old ghost stories surrounding the infamous “Badlands Banshee,” a local ghost story I had not heard of… until then.

The Ranger said the old stories called it the Watch Dog Butte, but the exact location of the butte from the legends remains elusive. No one knows for sure where it is. This is a true ghost story from almost 150 years ago!

There were accounts of a ghostly woman glowing and shimmering in the moonlight who looked like she was expecting something from you. When the travelers asked her what she wanted, she would darkly shriek and rush upon them.

Sometimes, she was associated with a skeleton who would play haunting music on a violin. Some said it was searching for a soul, maybe your soul, I don’t know. The stories also described phosphorus-glowing rocks, which were pointers to a path where if you strayed, you’d be stripped of life and dignity.

As a newspaper reporter, I naturally like old stories and legends, so I set out purely for the fun of the investigation. I really thought I was ready, Boy Scout ready! Ha! Luckily, I lived and learned. The real problem was that I didn’t believe there was any danger.

I had a general map location and a good idea of how to get there, even though the actual buttes didn’t show up on the Google satellite map. As they say of the badlands, “It’s Hell with the fires put out!” and obviously, those kinds of details just don’t show up on a Google map.

Don’t get me wrong. Like I said, I was Boy Scout ready. I wasn’t going to be one of those people who got lost and died in the ancient labyrinth, whether from stupidity or something worse. I had maps, a compass, and a drone to guide me. Getting lost was not going to be a problem. I had also trekked in two days’ worth of water just to be extra prepared.

I brought a strong blacklight flashlight and a knapsack full of small fluorescent flag markers. I was making a fluorescent breadcrumb path as an extra precaution against getting lost. The blacklights would be able to find those and anything else that glowed, including the phosphorus rocks from the banshee legend.

When I finally made it to the butte, which I had now renamed Coyote Watch Butte, I found phosphorus rocks and small calcite crystals; they were scattered about the base of the butte and glowed under the blacklight, exactly as the old ghost story would suggest!

There was also a trail leading deeper into the hellish formations, which I followed for almost half an hour, eventually finding a nice level area for my camp between some of the peaks.

While waiting for nightfall, I used my drone to map the pathways around me, the camera link showed unusual things hidden in the crevasses. I admit it would be easy to see things in these fantastic shadows. I don’t want to jump to conclusions, but the shadows were jumping with or without my conclusions.

Maybe I’ll look into it later. There could be a whole new hidden world just waiting to be discovered in the dark geological creases of these 75 million-year-old, fossilized seafloor beds.

I was ready. The lightweight tent was up and my supplies laid out. I had found a big flat rock to put my notebook on, and the drone was charged and at the ready. The tripod and camera were set up, and my flashlights were at hand. Then, I waited and listened.

I admit, it was pretty spooky. It got very dark that night. Heavy clouds didn’t even let moonlight through. Deep inside the badlands, it was black, black as hell and I was unprepared for the sheer darkness of this place.

My 2000-lumen strong LED flashlight could brightly and blindly light up the whole side of a formation. In the bright light, the buttes swayed back and forth. At the time, I thought I was experiencing vertigo caused by the utter darkness and sudden bright light. It made me dizzy.

My flashlights amplified the neon shine my nylon tent emitted. If it weren’t for the clouds, I think the astronauts could have seen that neon yellow from space! It glowed brightly, like a lighthouse beacon. I left a small light on inside the tent so it wasn’t so dark where I sat and waited.

In the purple hue of the blacklight, I saw shadows run across the ground and hillsides, similar to what my drone had revealed earlier. I tried to take a video with my cell phone, but the back-and-forth swaying made it impossible for the camera to capture anything clearly.

Then I heard it, a piercing screech! It burst through me! Have you ever heard a mountain lion scream? It’s terrifying when you’re out camping. I know, I’ve heard them before. Like chalk scraping on a blackboard, some sounds hit you in the bones, making you shiver from head to toe. Mountain lion screams can do that. This was worse.

I think I felt the screech more than I heard it. It almost felt like a high-speed airplane flying directly above me. It lasted long enough to be disorienting and cause confusion, yet quick enough that it felt like I was skewered through my chest!

Then everything went still and silent, like the calm after a bad storm. I hate to use the phrase, as it’s overused nowadays, but I could describe it as ‘primal evil’; it was petrifying! I was feeling numb.

Then it happened again, and it was even more startling! My chest made a huge involuntary gasp. This screech was faster and more intense, sharper. It was obviously coming towards me! My backbone, hips, and legs all reacted badly to this force. I was dead in my tracks.

I don’t know if it was 5 seconds or several minutes until I came to and could decide what to do next. I sent the drone straight up to look down on me. Maybe it would record my death. I was shaking so badly that I dropped the controller. I still had my camera ready and blacklight on.

Then she came into view! I saw her for a microsecond. I clicked the remote shutter. The camera flashed, catching only a swirl of glowing specks and sparks that evaporated into the air.

In the microsecond before the flash, I saw a thin, undulating woman’s outline flowing in green and blue fluorescent colors. There were glowing sparks, like fireflies, marked a trail that led into the buttes as well.

Of course, this was all very frightening, but I had to find out; I’m a journalist, not a scared mouse looking for a hole to crawl into. I had my LED flashlight to scare her away again; how bad can this so-called Badlands Banshee really be, right?

I strongly reminded myself, ‘Fear is a Choice if you don’t let it become a reaction.‘ I grabbed my flashlights, camera, and the fluorescent trail markers. I sprinted into the dark, following the trail the glowing phosphorous rocks had marked out.

After a few minutes, I was led into an open crevasse between the formations, where I slid on some loose gravel right into the very bottom of a cone-shaped depression or pit! It was maybe only 25 feet deep but very steep with loose gravel sides.

Suddenly sliding down a steep hole into sheer blackness is overwhelmingly terrifying, but then the stench hit me… and it was overpowering! I had reached the bottom, and it was mucky with what at first felt like warm, wet mud and sand. With my blacklight, the mud glowed orange and clung to me like globs of glue. Then I saw little white specks wiggling around in it.

Quickly turning on my LED flashlight, I found that I had landed in the middle of some poor creature who had slid in and died! My feet and ankles were deep into its horrid sticky goo, and it was crawling with wiggling maggots! And now I was crawling with squirming maggots, and worse, I was almost passing out from the stench! I gagged and puked on the maggots until I only had the dry heaves left.

A breeze eventually came up, helping to clear the stench but also stirring up their vengeful parents, the biting horse flies. I was unable to get out of that miserable pit for several hours. That’s how long it took for the sun to come up enough to show a certain twisted pathway up the steep sides.

I think the dead goat, whom I was festering in, had repeatedly tried to get out, creating an odd path of foot landings by clearing the loose sand and gravel with its hooves. It had probably broken a leg or exhausted itself to death trying to escape.

After several ugly and messy attempts to jump back and forth on the little footmarks, I got out, but just barely. My escape was propelled by horrified determination more than strength and ability.

I immediately stripped off my shoes, pants, underwear, and socks. With more dry heaves, I was finally able to wipe away most of the slimy wet goo. I had foolishly left my water at the campsite. Some Boy Scout, huh?

What a gross, gagging, yucky experience. I had been bitten and consumed upon like a dead rotting goat. I tried to go barefoot but had to settle for open, wet-gucky shoes with no socks and no pants. I quickly walked back to my camp in the breeze, Donald Duck style.

The trek back to my camp was not as I remembered; the trail was very different in the daylight. Luckily, the trail markers I had dropped along the way took me back to the right place. I can see why people would get lost and die in the badlands even without falling into deadly traps and pits.

I washed myself as best as I could, saving a little water to hike back to my vehicle. My shoes were unusable, but I only had one pair with me, so I neutralized them by grinding dirt into the wet parts. I also cut the legs off of my jeans, so I didn’t have to walk back to my car quite so exposed.

I didn’t know what I saw. I couldn’t even prove anything was there, but something was there! And now I wasn’t even sure it was a woman. Maybe I was just assuming it was because it was tall, slender, curvy, and scary. Ha! And it might have been flowing in those back-and-forth motions in water. I was starting to imagine a monster from the Badland’s ancient sea, out stunning her prey for supper!

         #

It took me several days to get over that experience. I was still feeling the wet slime between my toes and the maggots on my ankles, but I had been pushed on by a recent tragedy of two teenage boys who’d gotten lost in the badlands. There was a considerable state-wide effort, with many people involved in trying to find and save the boys.

Three days later, the authorities finally found their bodies at the bottom of one of those badlands natural pits. Shockingly, the coroner reported that the teens didn’t succumb to the harsh, dry badlands environment. They had drowned!

There had been no rain, and there was no standing water. After all, this is still the badlands, ‘Hell with the fires put out.’; it made no sense. The sheriff determined that the kids had to have been picked up inside the badlands, where they were last seen, taken somewhere, where they died by drowning, and then their bodies brought back to the badlands. They said the only reasonable explanation was foul play. Murder.

I know what I suspected. I suspected something related to the screecher I had encountered. I suspected something related to the back-and-forth swaying, something related to the jumping shadows in the badland’s small, dark spaces.

I wasn’t sure how to find out except to go back and see for myself. This time, I would let friends and family know where I was going and I would take someone with me. I was going to be even more than Boy Scout ready. I was going to be Mild Bill Hickok ready!

I talked my friend Mild Bill Hickok into going back in there with me. As a retired Deputy Sheriff, he had been part of the search efforts to find the two boys and was well aware of the Badlands harsh environment.

I reasoned that two people could carry in more stuff, like ropes, and if needed, be there to help pull someone out of steep death pits. Mild Bill was up for the adventure as he liked the eerie and weird stuff, just not so much the maggots.

With our backpacks full, we got onto the first part of the trail. I was sure every brush of a twig was a maggot crawling on me. I had to stop and take my shoes off to look just to make sure I remained maggot-free. The extreme stench and ick of my first trip had burned its way into a lifelong memory. I was packing several extra pairs of socks and extra pair of shoes this time too. Waterproof ones!

We made it back to the Coyote Watch Butte and headed for the same tent site I used before. Again, I planted fluorescent flags along the way, but things looked different this time. The trail was not the same. The buttes around me were darker, taller, and somehow more foreboding. Maybe it was just in my head.

We reached a spot very similar to the campsite I had used earlier. Last time, the area was clear of vegetation. This time, tumbleweeds were tucked into the crevasses. The landscape really was spookier. I was glad to have Mild Bill along, and the campsite was good for what we needed.

The sky was clear except for a few scattered wisps of thin white clouds, and it was warm. The Badlands scenery was worthy of a National Geographic cover. To think that an ancient feeding trap was awaiting our presence, was almost unthinkable.

When we arrived, it was late afternoon, so we had several hours to explore the region with the drones and look for the jumping shadows I saw last time. They were there again, yet when we went to those spots expecting to see something wondrous, all appeared normal. There were nothing but rocks and crunched-up tumbleweeds. It was too bright to use the blacklights; we’d have to wait until it got dark for that.

After eating our cold suppers and waiting in the dark long enough to eat half of our remaining supplies, we finally heard a screech, but it was much further away this time. The cameras, the drones, and the flashlights were at hand, and I was making sure to video it without the LED lights, only blacklight. We were ready, but nothing was happening.

There was a bright, full moon that night. At first, it made our nylon tents shine, but I covered them with dark tarps so they didn’t. In the blacklight, wisps of small things were in the air around us. I tried to swat them away even though I couldn’t feel them. At times, it was eerie and uncomfortable. Bill seemed to like it. “I’ll take these over maggots any day!” he said.

After another hour of waiting, I opened my tent to grab something more to eat and momentarily turned on the LED flashlight. Of course, my tent suddenly glowed like a neon lighthouse, and that’s when she came around the corner, screeched, and burst right over our bodies! Sharp and stunning, and it was over!

We were unharmed but quite shocked. We didn’t talk, we just wildly looked around, trying to figure out what the hell had just happened! Bill also looked a bit impressed.

Next, we saw it in the moonlight on a nearby butte. It was not a girl swaying in the wind. Instead, the glow looked like a sea monster shimmering in the water. The moonlight seemed to show off its blue and green glowing colors. She disappeared in a rush after some new target we couldn’t see.

This was surprisingly like the “Badlands Banshee” story, but it wasn’t a banshee. It was the ghost of an ancient, large-headed sea beast, no doubt from the time when this region was part of a warm, shallow inland sea!

After more than a little bit of shaking, we hooked a blacklight to the underside of Bill’s drone and tried to find it again. Taking a video from high up, we saw an area on the screen that glowed. Upon closer inspection, the drone showed the light was coming from a glowing tunnel entrance at the bottom of a large, deep pit.

It took a little convincing. I repeated several times, “Fear is a Choice if you don’t let it become a reaction.” Reacting was especially easy at that moment! After a few minutes of dissenting discussion, we convinced ourselves that there was really nothing to fear if we were smart about it all. We took off to find the glowing tunnel the drone had revealed, taking time to plant the fluorescent trail markers along the way.

When we got close to where the drone was leading us, we came upon a large crack in the ground, visible in the LED light but not in the moonlight or the blacklight! Had we walked into that, we would have fallen into what I can only imagine as death and maggots. But we got around it and continued, now even more cautious than before.

Finally, we reached the butte and looked down upon the glowing tunnel. We were probably 40 or 50 feet above it. The sides going down to the tunnel were fairly steep, and the gravel was loose. I was, indeed, spooked! Ultimately, I tied on a rope and slid down the loose gravel side slowly, Bill held on to the other end of the rope at the top.

When I finally made it to the bottom I saw there wasn’t an actual tunnel going into the badlands formation. Up close, the blacklight showed something like a cocoon with the glowing end open and the other leading into something darker than the shadows around it.

That’s when she attacked! The screech was loud and painfully harsh! I spun around, clenching my chest and blacklight. The creature was almost on top of me! It was like a plesiosaurus crossed with a T. Rex. Its mouth was wide open, I saw its teeth and I remember a grotesque purple tongue! I believed I was about to die and instinctively curled up into a ball!

Luckily for me, Bill had the presence of mind to turn on the LED flashlight, and everything that was glowing disappeared; tunnel, creature, and all. I was in shock and also soaking wet with brackish sea water!

With the LED light, we saw nothing except an empty, natural badlands trap, like a Venus flytrap, but built for large mammals. The glowing tunnel could again be seen at the bottom in the moonlight. But it wasn’t a badlands ‘natural’ trap. Not if you ask me. It was a creature-made snare waiting for its next meal.

Bill questioned me, “Fear is a choice, not a reaction?” He had a serious look on his face. “Bullshit! Instead, maybe fear is nature’s way of saying ‘LOOK OUT!'”

I don’t know if it could have directly killed me or not. Maybe I would have drowned like the two boys. Either way, I would have been in deep, death-trap trouble without Mild Bill along. I’m sure he saved my life when he turned on the light and pulled me back up to the top of the butte. I was numb for an hour and visibly weakened for the rest of the trip.

On our way back to camp, the drone spotted another glowing region not too far away. That’s when we knew the tent’s bright neon glow called the creature in. That’s how the creature’s death pits are marked, with a fluorescent glow. It’s what she was looking for!

I will never go back in there to explore again. I can only warn you and hope you live to tell me about it. If you disappear without a trace, the local sheriff will think you’re just another hapless victim of the Badland’s ancient labyrinth, but I’ll suspect you were drowned and maybe even consumed, either by sea monsters or maggots or both!

Soon after, we alerted the Park Rangers, but when we went to show it to them, it was no longer there. If you do go camping in the badlands, look (out?) for the Coyote Watch Butte. It’s not always in the same place. It moves around with the moon phases.

If you hear something shriek, pray it’s only a mountain lion. Bring extra flashlight batteries, and don’t follow any phosphorus trails. I don’t know if she’ll kill you or not, but I know you will likely die if you follow that ill-guided shreeker’s trail!

Most importantly, don’t sleep in loud, bright, fluorescent tents in the badlands! This is the creature’s feeding grounds that we’re tromping around in, and the florescent tents only call them in while they’re out feeding.

Keep the lights inside those kind of tents turned off. In the badlands, the only camp in dark, heavy tents. Be ready, even more than Boy Scout ready. If the mountain lions don’t get you, the Stunning Badlands Ghost might!

  Randy Peterson