A Badlands Ghost

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

     Later that day I showed my photo of the butte to one of the local Badlands 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 yet.

     The Ranger said the old stories called it the Watch Dog Butte, yet the exact location of the butte from the legends, remains illusive. No one knows for sure where it is. This 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 come upon them in a rush.

    Sometimes she was associated with a skeleton who would play haunting music on a violin. Some said he 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, and I really thought I was ready. Boy Scout ready! Ha! Luckily I lived and learned. The real problem was that I really didn’t believe there was any danger in it.

     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. Like 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 say, 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 along a strong black-light flashlight and a knapsack full of small fluorescent flag markers, of which I planted one every 50 feet or so along the trail. I was making a fluorescent breadcrumb path as an extra precaution against getting lost. The black-lights 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 there were indeed, phosphorus rocks and small calcite crystals. They were scattered about the base of the butte and glowed under the black-light, exactly as the old stories would suggest!

     There was also a trail leading deeper into the hellish formations, which I followed for almost half an hour, until I found 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. It’s camera link showed unusual things hidden in the crevasses. I admit, it would be easy to see things in these fantastic shadows and 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.

     Evening came and I had my camp ready. My 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 ready. The tripod with camera was set up and my flashlights were at hand. Then I simply waited and listened.

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

My flashlights amplified the neon shine my nylon tent emitted. My god, if it weren’t for the clouds I think the astronauts could have seen that neon yellow from space! Same for my trail markers. I left a small light on inside the tent so it wasn’t so dark where I sat and waited.

     My 2000 lumens 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 then sudden bright light. It made me somewhat dizzy.

     In the purple hue of the black-light, 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, even when you know what it is. I know, I’ve heard them before. Like chalk scraping 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 felt this screech more than I heard it. It felt like a very fast 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 with a jagged spear!

     Then everything went still and silent, like the calm after a bad storm. One really ugly, nasty screech which caused a debilitating sense of dread and fear, and then silence. I hate to use the phrase, as it’s overused now days, 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 was able to make decisions of 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 black-light 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 think I saw a thin, undulating woman’s outline flowing in green and blue fluorescent colors. There were a few more glowing sparks, like fireflies, marking a trail that led into the buttes.

     This was all very frightening of course, but I had to find out; I’m a journalist, not a scared mouse looking for a hole. 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 that ‘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 it was steep with loose, gravely 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 black-light, the mud glowed orange and clung to me like globs of glue. Then I saw little white specks were 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 it’s horrid sticky goo, and it was crawling with wiggling maggots! And now I was crawling with wiggling 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, or maybe I was just getting used to it, I don’t know. I was unable to get out of that 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 gravel with it’s hooves. It had probably exhausted itself to death trying to escape. 

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

     I immediately stripped out of 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 camp site. Some Boy Scout, huh!

     What a gross, gagging, yuck, 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-yucky shoes with no socks and no pants. I walked back to my camp half naked.

     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 get back to my vehicle. My shoes were unusable, but I only had one pair with me so I neutralized them up by grinding dirt into the wet parts and I cut the legs off of my jeans so I didn’t have to walk back to my car Donald Duck style.

     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!

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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 big state-wide effort with many people involved trying to find and save the boys.

     Three days later, the authorities finally found their bodies in 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, this is still the badlands after all, ‘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 badlands 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. I’d take someone with me. I was going to be even more than Boy Scout ready, I was going to be Mild Bill ready!

   I talked my friend Deputy Sheriff, Mild Bill Hickok, into going back there with me. And yes, that’s his real name, he’s the fourth generation of the original Wild Bill Hickok. As a Deputy Sheriff, he had part of the search efforts.

     I reasoned that two people could carry in more stuff, like ropes, and 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 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 an extra pair of socks and 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 florescent flags along the way. 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 did reach a spot that was very similar to the camp site I had used earlier. Last time the area was clear of any vegetation, this time there were tumble weeds tucked into the crevasses. The landscape really was spookier this time. I was glad to have Mild Bill Hickok 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 National Geographic covers. To think that an ancient feeding trap was awaiting our presence, was unthinkable.

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

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

     There was a bright, full moon that night. At first it made our nylon tents shine like beacons. I covered them with dark tarps so they didn’t shine so loudly.

     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 through our bodies! Sharp and stunning and it was over!

     We were unharmed but quite stunned. 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 it’s 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, only it wasn’t a banshee. It was the ghost of an ancient, large-headed sea beast with big teeth, no doubt from the times when this region was part of a warm, shallow, inland sea!

     After more than a little bit of shaking, we hooked a black-light 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 extra time to plant the florescent trail markers along the way.

     We walked very cautiously, there were wisps of small things in the air around us. I tried to swat them away at times even though I couldn’t feel them. It was eerie and uncomfortable. Bill seemed to like it. “I’ll take these over maggots any day!” he said.

     When we got close to where the drone was leading us, we came upon a large crack in the ground which was visible in the LED light, but not visible in the moonlight or the black-light! Had we walked into that, we would have fallen into what I can only imagine as death and maggots. We got around it and continued on, 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 spooked! Ultimately I tied on a rope and slid down the loose gravel side very slowly, while Bill held on to the other end of the rope at the top of the butte.

     When I finally made it to the bottom I saw there wasn’t an actual tunnel going into the badlands formation. The black-light instead showed something like a cocoon with the glowing end open and the other end 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 black-light. The creature was almost on top of me! It was like a plesiosaurus crossed with a T. Rex. It’s mouth was wide open, I saw it’s 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 now I was also soaking wet with brackish sea water!

     Bill 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.

     With the LED light, we saw nothing except an empty badlands trap, like a Venus flytrap, but built for large mammals. In the moonlight, the glowing tunnel could again be seen at the bottom. A badlands ‘natural’ trap? Not if you ask me. This was no accident. It was a creature-made snare, waiting for its next meal.

     Fear is a choice, not a reaction…? 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 was in trouble without Mild Bill along.

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

     I will never go back in there to explore again! All I can do is warn you, and hope that 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 badlands fossil labyrinth. 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, I think it moves around with the moonlight.

     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 though, don’t sleep in loud, bright, florescent tents in the badlands. This is the creature’s feeding grounds that we’re tromping around in and the florescent tents are only calling them in while they’re out feeding.

     Keep the lights inside those kind of tents turned off. In the badlands, 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