The Rickshaw Man

I was there and saw Vernon A. Lusker’s body twisted like a pretzel at the bottom of that hole. As the local newspaper reporter in Deadwood, SD, I usually get bland tourist news, but this was a dark story involving infamous old Deadwood, maybe it was worthy of national news headlines.

This madman had gruesomely murdered his whole family by stuffing them down a well and then blowing it up! Shortly thereafter, he savagely killed three guards while escaping from prison.

My friend, retired Deputy Sheriff Mild Bill Hickok, and yes, that’s his real name, it’s been passed down through four generations of Bill Hickoks, except we call him Mild Bill, not Wild Bill, called me. It was 2 AM.

“Pete?” he asked.

Leaving the comfort of my bed was a struggle, except for the way he whispered, “You might want to come see this.”

I arrived just as they were setting up the floodlights. An hour earlier, a fissure had opened on Main Street, where the old brick pavement still stretched between the historic saloon buildings. The bricks had collapsed inward as if something below had been pulling them down. Strangely, there wasn’t even any dust around the ragged, oblong hole.

Lusker, the escaped murderer everyone had been looking for, was dead, laid out at the bottom about twenty feet down. His contorted face, which was eerily looking up at us, was frozen in an ambiguous expression of either great pain or great laughter.

Mild Bill, pointing his flashlight at something beyond the body, asked me, “And what do you make of that?” That’s when I saw the tunnel. Mild Bill had a way of finding the eerie and weird things.

As standard procedure, the Search & Rescue team went down first. We were allowed access once the body was removed and the ground searched. The tunnel stretched back maybe 10 feet before reaching a cracked, rock face covered with ominous-looking Chinese characters painted in red.

Later, Mr. Wong, a small, hunched-up Chinese historian who almost looked old enough to have personally lived in the days of old Deadwood, arrived and translated the symbols. ‘DANGER’ and ‘DO NOT OPEN.’ The warnings were painted in several places.

It was too late. Apparently, Lusker had been involved in exactly that. The rock face was cracked open, revealing the insides of a cursed Chinese tomb dating to the late 1880s, when the Chinese workers built and used tunnels to service Deadwood’s saloons and hotels.

Inside the small tomb sat a rickshaw. The wooden axle was broken, and the wheels lay against the wall. A dilapidated skeleton was lashed into the seat, its hollow eyes staring forward.

A small table in front of the rickshaw held thirteen white, unlit candles. A fourteenth candle, a red one, had been lit and had burned down to the bottom of its wick. The puddle of red wax marked the moment when time must have stopped inside the tomb.

But it was the painting on the rock wall above the little table that made my backbone shiver, figures of a man with an ax, chopping up 13 women, children and babies, who were still alive! I could imagine the characters screaming and struggling, animated by the lone candle’s flickering light, as the last thing the man lashed into the rickshaw seat ever saw.

The Chinese characters beneath the grisly painting told the story of Samuel Shaw, the monster who’d walked the old Deadwood streets. The translation read like a curse.

“Here rots Samuel Shaw, a man who willingly and without sympathy tortured and cruelly murdered 13. May he forever ride in his circle of hate, never overcoming the anger he used to justify the hard murder of our most precious, soft, and tenderest souls.”

Mild Bill was fond of saying. “Deadwood gold might represent eternal love, but that gold also carries its grievances forever. It has a way of keeping its dark secrets alive. That’s why we have so many ghosts out here.” Mild Bill obviously knew a lot about ghosts.

Two days later, Mrs. Chen from the Dragon Wok Chinese Restaurant heard it first, the distinct click-clack of wooden wheels on the brick street. Then came the hot cracking of a whip. She described a screaming, angry voice echoing between the buildings: ‘GO CHINA BOY! GO! NOW!‘

Nobody really believed her at first, as Mrs. Chen was always seeing and hearing spirits, but then a Miss Emma Patel, a tourist from Ohio, died right in front of the Bullock Hotel, in front of dozens of people. One minute, Emma was taking selfies with the historic facade, the next, she was screaming. Her body crumpled, hit by an unseen force, bones crushing under invisible weight.

Nearby people reported the searing, hot cracks of a whip and an equally hot, screaming voice, ‘GO CHINA BOY! GO! NOW!‘ The voice was described as ‘Beyond angry!’

The Sheriff’s report called it an ‘Accident,’ yet we all suspected something else. Something had awakened in Deadwood, something that had been waiting since the gold rush days. We had to be careful not to alarm the tourists since it was still tourist season.

Over the next few nights, a pattern developed. It was always at night and always started with that click-clack sound. Local hysteria had people seeing ghostly rickshaws with spirit riders and whips, there and gone in an eye blink.

Some said the temperature would suddenly drop, and a brutal voice would ping out, ‘GO CHINA BOY! GO! NOW!‘ The whip cracked until everything, rickshaw, rider, and whip, faded into the background. The people were calling him The Rickshaw Man.

Old Mr. Wong found more information from the Chinese Cultural Center and told us the story. Sam Shaw had been a failed prospector who blamed Chinese immigrants for his misfortune. In 1888, he snapped. He stole a rickshaw and forced its driver, a young man named Li Wei, to cart him around town while he committed his gruesome revenge.

He chopped up thirteen victims in total, all young Chinese women, children, and even babies, before the Chinese community took matters into their own hands.

They didn’t kill Shaw. Instead, they cursed him and left him tightly bound to the broken rickshaw inside that cold, hard-rock tomb. Ancient Chinese dark magic, Mr. Wong explained, bound Shaw’s spirit to Li Wei’s rickshaw, forcing him to serve as its master for eternity.

The tomb we’d found was meant to be Shaw’s prison, sealed with spells and sacrifices. Mr. Wong believed that Lusker got too physically close to Shaw’s tomb. He said their combined dark energies broke the seals. Lusker’s death paid for Sam Shaw’s freedom, whether by sacrifice or accident.

The very next day, there were more deaths, a tourist who’d been walking behind the Franklin Hotel, and a visiting history professor who’d been researching Chinese immigration in the Black Hills. Each victim was crushed, their bodies bearing the distinct marks of being run over. Before the week was over, there were four ‘accident’ victims; Sam Shaw wasn’t wasting any time, he was now up to 17 known murders.

The Sheriff’s Office tried everything, even paranormal remedies. Nothing worked. The click-clack and whip-cracking continued, and Shaw’s voice screeched out his twisted commands night after night. We were getting desperate.

It wasn’t until Mr. Wong discovered Li Wei’s descendants living in China that we found a potential solution. They sent an elderly woman named Zhi Kui. She came to Deadwood carrying a fierce mask of Zhong Kui, the Chinese God of Ghosts, and family relics from the victims. She was determined to end the curse once and for all.

The ritual took place in the early morning hours with very few people around. Zhi Kui chanted enticements in the street, wearing the large, fierce mask and clutching the family’s relics in her weathered hands. We waited. When the familiar sound began, click-clack, click-clack, she spoke in Mandarin, her voice growing stronger with each word.

The temperature plummeted. I saw the mask change its face and turn fire-red. The street lamps flickered and died. And then we saw it clearly for the first time, a ghostly rickshaw. Its wheels left traces of phosphorescent light glowing on the bricks. Shaw’s twisted spirit sat in the seat. One of his hands was fused into the carriage handle, the other hotly whipping an invisible runner.

Zhi Kui’s chanting reached a crescendo. The relics in her hands began to glow with an inner light, and suddenly the rickshaw stopped. Shaw’s spirit tried to flee, but the rickshaw would not release him.

With the intensity of a fierce lightning storm, a dark shadow over the bricks grew into a deep black rift. The rickshaw and its screaming spirit plunged into the void just as the shadow closed and vanished behind it. Everything stopped. It felt like we were in a vacuum of space and time; no noise, no wind, no one was even breathing, nothing but silent stillness.

Deadwood’s troubled past is deep. In this case, it only took two days for the next death!

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The next victim was a 65-year-old farmer visiting from Iowa. His broken body was found behind the Hickok Hotel. We had seen this kind of death before. It was ominous.

Mrs. Chen from the Dragon Wok was again the first to claim she heard something calling out a name late at night from the dark side of her building, ‘Lusker.’ Others reported strange cold spots and the smell of sulfur around Main Street.

By the time the second body appeared, a local poker dealer, there was no denying it; something was already stirring again in Deadwood. We wondered if Sam Shaw was riding again. The twisted dead bodies were the same, but the signs were different this time. There was sulfur in the air and a gritty name in the wind, ‘Lusker.’

Mild Bill Hickok called me again. His voice was tight and controlled. “Pete, you should get down here behind the Bullock.” Mild Bill might have been retired, but he knew everything that was going on at the Sheriff’s Office. “Someone with my name doesn’t simply retire,” he told me once. The people won’t let me.”

I grabbed my camera and rushed out, heart pounding. When I arrived, Mild Bill was standing in the center of Main Street.

“Something weird going on here…” he said, pointing to the street.

A trail of soot-black footprints stretched across the bricks. The black tracks appeared and disappeared as they wove back and forth through the street.

We picked up the trail again when our breath became visible in the sudden cold air. It eventually led us to the Mt Moriah Cemetery in Deadwood’s twin city, Lead, where the prints vanished among the gravestones.

Old Mr. Wong was surprisingly agile. We found him at the cemetery, moving between the tombstones and examining the weaving footprints. He told us that he had been trailing a wandering ghost and was suspicious that Lusker was involved.

Mr. Wong, with a sad-eyed expression on his heavily wrinkled face, said, “If it is him, he’s something worse than Shaw. He’s not bound to the rickshaw. He’s free to roam. He’s hunting. This is no longer just about Shaw. I think Lusker has joined him somehow.”

The air was gritty with dust, oppressive like something bad was watching us. The wind echoed a low, raspy laugh through the pine tree branches. We believed it was Lusker’s voice.

By then, there had already been five deaths in and around Deadwood and Lead. Each victim bore the same twisted limbs. The smell of sulfur was strong, and cold spots lingered long after the bodies had been removed. Lusker was building his tally.

The next morning, as I reviewed the photos I’d taken at the cemetery, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before. In some of the images, there was a faint shadow, a figure standing just at the edge of the frame. With some basic photo editing enhancements, it became clear. It was Lusker’s face, and he was watching and taunting us.

My blood ran cold. The photos were more than simple warnings. This madman was challenging us, and we should have expected it.

I sent the photos to Mild Bill. “I don’t think he’s picking victims. He’s just taking anyone he can get close enough to!” I was out of breath, “We have to stop him.”

Mild Bill agreed, “That Zhi Kui woman is still here, researching other Chinese history and ghosts. She might be our best chance.”

With much frenzy, we all gathered that night at the site of Lusker’s death. Old Mr. Wong was armed with the Chinese Cultural Center relics, and Zhi Kui was leading the chant. The large face mask was changing faces and grew redder, the same as last time.

The air grew fearfully thick with anticipation. This time, Mr. Wong and Zhi Kui chanted in Mandarin. Her voice rose and fell while the ground beneath us started to tremble like a minor earthquake.

Then Lusker appeared. His spirit was monstrous, tall and gaunt, with fire-red eyes. His mouth twisted into an open grin as he watched us. He didn’t speak, yet his name was in the air currents. His presence was heavy and suffocating. The air grew cold, and fiery shadows bounced off the street’s bricks, almost like living things.

Zhi Kui’s chanting grew louder, more urgent. The relics began to glow with a soft, golden light. Lusker howled, his voice a chorus of rage and anguish. He lunged toward us, but the light kept him back.

With a final word, Mr. Wong thrust the relics into the air. The light exploded outward, washing over Lusker’s spirit. For a moment, everything was still. Then with a final flare-up, Lusker vanished into the ether, his dark energy sucked back into the ground, under the street where it had all begun.

The air did feel lighter like maybe a great weight had been lifted. We stood in silence. The ground where Lusker had appeared was scorched black, and there was no sign of his spirit.

“Do you think it’s over?” I asked. It didn’t necessarily feel over.

Mild Bill nodded. “For now. But it’s still Deadwood, ask me tomorrow.”

Tourists still come to take selfies, and ghost tours tell watered-down versions of The Thirteen Candles and The Rickshaw Man. The tomb is again covered under infamous Deadwood’s Main Street bricks and no one talks of Vernon A. Lusker.

We know that Deadwood’s troubled past is not over. On the most tranquil of nights, if you press your ear to the oldest bricks on Main Street, you can still hear and even feel the scream. There is still more to come, still more to atone for.

In downtown Deadwood, we walk quickly at night, listening for echoes off the buildings and whispers on the wind. The dark past keeps circling like the ghostly rickshaw or lies nearby, buried in a cursed tomb, waiting for someone to break the wrong seal and expose the dark sins.

I still wonder if Lusker is truly gone. I see shadows where there are none. I think I’m being followed. I refuse to light red candles. I hope it’s only paranoia.

by Randy Peterson