The Rickshaw Man

I was there and saw 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 sensational news! This madman had gruesomely murdered his whole family and later killed two guards while escaping from prison. A news story worthy of the infamous side of old Deadwood!

     My friend, 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 2AM.

     “Pete?” he asked.

     I had considered not answering his call, and leaving the comfort of my bed was an even bigger struggle, except for the way he quickly whispered, “You might want to come see this.”

     I was thrilled to get the exclusive photos and storyline, but then 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.

     An hour earlier, a fissure had opened on Main Street where the old brick pavement from the early 1900s still stretched between the historic saloon buildings. The bricks had collapsed inward like something below had been pulling them down. There wasn’t even any dust around the ragged, oblong hole.

     I arrived just as they were setting up the floodlights. 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 expression of either great pain or great laughter. From above it looked like he was laughing.

     As standard prodcedure, the Search & Rescue team went down first. Once the body was removed and the ground searched, we were allowed access. The tunnel stretched back maybe 10 feet before reaching a rock face covered with ominous-looking Chinese characters painted in red. Later, a local Chinese historian arrived and translated the symbols. “DO NOT OPEN.” The warning was painted in several different places.

     But 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 1880’s, from when the Chinese workers built and used tunnels to service Deadwood’s saloons and hotels.

     Inside the tomb sat a rickshaw with a dilapidated skeleton lashed into its seat! The rickshaw’s wooden axle was broken and the wheels lay askew against the rock wall. In front of the rickshaw was a small table that held thirteen tall, 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 had stopped, when the candlelight went out inside the tomb.

     But it was a painting on the rock wall above the little table that made my skin crawl; painted 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 in the rickshaw ever saw.

     The Chinese characters beneath the grisly painting told the story of Samuel Shaw, a 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.”

     Deadwood has a way of keeping its darkest secrets alive.

     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, and the hot cracking of a whip. She described a screaming, angry voice that echoed between the buildings walls; “GO CHINA BOY! GO! TO THE CEMETERY ON THE HILL! NOW!”

     Nobody believed her until 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 as if hit by an invisible force, bones crushing under wheels no one could see. Nearby people reported the searing cracks of a hot whip and an equally hot, screaming voice that vibrated off the surroundings with savageness, “GO CHINA BOY! GO! TO THE CEMETERY ON THE HILL! NOW!” The whip cruelly cracked. The voice was described as ‘beyond angry!’

     The sheriff’s report said “Accident,” but 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, not yet anyway, it was Tourist Season.

     Over the next few nights, a pattern developed. It was always at night and it 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! TO THE CEMETERY ON THE HILL! NOW!” The whip hotly cracked until it all, rickshaw, rider and whip, faded into the background. The people were calling him The Rickshaw Man.

     Old Mr. Wong from the Chinese Cultural Center found more information and told us the story. Sam Shaw had been a failed prospector who blamed Chinese immigrants for his misfortune. In 1888, he snapped, stealing a rickshaw and forcing its driver, a young man named Li Wei, to cart him around town while he committed his vengeful and gruesome murders. He chopped up thirteen victims in total, all Chinese young women, children and even babies, before the community took matters into their own hands.

     They didn’t directly kill Shaw, they cursed him and left him tightly lashed to the broken rickshaw, inside that pitch-black, 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 his prison, sealed with spells and sacrifices, but Lusker apparently got too physically close to Shaw’s tomb, and their combined dark energies, broke the seals. Lusker had unwittingly paid the price of Sam Shaw’s freedom.

     There were more deaths. Two tourists who’d been walking behind the Silverado, 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. With the latest four victims, Sam Shaw was now up to 17 known murders, not counting Lusker.

     The Sheriff’s Office tried everything, including paranormal remedies. Nothing worked. The click-clack and whip-cracking continued and Shaw’s voice kept screeching out his twisted commands night after night.

     It wasn’t until we discovered Li Wei’s descendants living in China that we found a solution. His great-great-granddaughter, an elderly woman named Zhi Kui, came to Deadwood carrying her ancestor’s family relics and a determination to end the curse once and for all.

     The ritual took place in the early morning hours with very few people about. Zhi Kui chanted enticements in the middle of Main Street wearing a large, fierce mask and clutching the family relics in her weathered hands. We waited. When the familiar sound began, click-clack, click-clack, she started chanting in Mandarin, her voice growing stronger with each word.

     The temperature plummeted. The street lamps flickered and died. And then we saw it clearly for the first time; a ghostly rickshaw, its wheels leaving 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 an oncoming train, a dark shadow grew in the street, opening into a black rift, and the rickshaw, along with its open-eyed spirit, plunged into the void just as the shadow closed and vanished behind it.

     The reports of Shaw stopped after that night. No more click-clack, no more searing whip and no more harsh screaming voice. For now, Deadwood has added another ghost story to its collection, another dark chapter in its history of gold and blood and revenge. Tourists still come to take selfies, ghost tours tell watered-down versions of the Thirteen Candles, and life goes on.

     For those of us who were there in the tomb, who heard the click-clack and saw what happened to Miss Patel and the others, we know the truth. If we should happen to walk over the brick streets at night, we walk quickly and quietly, keeping an ear out for ominous sounds.

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

     Deadwood’s dark past never really dies. It just keeps circling, like that ghostly rickshaw, waiting for someone to break the wrong seal or crack open the wrong tomb and expose the dark sins.

     Gold carries grievances forever.

by Randy Peterson