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 and 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 brutally killed three guards while escaping from prison.

     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 arrived just as they were setting up the floodlights. An hour earlier, a fissure had opened on Main Street at a spot where the old brick pavement still stretched between the historic saloon buildings. The bricks had collapsed inward like 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.

     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. Mild Bill had a way of finding the eerie and weird things.

     As standard procedure, 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, Mr. Wong, a very old, small, hunched-up Chinese historian who looked old enough to have actually been there, 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 1880’s, from 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 askew against the rock wall. A dilapidated skeleton was lashed into its seat, hollow eyes were staring forward.

     In front of the rickshaw was a small table that 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; 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.”

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

     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 said “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, 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! NOW!” The hot whip cracked until it all, 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 Chinese young 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 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 Shaw’s prison, sealed with spells and sacrifices. Mr Wong believed that Lusker got too physically close to Shaw’s tomb. Their combined dark energies, broke the seals. Whether by sacrifice or accident, Lusker’s death paid for Sam Shaw’s freedom.

     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, who was experienced with ghosts. 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 about. Zhi Kui chanted enticements in the middle of Main 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 started chanting in Mandarin, her voice growing stronger with each word.

     The temperature plummeted. I saw her mask change it’s 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 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 a fierce lightening storm, a dark shadow grew into a deep black rift, and the rickshaw, along with its open-eyed spirit, screamed and plunged into the void just as the shadow closed and vanished behind it. Everything seemed to come to a screeching halt. 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.

     No more click-clack, no more searing whip, and the harsh screaming voice was quieted. But Deadwood’s troubled past is deep. In this case, it only took two days for the next chapter to start!

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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, controlled. “Pete, you should get down here behind the Bullock.”

     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 from the Chinese Cultural Center was already at the cemetery examining the weaving foot prints when we arrived. He claimed that Lusker wasn’t just a wandering ghost, he was something worse. “He’s not bound to the rickshaw, he’s free to roam. He’s hunting. This is no longer just about Shaw. Lusker has joined him somehow.”

     The air was gritty with dust. It felt 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 were removed. Lusker was building his tally.

     The next morning, as I was reviewing the photos I’d taken at the cemetery, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before. In some of the photos, 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 mad man was challenging us. We should have expected this.

      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, I had to whisper, “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, armed with relics from the Chinese Cultural Center, and Zhi Kui leading the chant with the large face mask changing faces and growing 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 was rising and falling while the ground beneath us started to tremble like a minor earthquake.

     And Lusker appeared. His spirit was a monstrous thing, 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, 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 scream, 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, ghost tours tell watered-down versions of the Thirteen Candles & The Rickshaw Man. The tomb is again covered under Deadwood’s infamous 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.

      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 feel like I’m being followed. I never light red candles anymore. I hope it’s only paranoia.

by Randy Peterson