Goodbye God, I'm Going to Bodie

Image courtesy of pixabay.com

Hello, and welcome back to Voices in the Attic for your latest—and last—dose of the creepy and abandoned. This time, it falls upon me to tell you the story of another ghost town—Bodie, California, one of the most incredible and well-preserved examples of an nineteenth-century American boom town.

Bodie began life in 1859 as a small mining camp just east of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, started by a group of prospectors including W.S Bodey from Poughkeepsie. It was allegedly Bodey who discovered gold there, but he died a few months later in a blizzard, long before the town was named after him.

It took another sixteen years or so before things started picking up in Bodie, which most historians attribute to the discovery of silver in Aurora and the discovery of the Comstock Lode in Virginia. However, by 1876 the discovery of a profitable gold deposit had transformed Bodie from an isolated camp to a growing mining town.

Three years later, Bodie’s population was anywhere between 5,000 to 7,000 people with facilities and an infrastructure to match. At its peak, Bodie boasted opium dens aplenty, breweries, hotels, four volunteer fire companies, railroads, schools, telegraph lines, a Taoist temple, a union hall, a busy red light district, a Wells Fargo bank, nine stamp mills, several daily newspapers and sixty-five saloons. It also had a large and thriving Chinese community, many of whom were employed supplying most of Bodie’s wood and coal. Newspapers at the time even recorded large Chinese New Years celebrations happening in Bodie each year.

Not surprisingly, jails and mortuaries were an absolute necessity because Bodie residents were killing each other in the street and committing crimes left, right and centre. In fact, the only thing the men of Bodie were exceptionally good at was getting violently drunk and shooting each other. It got so bad that Bodie earned itself a reputation for being lawless and depraved. Perhaps the most famous description was given in 1881 by the Reverend F.M Warrington, who described Bodie as “. . .a sea of sin, lashed by the tempests of lust and passion.”

Image courtesy of John Sullivan.

But eventually, the get-rich-quick prospectors moved on to greater things and families settled down while the mines were still operating at peak profitability. The relative peace and prosperity didn’t last for long though because, yes, you guessed it: the mines dried up and shut down. The Bodie boom was over, just twenty years after it started.

The city began haemorrhaging residents and money, a situation which was not at all helped by the two world wars and a massive fire in 1932 which destroyed ninety percent of Bodie’s buildings. By the 1940s Bodie was officially a ghost town, held in arrested decay the way its last residents left it. Now, Bodie is a popular tourist destination for those seeking to experience an authentic ‘Wild West’ town, but with that comes the threat of vandalism and theft.

Thankfully, park rangers came up with a preventative strategy that seemed to take on a life of its own. Rangers invented an urban legend to scare people off, or a faux curse if you will. The legend goes like this; If you take something from Bodie, you will be cursed with bad luck.

It could be a rock or the piano in the old gambling hall (which was actually stolen in the 60’s but returned.) Take anything, and expect bad things to befall you immediately. That’s all well and good. We love a good curse! But somehow, the curse became real. The rangers were soon receiving stolen items in the mail from tourists, begging for forgiveness after they took ‘souvenirs’ and began experiencing bad luck. Visitors describe sudden illnesses, car crashes, family deaths, all manner of ill-tidings, after leaving Bodie.

The following excerpt is from a letter sent to Bodie in 2002 by an anonymous sender:

"Fair warning for anyone that thinks this is just folklore — my life has never seen such turmoil. Please take my warning and do not remove even a speck of dust."

So, if you are thinking of going there, don’t take anything. Not just for your own sake, but for the sake of Bodie as well. The State Parks service also discourages tourists from testing the curse, as police reports must be filed each and every time they receive stolen artifacts in the mail. Much like the number one rule of camping: leave no trace.

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Natascha Wood

Natascha is a second year Professional Writing student and withered cemetery dweller, born in 1632, in Great Britain.

Halloween 2018 in Ottawa

To quote Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, “Ottawa is a depressing frigid shithole and always has been”. Subsequently, those of us who live here are saturated in gloom and despair from all those winters spent praying for the sweet release of death, just so we don’t have to shovel the driveway. But on the upside, Ottawa’s collective misery makes for a great Halloween season! And 2018 will be another killer, let me tell you.

So, whether you are looking for a few good scares, perhaps a thrill to break up the endless tedium, I, this blog’s resident vampire, will endeavour to pass along the good news. And of course, before I begin, it is important to note that all the following events are nocturnal-friendly. 

 THE HAUNTED WALK’S INCIDENT AT THE BUNKER: A ZOMBIE ADVENTURE!

Do you want to be trapped in an underground bunker while being chased by hordes of the undead this Halloween? Well, you are in luck. Now you can put all those years of practice running for the bus in five feet of snow to good use. The Incident at the Bunker will be running for three more nights, October 27th, 28th and November 3rd—so put it in your planner forthwith. Adult tickets are $26.75, and youth tickets (up to 17) are $23.75. Please gather your party at the Diefenbunker Guardhouse before your tour departs.

NATURE NOCTURNE AT THE CANADIAN MUSEUM OF NATURE

On the night of October 26th, the Canadian Museum of Nature invites you to a masquerade soiree in black. Guests can explore the museum after dark and mingle with the dinosaur skeletons from 8PM to midnight. Tickets are $25 and guests are to be 19 years of age or older; that means no younglings.

BILLINGS ESTATE HAUNTED HOUSE ON THE HILL

Built in 1827 by Braddish Billings, the Billings Estate is Ottawa’s oldest wood-framed house and the former home of four generations of the Billings family; including Elkanah Billings, Canada’s first palaeontologist, and Braddish Billings Jr., the architect responsible for designing the Trinity Anglican Church rectory on Bank Street. The Billings property also contains a cemetery, where many of Ottawa’s pioneers are interred.

Nowadays the estate is owned and maintained by the City of Ottawa as a museum for most of the year. However, on the nights of October 26th and 27th, the estate will become a haunted house. Advance tickets are sold out, but there are tickets sold for the final time slot (10:00PM) on a first-come-first-served basis, so don’t get there late, because this one is especially busy.

STITTSVILLE HAUNTED HERITAGE TOURS

You’ve probably heard of Ottawa’s Haunted Walk, but have you heard of Stittsville’s Haunted Heritage tours? Odds are you probably haven’t. And that is good news, because there’s nothing like a good ghost story that you have not heard before. The ninety-minute tours will be running until November 3rd, alternating between 7:00PM starts and 9:00PM starts. Tickets are $15. Book them quickly though, because they are selling out.

BEETLEJUICE: A CAPITAL POP-UP CINEMA PRODUCTION

On October 27th, Westboro Village and Capital Pop-Up Cinema will be hosting a screening of my personal favourite spooky classic, ‘Beetlejuice’. Hot cocoa, heating fans and cider will be available to keep movie-goers from sliding off the mortal coil mid-show, but everyone is encouraged to dress for the weather, which will inevitably be frigid and bitter. Showing begins at 7:00PM at 261 Richmond Road.

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Natascha Wood

Natascha is a second year Professional Writing student and withered cemetery dweller, born in 1632, in Great Britain.

Spirits in the Cotswold Hills

The city of Bath and its surrounding towns have been host to a wide array of different societies and peoples throughout history—Iron age Britons, Romans, Saxons and Georgians, among others. So, it’s not at all surprising that the area still bears their marks, in architecture or in stories of a more ghostly nature. And if you believe those stories, then you’ll find that most deceased residents have decided to stick around.

The first, and perhaps the most infamous of the stories around Bath, is the legend of Sally in the Woods. So the legend says, Sally was a little girl who was locked in Brown’s Folly, the tall tower standing alone in the woods, and she died there.  Since then, people have reported seeing the apparition of a girl in the roadway, which is pitch black at night without lamps or moonlight coming through the trees overhead. Cars often swerve to evade the phantom and crash into the dark forest. As such, the legend lives on and residents continue to avoid that road at night, for fear that Sally will emerge in their headlights.

Image by London Illustrated News. [Theatre Royal, 1888]

Another story, which has made the rounds in the past century, involves the Bath Theatre Royal on Sawclose, built in 1805, and still the most incredible work of Georgian architecture. I cannot personally attest to the accuracy of the following stories, as I did not see or feel or smell anything during my many visits as a child. However, others who have gone to see performances do experience some rather strange phenomena attributed to different spirits.

One of the spirits people report seeing is known to all as ‘the Grey Lady’. She sits in the top left box during shows, leaving behind the distinct smell of jasmine and a terrible depression that affects show-goers for days after. The Grey Lady is said to be an unnamed Victorian actress, who hung herself in the Garrick’s Head Pub next-door to the Theatre when she discovered her husband had murdered her lover.

Of course, we cannot speak about Bath without mentioning the outer towns. And this time, it’s Bradford-on-Avon, the quaint town built on a once thriving textile industry and the site of a few grizzly happenings. Where, in 1532, a local man was burned at the stake for heresy, now there is a zebra-crossing, or a crosswalk for those of you who are of a more North American persuasion. The road crossing is between a pharmacy and a charity shop. Residents and tourists pass over it daily, most without knowing what transpired there five hundred years ago.

Thomas Tropenell, the above mentioned Bradford resident, was arrested for denying the doctrine of transubstantiation—the belief that bread and wine given at the eucharist were quite literally the blood and body of Christ. For doing so, he was burned at the stake upon that very crossing. And sometimes it feels like the fires are still burning. People who cross the road often experience a sudden change in temperature, a sudden unexplainable heat on an otherwise cold winter day. Those who do feel it don’t know what to attribute the heat to, but author Jasper Bark theorizes that the execution of Thomas Tropenell left a permanent mark that can still be felt today.

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Natascha Wood

Natascha is a second year Professional Writing student and withered cemetery dweller, born in 1632, in Great Britain.