BEAR PAW MEANDERINGS

I don’t know but I think that I started to collect ghost stories when I was very young. My fear of the dead and the collecting stories about them came about in several very natural ways as I look back and think about my jaded past.

When my great grandmother died I must have been about 6 or 7. Not only did I have to go to her funeral but my mother said I should lean over the coffin and kiss great grandmother good-bye. I stayed awake nights thinking of how I would get through that horrible experience. So, I must have had some bad feelings about the dead even back then. Well, the day of the funeral came and I leaned over the coffin with mother lifting up and there was this crone face, not anything like I knew great grandmother to look. I leaned over and kissed her cheek and was never the same since.

Then just a few years later my friends and I would go to the Lyric Theater where you could get a double feature, serial and cartoon for fourteen cents. Usually one of the features would be a very scary vampire type story or something like that. I will never forget Vincent Price and “The Phantom of the Rue Morgue.” That one scared me so much that I thought there were undead things all the way home lurking behind every tree. It did not help that the shortest way to get home was to go by the funeral home. If I was alone I would go four blocks out of my way just not to have to pass by that place of the undead as I began to think of it. Besides it just looked haunted. Ever notice?

Out on Clear Creek there were always ghost stories. One family, Dan, Jim and Veronica Murphy lived at the top of Hungry Hollow and had Murphy Butte named after them. They had a large Irish history and knew that there were little people running around Hungry Hollow. They told stories that were not really scary but morbid to say the least. One of their better stories concerned a man who died late one fall, and the ground was frozen so they could not bury him. The undertakers laid him out in his best suit and tie and put him in an inexpensive coffin in his back porch. They told his widow and children that they would come back that next spring and bury the man.

The next spring they came back and looked at the remains of the man one last time before burying him. He lay naked in his coffin and they noticed that the young kids all had new clothes made from the clothes that he was buried in.

When I went to work in Glacier National Park driving a Red Bus, I found there were no organized ghost stories concerning the grand hotels of that park and yet Many Glacier, the Belton Chalets and the Prince of Wales especially had many stories. I took it upon myself to write those stories down and published them in our Driver’s Manual. One year a lady from Billings asked me if she could use some of those stories and she wrote a book about Ghosts in Glacier National Park using a lot of my stories.

And so every Halloween for years and years I have been writing about ghosts and things that go bump in the night.

It has been fun.

But do I really believe?

You bet I do!