Her sister and brother-in-law arranged a wedding for her on the post. When the big day arrived, there was a short ceremony in the chapel; then everyone retired in the evening to the mess hall, which was decorated for a ball.
Outside a sudden thunderstorm rolled through nearby canyons, and sent rain splatting against the roof and walls of the mess hall. But inside all was festivity: there was good food, lots to drink, and loud laughter everywhere. A band was playing with more enthusiasm than tunefulness, but everyone was having a fine time. At the heart of everything was Elizabeth Bidwell, smiling and fanning herself and swirling her skirts of roseblush pink.
Suddenly, when the dance was at full swing, the outside doors of the hall slammed open with a bang, letting in a draught of air that made the candles gutter and burn low.
A bloodcurdling cry, neither human nor like any other bird or creature anyone could name, echoed through the common room, carried on the invading wind. All eyes turned to the open doorway. Framed by the doorposts was the body of a dead man, dressed in the stained uniform of a cavalry officer. Across his forehead was a gash left by a tomahawk. His eyes were wide open and burned with a fiery light.
As everyone retreated to the edges of the dance floor, the horrible apparition walked across the floor to the new bride, and pulled her from the arms of her husband. Like the rest of the company, she stood gaping, too shocked to move. The corpse led Elizabeth to the center of the floor; she moved as stiffly as a doll, her mouth working but no sound coming out. Suddenly the thing that had been Lieutenant Sutter clasped the young woman closely to him. Then he gave a signal to the musicians.
Afterward the shaken men protested that they did not know what they were doing. But at the corpse’s command, they began to play a waltz, so strange and haunting in its melody that some people burst into tears upon hearing it, while others pressed their hands to their ears to keep out the sound.
On the floor the couple whirled around and around and around. Elizabeth could not take her gaze from the dead lieutenant’s burning eyes, but she grew paler and paler. The musicians, possessed by some compulsion from beyond the grave, played faster and faster, until the music became so frantic that the spinning couple out on the floor became a blur of pink skirts and blue uniform.
Then the music slowed from a pace that no human could dance to, back to a waltz, and down to a dirge. The young woman hung limply in the corpse’s arms; her slack jaw and empty eyes showed that she was as dead as her partner.
Gently the dead man lowered her body to the floor. For a moment he stood staring down at her; then his eyes circled the horrified company. He threw back his head and gave the same fearful cry they had heard earlier. Then he turned and marched stiffly out into the driving wind and rain, while the doors of the mess hall slammed shut behind him.
When people could move again, Elizabeth’s bridegroom rushed to her side, but his efforts to revive her were futile.
The corpse had vanished into the storm that battered Fort Union for a day and a night.
Several days later a troop of soldiers which had been sent to the scene of the earlier battle located Frank Sutter’s body where it lay at the bottom of a small gulley, with a single tomahawk gash across the forehead.
He was returned to the post and buried beside Elizabeth Bidwell, in the little cemetery outside the fort.
The Ghost of Misery Hill
(United States—California)
There was once a miner, Tom Bowers, who worked a claim on Misery Hill, near Pike City, in California. Tom was a loner: he never liked having people around him, he only went into town when he needed supplies, and he never took a partner. “Nobody’s going to work my claim but me!” he told anyone who offered to buy into his claim.
During the winter he laid in supplies and kept to himself, while the snowdrifts piled up high around his cabin. People in Pike City always knew spring had arrived when Tom came down from Misery Hill to purchase a fresh batch of foodstuffs.
But one spring, long after the last traces of snow had melted, the inhabitants of Pike City noticed that Old Tom hadn’t turned up with his poke of gold dust to buy beans and salt pork, bread and coffee. After a good deal of discussion, a group of miners and townspeople rode off to investigate.
They found Tom’s cabin empty; the pot-bellied stove was stone cold, and some bits of fried bread had gone moldy in the big iron skillet on top of it. Clearly no one had been in the one-room shack for a long time.
Certain now that something had happened to the old miner, the men followed the path that ran from his cabin to the brink of the steep slope where he had done his prospecting. But they found the end of the trail had vanished— had been blotted out by a huge landslide.
Fearing the worst, they dug into the pile of earth and rock; and, after half a day of hard work, they found the old man’s body. Then, having solved the mystery and having nothing better to do with Tom’s remains, they buried him properly in a shallow grave not far from the mouth of his old mine shaft.
A few miners thought to work Tom’s mine on Misery Hill, but the story soon grew that the ghost of Tom Bowers was often seen prowling around, carrying his old pick, near his mine. Soon everybody avoided the spot.
There was one miner, Jim Brandon, who got himself so far into debt when his own claim ran out that he became desperate. He moved into Tom’s long-empty shack and began to work the abandoned mine. Soon enough he made it pay well enough to clear up his debts and accumulate a nest egg for himself.
But after several months, he began to notice signs that someone else was working his claim by night. Every morning he could see that somebody had tampered with the sluice—a long wooden trough he filled every day with freshly dug gravel. When water from a nearby stream was run down it, bars along the bottom of the sluice would catch any gold the gravel might hold.
Jim searched high and low for a clue to his midnight visitor but found nothing. Thinking some of the other miners might be playing a trick on him, he challenged them. But they all swore they knew nothing about it.
After this, things were quiet for a few days. Then one morning, Jim again found that someone had been loading the sluice with gravel and running water through it. When evening came, he loaded his rifle and, hiding himself in a nook from which he had a clear view of the claim site, he kept watch for the intruder.
For a long time he heard nothing but the wind whistling through the pines, and the Yuba River rushing over rocks nearby. He could see the distant ridges of the Sierras gleaming in the starlight, but though he strained his eyes, he saw nothing moving near the mine entrance.
Then, by the light of the newly risen moon, he saw a notice shining on a nearby tree trunk, as though someone had just tacked it into place. Curious, he walked over and found the odd sign was as easy to read as if it was glowing by itself, not just reflecting the light of the full moon. It said,
Notice!
I, Tom Bowers
Claim this ground
for placer mining.
Sure now that he was the victim of practical jokers, Jim grabbed for the paper to tear it down—only to feel an electric jolt run from his fingertips to his shoulder. His arm fell numbly at his side.
The notice vanished.
At the same time there came to his ears the sound of gravel being dumped into the sluice. A moment later he heard water gurgling into it, then the rattling and bumping of rocks being tumbled down the length of it.
Shaking his arm back into use, he angrily grabbed his gun and headed toward the sluice. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the message was glowing again on the tree trunk, but he ignored it. He heard the sound of a pick biting into gravel, now, and nothing mattered except finding out what was going on.
Leveling his rifle, he rounded an outcrop of rock and saw Tom Bowers, swinging his pick near the entrance to the mine. The miner turned to glare at Jim, and the frightened man saw at a glance that he was a ghost. Tom’s tall, skinny frame glowed just like the notice on the tree. His
head and face were half-covered, with lank, white hair; his eyes blazed from black sockets.
Scared nearly out of his wits, Jim raised his rifle to his shoulder and fired.
The gun’s report was followed by a bellow from Tom’s ghost. Looking through the rifle smoke, Jim saw the spectre charging at him, his pick raised in both his hands.
“Oh, Lordy!” cried Jim and, still clutching his rifle, he took off running, with the angry ghost only a few paces behind.
The living led the dead a wild chase up hill and down, into and out of woods, over streams and ditches, and through scrub, toward Pike City.
In town the miners were all gathered in the saloon, celebrating a new gold strike. Suddenly everyone froze when they heard an ear-splitting scream. Then there was a sound like a body falling, followed by the clang of metal hitting on metal—then silence.
Everyone tumbled outside to see what had happened.
In the middle of the road, they found Jim Brandon’s rifle pinned to the ground by the point of a pick sunk clean through the barrel. On the pick’s handle were carved the initials “T.B.”
No one ever saw Jim Brandon after that night. But for years afterward, miners working near Misery Hill reported the sluice at Tom Bowers’s claim ran every night, just like clockwork.
The Loup-Garou (The Werewolf)
(from French-Canadian folklore)
In the old time in Canada, people believed the werewolf, which they called the loup-garou, haunted graveyards and prowled the woods and waited in the brush beside lonely trails to catch unwary travelers and gobble them up.
There was an old couple living on a farm far out in the country. One wintry night Marthe took very ill, and her husband, Pierre, had to go to fetch the doctor in town. This meant a long, long journey through the woods. But Pierre was too worried about his wife to hesitate. He hitched up his horse to his sleigh and set out through the lightly falling snow.
As he went along, he could hear nothing except the scrunch, scrunch of snow under the sleigh’s runners and the horse’s hoofs. The old man wasn’t thinking of anything except getting help for Marthe as fast as he could.
They were now a long way into the woods. Moonlight shone on the snow, which lay thick on the ground and on branches of the pine trees all around. Sometimes from deep in the shadows would come the sharp report of an ice-heavy branch snapping and dropping to the ground. Once, Pierre heard an owl hooting. Except for these sounds, silence lay heavily over the forest.
The road ahead was level and easy enough for the horse. But suddenly the animal began to slow down. Pierre shook the reins and shouted, “Giddup!” but the horse was hardly moving at all now. It was as if he was pulling a two-ton load, rather than the little sleigh with its single passenger. The old man flicked his whip, but the horse merely shook its head and made a frightened little whinney. The poor animal was breathing rapidly, his warm breath making clouds like the steam from a steamboat’s chimney; sweat was running down his flank.
Now Pierre could feel some of the horse’s fear sinking into him. Then there was a low growl just behind him that stood his hair on end. Turning, he discovered what looked like a great big black dog or wolf, its teeth and the claws of its forepaws sunk into the back of the sleigh, its hindpaws dragging on the ground, bringing the sled nearly to a halt.
For one terrible moment Pierre stared directly into the creature’s burning yellow eyes. Then, almost without thinking, he cracked his whip across the monster’s snout. The wolf gave a howl of pain and loosened its hold on the sleigh for a moment. In that instant the horse lunged forward and ran as if all the devils from hell were in pursuit.
Looking over his shoulder, Pierre could see the shadowy creature bounding down the road close behind. The man knew that unless his guardian angel was riding with him that night, it was all over for him.
He didn’t need to urge the horse to go faster: the animal was so scared that he galloped like a hurricane. But for all that, the monster was getting closer.
And closer.
And—
The creature gave a tremendous leap and landed on the back of the sleigh. The thump of the impact and the sudden weight on the end of the sleigh sent it sliding first to one side of the road then the other. For a moment Pierre thought he was going to crash; but miraculously the sleigh kept upright on its runners and found the center of the road again. The horse, now crazy with fear, somehow managed to keep from falling in the icy road, often blocked with drifts of snow.
The wolf was growling as it crept toward the old man, who had turned to face the beast. Pierre tried using his whip again, but the monster caught it in his huge jaw, severing it as if it was no more than a twig and tossing it over the edge of the wildly careening sleigh.
Old Pierre felt for his hunting knife, and pulled it free, just as the wolf sprang at him and slammed the man to the bottom of the sleigh. His forepaws were on Pierre’s shoulders, pinning him to the floorboards; the man felt his bones were likely to break under the weight of the monster. For one terrible instant he felt the creature’s whiskers brush his face like needles, felt its hot breath on his throat, saw its yellow eyes only inches from his own—
Then, with a prayer, he jabbed at the thing with his hunting knife. Though his movement was hampered by the weight of the monster on top of him, he managed to nick it just enough to draw blood, so a spot of red appeared on its pelt.
Instantly the creature reared back, howling like nothing Pierre had ever heard before; then, to the old man’s astonishment, the wolf turned into a man. Right away, Pierre knew that this was, indeed, a loup-garou, because the stories say if you draw blood from the loup-garou, he’ll turn back to a man right off and run away.
Pressing his big, pale hand to his side, the man suddenly leapt off the sleigh. Pierre saw him rolling down a hillside through the snow, where the forest shadows quickly hid him.
Then the sleigh was out of the woods and heading toward the sleeping town ahead. Shaking, Pierre returned his knife to its holster and took hold of the reins, gradually easing the horse back to a trot, saying, “Easy, easy.”
When they reached the gate of the doctor’s house, Pierre quickly roused the man, who thought at first the old man was the one who was sick, because he was so pale and trembling. But when Pierre told what had happened, the doctor gave him a shot of whiskey. Then they roused the village priest, who gave them holy water and a cross as protection for their journey back through the woods.
Pierre never saw the loup-garou again. But Marthe, when she recovered, made him promise never to travel through the woods alone at night again, and the old man was only too happy to give her his word that he never would.
The Golem
(based on Jewish folklore)
There was a rich merchant who lived in a city in Eastern Europe in the sixteenth century. He had heard of the golem, a manlike creature fashioned out of clay that Rabbi Elijah of Chelm and Rabbi Yehuda Loew of Prague had created to serve them. Desiring such a servant for himself, the merchant went to his friend the rabbi, who was a wise man. The good rabbi had studied the magical books of the Kabbala and had discovered many secrets that had been hidden from men’s eyes since the beginning of time.
And the most wonderful—and terrible—thing he discovered was how to create a golem. After much persuading, the merchant got the rabbi to agree to bring such a creature to life. The rich man fashioned the likeness of a man out of yellow clay his servants fetched up from the river-bank. He lovingly shaped the hands and feet and head, and carefully sculpted a human face. Then the rabbi said magic formulas from the Book of Creation over the figure, walked around it seven times, and wrote the Hebrew word Emet, which means “Truth,” on the creature’s forehead.
Instantly the clay body turned red as fire, and the creature came to life. Hair sprouted on its head, and nails appeared on its fingers and toes. It climbed clumsily to its feet and stood watching the two men. The rabbi stood for a long time looking at his handiwork and stroking
his beard. At last, without saying a word, he left the rich man’s house.
The merchant was delighted to have the perfect servant, who would never tire, needed nothing to eat or drink, would require no pay—and could not even complain, because the power that had brought him to life did not give him the power of speech. He ordered the golem to draw water from the well and sweep the courtyard. Silently the clay man went about his tasks.
And for a time he proved an admirable servant. But each day the golem grew a little bit taller and broader, and slower to take the merchant’s orders.
Still he was a tireless worker. And when he had grown bigger, the rich man sent him to carry goods to nearby towns and fetch back items the merchant needed for his own business, which prospered. Soon he became the richest man in the city.
When he walked out in the afternoon, the golem trudged silently behind him, to frighten off robbers who might come for his gold or shoo away beggars who also wanted some of his money. No one, looking at the tall, hulking guard of red clay would dream of making the merchant angry.
And still the golem grew a little bit more each day; and each day, the merchant saw in the creature’s eyes something that made him uncomfortable, though he could not give it a name.
He asked his friend the rabbi about this, but the old scholar merely shrugged and said, “I can bring the clay to life; I can tell you how to destroy it; more I cannot say.”
“I will never destroy my servant,” said the merchant, “I am a man of real position now. People tremble when they see me coming; they make way when they hear my servant’s footstep on the street.”
Soon the golem was nearly twice the height and bulk of a man. In the evening, when the merchant sat at his table, being waited on by the clay figure, he would sometimes grow oddly uneasy as the creature shuffled back and forth to the kitchen. The glow from the fireplace would sometimes light his servant’s face in such a way that the thing seemed to watch him with a look of anger. At such moments he was glad that his friend the rabbi had not been able to give the golem the power of speech.
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