Hometown Ghost Stories
Having grown up in one of Nevada’s many acclaimed Ghost Towns, I have been in the middle of some pretty weird goings on. From phantom trains to ghostly apparitions we have seen just about everything out here. In mining towns as old as this one we’re bound to be caught up in the often tragic and messy past.
I remember hearing stories when I was younger of immigrant workers getting stuck in a collapsed mine shaft, where they subsequently died because the boss thought a rescue operation would waste time and money. How they are now seen walking in a loop to the work that had been closed so long ago. Or the many large and strange creatures that have been seen lurking in our forest, the ones that supposedly take off with small children and animals when you're not careful.
Whether these stories I grew up with are true or not, I know that I’ve collected a few of my own over the years. Telling them has always been something fun for me so I figured why not grace the internet with these improbable happenings?
I suppose kicking off this miniseries I might as well start with one of my scariest stories. What I’m about to recount probably belongs on some reddit no-sleep forum and will have several nay-sayers pointing out the faults, but since this happened it has never left my mind. I can’t explain logically why it or how it had happened but several of my peers have reported similar situations without prompting.
It was the summer of my sophomore year in high school, my girlfriend at the time and I had been sitting in the old baseball park watching the stars. For the sake of privacy we’ll call her Cait. It was the best place in the whole town to stargaze because it was always like a little dome of darkness. We were laying there on that dead grass completely silent until I thought I heard something. I brush it off as someone near the park talking since sound travels strangely in the area until I heard it again, only this time a lot clearer.
It sounded just like Cait's mother calling for her from the old dilapidated bleachers that weren’t that far away from where we were laying vulnerable on the ground. The problem with this was that her mother was in the other town, a 20 minute drive from where we had been. The woman didn’t have a driver’s license and there was very little chance that she had gotten a ride so late at night. I start to stand up and urge her to do the same.
We bickered back and forth as I tried to convince her that we needed to leave until what ever was trying to lure us in had taken the voice of my stepmother, calling out to us from no more than fifteen feet away. It had sounded almost angry I remember. This time Cait had heard it too and we started running towards the gates on the opposite side of the park. The whole time I was telling her to not look back as we heard footsteps on the dry grass behind us. We didn’t stop running until we made it into the doors of my home which had been a good three blocks away all up hill.
We both told my stepmother what had happened, and asked her if she had been yelling for us from the porch. If she had done it loud enough we would have certainly heard her, though she most likely wouldn’t have sounded so close. She told us she hadn’t been, was inside the whole time we had been gone, and I got chills. Ever since that night I’ve steered clear of the ballpark at night. This wasn’t the last time I had heard someone’s voice being mimicked, but it was definitely one of the scariest.
