Black Hills Ghost Stories

I don't particularly like Halloween. Even when I was an enthusiastic teen, tipping toilets throughout the ranch country around my home town wasn't to my liking. I was more the bobbing for apples in a dimly lit basement sort of girl.

The toilet thing always bothered me as my dad had such a terrible time keeping ours upright. He finally got so sick of the yearly ordeal that he dug four deep post holes on each corner of it, put in sturdy wooden posts and wired the structure to each of them. I was in highschool and it was the talk of the town to my chagrin. He put an end to the November 1st ordeal. A cousin bought the property and not very many years ago, I noticed that the outhouse was still standing.

In this morning's Rapid City Journal Online, Heidi Bell Grease writes about Black Hills Hauntings. I took a class called Ghost Towns and Gold Mines of the Northern Hills and our instructor told us the story of Red Water Hill. Bell Grease writes "...Another story goes that on the second floor of the Bodega, also a former brothel, a prostitute was killed by a customer. Some say they’ve heard her decapitated head rolling down the stairs from the second floor."

He Who Must Be Obeyed and I had an interesting occurrence in the mid '60's while we were living in Nemo, which is about halfway between Rapid City and Deadwood.

We had gone into Deadwood to pick up groceries one evening and stopped in to the Bodega on our way home. We were the only people there. It was beginning to snow and we weren't going to be there very long. The barmaid, an elderly woman, was talkative and friendly. She felt very sorry for the old pimp who lived upstairs as he was old, ill and lonely. I didn't know at the time that prostitution was still going strong until 1982 when the city fathers finally shut the trade down.

After she reminisced about old times for a little while, she asked us if we would like to look at the tunnel in the basement. She locked the door, led us down the brick stairway into the basement. Apparently all the businesses on that side of the street were connected by a brick tunnel with an arched roof from building to building. She said some businesses had cemented the thoroughfare to prevent theft as the access to one another's buildings were so free. Actually the reason for the tunnel was to provide access to the Chinese opium dens in days of old.