Ellen Baumler's Blog, page 46

Grandstreet’s Ghost

Happy Halloween!

Helena’s Grandstreet Theatre began in 1901 as the Unitarian Church. Unitarians were a progressive group who believed churches should serve the community, so the building doubled as a public auditorium and theatre. Reverend Stanton Hodgin and his wife Clara arrived as a team in 1903. Clara was a former kindergarten teacher, full of energy and eager to work with Helena children. Fiercely devoted to her small charges, Clara was adored by the children and she loved to direct them...

Deer Lodge Prison

The historic prison at Deer Lodge served Montana from 1870 during territorial days until 1979. Today it is a museum, but over the course of more than a century, thousands of prisoners lost their identities within its walls. Some horrific events occurred there. One took place on March 8, 1908, when George Rock and W. A. Hayes attacked Warden Frank Conley and his chief deputy, James Robinson, in an attempted escape. Conley shot both Rock and Hayes, hitting Rock in the head and Hayes twice, once...

Friday Photo: Speculator Mine

Happy weekend! It's going to be a busy one for me. I'm signing books at Barnes and Noble in Bozeman on Saturday, and that evening I'm leading a ghost tour in Nevada City starting at 6:30. Get in touch with the Montana Heritage Commission if you'd like to join me. In the mean time, here's a stark stereograph of Butte and another ghost story:

There was always work in the mines at Butte. In fact, there was such demand for miners that immigrants who spoke no English, upon arriv...

Finger in the Door

A house in Helena’s southeast neighborhood was long home to Annabelle Richards and her family. Annabelle loved the spirits that lived there, but others were not so tolerant. When the Richards moved to Washington, D.C., for a period of years, a series of tenants lived in the house.



Annabelle never learned exactly what the spirits did to frighten her tenants. Long after Annabelle moved out of the house, however, one of them related this incident. A mother and her five-year-old daughter briefly l...

Sedman House

Montana legislator Charles Bovey’s placed some eighty endangered structures from across Montana at Nevada City. Now under state ownership, Nevada City is a good place for ghost hunting. The diverse pasts of its buildings raise myriad possibilities. The Sedman House is one of those special places where old energy seems to linger. Sometimes in the mornings when employees open the house for tourists, they find the bedding rumpled in an upstairs bedroom and furniture moved. Paranormal invest...

Friday Photo: Boulder Hot Springs

One dark evening a few years ago a group assembled on the stairway of the unused wing at the historic Boulder Hot Springs Hotel. There were a dozen adult students, led by Patrick Marsolek of Helena, who wanted to practice their intuitive skills. None of the participants knew the history of the hot springs, which stretched back to the mid-nineteenth century.

A postcard view of Boulder Hot Springs in the 1940s.
From the collection of Kennon Baird via Helena As She WasThe property manager al...

Flathead Monster

I’ll be telling spooky stories at the Belgrade Public Library tomorrow (Thursday, October 18)  at 6:30. The program is a Humanities Montana sponsored event and is free and open to the public. Hope to see you there!

Captain James Kerr, piloting the U.S. Grant on Flathead Lake in 1889, made the first recorded sighting of a mysterious creature in Flathead Lake. He and his passengers saw a 20-foot object swimming in the steamboat’s path. Passengers panicked. One man fired at it and mi...

Mine Spooks

Waino Nyland came to Butte as a child from Finland in the early 1900s. He remembered that the first disaster his family experienced occurred when a lever broke on a hoisting engine as a cage was taking four men down into the mines. The cage fell twenty-two hundred feet, killing the riders. The bodies of the four men, one of them Nyland’s next-door neighbor, came out of the wreckage in pieces. The men’s spirits, according to Nyland, still haunt the mine. If you look down the shaft when the tim...

Friday Photo: Spirit Cat

William Chessman built the Original Governor’s Mansion in Helena as a family home in 1887.  From 1913 to 1959, it served as the home of Montana’s governors.  By 1959, however, the mansion’s elegance had faded. Dark and shuttered, the old mansion sat quiet and empty. For several years during the 1960s, before it became a house museum, the city hired a caretaker who lived at the mansion. She was surprised at the number of visitors who rang the doorbell. She would often answer the door...

Nevada City Hotel

Spirits wander in the Nevada City Hotel. The 1860s front portion was a stage stop, its log walls disassembled and rebuilt where the original Nevada City Hotel once stood. A two-story employees’ dormitory, circa 1912, from the Canyon Hotel at Yellowstone Park form the hotel rooms. Guests have related odd incidents, but the most dramatic event happened in February 2001.  A Global Stage production crew filmed a scene of Henry Ibsen's Enemy of the People in the Nevada City Hotel’s saloon. Th...