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...