Not Quite Alone: Haunted Sites of Death Valley
By Daniel Stallings, East Sierra Branch
With the bare bones of gold, silver, and borax mining camps scattered about the valley, you can feel this sense that you aren’t quite alone out here. Death Valley is filled with stories of restless spirits, lost souls, and bumps in the night. Some of these places still stand, and you can explore and discover their spooky secrets.
The Amargosa Opera House and Hotel, located in Death Valley Junction just east of Death Valley National Park, was once a theater built to entertain those who worked in the nearby borax mines. Though the mines are now silent, the opera house and hotel still run, thanks to the passion and hard work of dancer, artist, mime, and actress, Marta Becket. Her performances were legendary, but the performances of a more departed variety have also gained notoriety. Some claim a spectral cat had been known to interrupt the shows. Other tales center on mysterious sounds, scents, and shadows in several hotel rooms, the dining room, and an un-renovated portion of the hotel known as “Spooky Hollow.” The hotel is still open for guests to brave a night in its haunted hallways, and paranormal investigators flock to it.
If wilder terrain and wilder ghost stories are more in your wheelhouse, the ghost town of Skidoo lays claim to the spirit of accused murderer, Joe Simpson, who was famously lynched by the town and then re-lynched for late-arriving reporters in 1908. Or there’s the town of Rhyolite in Nevada, where, in 1907, a prospector claimed his camp had been dragged five hundred feet in the middle of the night away from a haunted desert oasis called “Tule Holes,” which for over three hundred years was the site of many unexplained and unusual events.
Though he writes in all genres from poetry to essays to fiction and nonfiction,
Daniel Stallings specializes in writing and producing interactive murder mysteries (https://mastermysteryproductions.wordpress.com/).
The next –the interactive murder musical Prima Donna –
will grace the Amargosa Opera House stage on
Saturdays 2 p.m., March 24, March 31, April 7, and April 14, 2018.
This article first ran in Volume 1, Number 1, Ridgecrest Death Valley Magazine, 2017.