Editor’s Note: This is the second in a three-part series. Jim Watson is the author of “Mysterious Island: Catalina,” available on Amazon, Kindle and in stores in Avalon.
“Goodbye God, I’m going to Bodie.”
—Early California settler
Leaving Las Vegas on Nevada State Route 95, the traveler is presented with either a desolate landscape or a beautiful one, depending on your point of view.
Editor’s Note: This is the second in a three-part series. Jim Watson is the author of “Mysterious Island: Catalina,” available on Amazon, Kindle and in stores in Avalon.
“Goodbye God, I’m going to Bodie.”
—Early California settler
Leaving Las Vegas on Nevada State Route 95, the traveler is presented with either a desolate landscape or a beautiful one, depending on your point of view.
The abrupt change from sparkling city to the vast, arid Great Basin is a startling one, especially for an island dweller such as myself.
That being said, however, there’s an interesting correlation between being in the open ocean and traveling in the open desert; a kinship in emptiness, if you will.
The town of Avalon and the dusty towns of the Nevada desert both share the common denominator of being tiny human settlements surrounded by an immense and inhospitable environment.
Along the way, remnants of the old Nevada still line the highway: abandoned and dilapidated motels and casinos from bygone years.
These edifices can still be seen next to mom-and-pop gas stations and Indian-run stores, blistering in the desert sun and populated with empty beer cans and tiny lizards that skitter in and out of their cinderblock kingdoms.
Due to circumstances beyond their control, these former gambling establishments have lost their lease on life and the desert is now foreclosing on them one tumbleweed at a time.
To the west of us lies Death Valley and the beginnings of the true High Sierra. Cutting over along Highway 6 to Highway 120 and back into California, I never pass up a chance to cut through this spectacular neck of the woods, particularly in the winter when the rugged, glaciated peaks live up to their nickname of the “poor man’s Canadian Rockies.”
There, just off legendary Highway 395, deep in the dry high desert near Mammoth, exists a legacy of the days of the Old West: the ghost town of Bodie.
Many a time have I driven on the main highway right by the turnoff sign that announces “Bodie, 14 Miles” promising myself that “next time” I’ll pay the poor old mining town a visit.
Well, this time I did and I was not disappointed.
Fourteen miles down a rough, dusty road (only the first few miles are paved) one first comes across this relic from a brutal era in our history.
Before the visitor lies a scattering of ancient weathered buildings and hovels riding out the western winds like moss clinging fast to river rock.
Like many a western town, Bodie was born, lived and died to the tune of pickaxe and shovel, streamer and crusher.
Gold was the calling here and at one time the town boasted a population of more than 10,000 souls.
True to the legends of the Old West, Bodie was that odd and uniquely American combination of pious missionaries and churchmen somehow coexisting with robbers, gunmen and assorted badmen the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the old days of piracy in the Caribbean.
In its heyday, murders in the town with its 60-plus saloons happened with near daily frequency. Church bells tolled the ages of the dear departed, and rarely did they toll more than about two dozen times per customer.
Today, only about 5 percent of the town remains.
Although tour guides for the California Department of Parks & Recreation live in the town today, the last bonafide residents of Bodie moved out in the 1920s.
When they left, it was as if they simply walked off into the desert, bringing nothing with them and leaving everything behind.
In one saloon, billiard balls and cue sticks still sit on a vintage billiard table.
Behind the bar, empty bottles still sit on the shelves, their contents long ago swallowed by the town’s last residents or evaporated into the desert air.
At the apothecary, vintage pharmaceutical bottles line the shelves and the pharmacist’s tools-of-the-trade still lay about, scattered on work benches and tables.
When I thought up the title for this week’s column, “The Ghosts of Bodie,” I was using the term “ghosts” mostly in a figurative sense.
But don’t think you’re going to get out of here without a handful of local tales involving literal ghosts.
Even the State of California’s official tourist booklet for the town admits that Bodie has “an occasional ghostly visitor.”
Debbie, a tour guide for the California Department of Parks and Recreation, has lived in Bodie for a number of years and regaled me with several chilling tales of encounters she and her fellow tour guides have had over the years, particularly in the cold winter months when snow has closed off the road and visitors are few and far between.
There’s the spirit of a Chinese woman that wanders the streets at night and Debbie remembers when two of her friends were hiking near the old abandoned mines one day hearing two men behind them discussing the mining trade only to turn around and see no one there.
The Moyle house on Main Street is a particularly “enchanted” locale and provided Debbie with an experience of her own.
“The tour guide that lived there before talked about hearing people whispering in the house when no one was there,” she said. That tour guide eventually left for the season and Debbie moved in for the winter.
“I’m in there cleaning at the end of the season,” she said, “and I go into one of the rooms and right in front of me is this shadow person.” Caught in the act of haunting, the apparition then abruptly flung itself out of one of the closed windows into the chill autumn air.
Prostitution, of course, was rampant back in the day and given the nature of untamed men and alcohol, the life expectancy of a prostitute was not much greater than that of a miner.
The old bordellos are rife with tales of the wandering spirits of young women and the sounds of their weeping.
Then there are the spectral gunslingers, one in particular.
No one is quite sure who he is, or was. After all, there were so many badmen who drifted through Bodie over the years that it’s tough to keep score. But this one at least has stayed.
Some say it’s a man named Tom Adams. Others theorize it might be another baddie named Washoe Pete.
Whoever he is, he shows himself on occasion, dressed in a long black coat and a wide-brimmed black hat, strutting through the streets of Bodie with a six-gun at his side and lever-action rifle in hand.
“You’ll see him walking down that street,” said Debbie, pointing down the town’s dusty main street. “He’s a long, tall drink of water with slicks and a leather hat.”
The ghosts of Bodie, both literal and figurative, come with the territory here. But I suppose nothing is more revealing about the ghostly nature of this lonely place than the fact—believe it or not—that the weathered, decrepit cemetery overlooking the town is equipped with a revolving door…
NEXT WEEK: TAHOE
