Ghost Town - Classic

Some tragedies, famine, disease, fire

are so immense that families, sometimes whole communities,

they leave hoping to make a better start somewhere else.

And to the untrained eye, it can look as if they just vanished without a trace.

But almost every time,

they leave something very important

behind.

You're listening to Spooked.

Stay tuned.

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Here in glittering Los Angeles, In booming Silicon Valley, in the hectic San Francisco Bay,

if you just stay on California's four-lane highways, our eight-lane expressways, it is very easy to forget that all of this is built on something.

And something is not that far away.

If you pull off the highway, turn away from the road signs.

pointing toward the latest tourist attraction.

Instead, go over that hill.

You don't even have to go that far.

See, we think of this place as crowded, as bustling,

but so much of our landscape is barren,

silent.

Even today,

you can follow dirt roads to abandoned towns where every single person has fled

or been consumed.

Snap Justin's underground lair, my name is Gwen Washington.

Know this.

All ground is hallowed ground.

Spook starts

now.

Travelers came to California in search of their fortune.

Very few of them found it.

And out in the foothills of California's gold country, some miners have discovered the old-timers.

They never really left.

Here's producer Adiza Egan.

Shannon Poe is a professional gold miner.

About 10 years ago, he traded his suit and tie for some hiking boots and decided to make his living outdoors as a full-time miner.

You know, having lunch in the outdoors with squirrels and fish and deer is a heck of a lot better than sitting in Starbucks in my opinion.

Shannon mines right outside Yosemite National Park in an area called the South Motherload.

I would drive down this really steep canyon in my four-wheel drive.

There was nobody within probably eight miles as the crow flies from me everything either stings you sticks you or bites you it's real rugged it's real remote and it's absolutely the most beautiful country on earth

this is the same gold country that the old-time miners flocked to during the gold rush in the 1850s

It took a very, very special type of person that was tough as nails.

I mean, you're talking about hanging off the side of a cliff, tunneling into a rock while they slept on the ground.

But Shannon's pretty tough, too.

He's fallen out of trees, had stare-downs with cougars, even dodged bullets.

He's the kind of guy who's not afraid to go to work each day at the bottom of a canyon all by himself.

But then, one afternoon, when Shannon was down there all alone,

something unusual happened.

I was running a small piece of equipment that was running a little water pump about the size of a lawnmower engine.

That's the volume of noise that it was making.

And finally, I shut the motor off and decided to have lunch.

And it's all by myself.

And I'm sitting on a rock, you know, just looking around at all the trees and the, you know, a little bit of water flowing and things like that.

And I kept hearing

it, it sounded to me like a cafeteria, like using real dishes, because it was the sound of like china, you know, porcelain dishes or things of that nature.

I kept hearing clinking.

You could hear muffled voices.

It was like a bunch of people talking, but you couldn't make out anything that they were saying.

You know, I'm looking around and I know, well, heck, I'm down in the bottom of this canyon.

There's nobody near me, and I certainly know that there's no restaurant or a cafeteria down here.

Over the course of about a month,

I probably

want to say maybe a dozen times I would hear it, and it was always be when I would shut down at lunch.

And a few times I had heard what sounded to me like a banjo or some type of a musical instrument.

It would last for,

you know, maybe a couple of minutes, and then it would just fade away.

It didn't bother me.

I just, I found it kind of unusual.

And then I would just go back to work, and I wouldn't think about it.

Then I took my wife down there.

We're digging away,

and we're sitting there.

First time I've ever taken her down there, and she's like, do you hear that?

And I said,

well, yeah, I've kind of been hearing that all along.

And she goes, it sounds like dishes clinking.

And I said, well, you know, you'll hear music.

And sure enough, she heard the same thing.

That evening, Shannon and his wife packed up their rock picks and their chest waders.

They got into Shannon's truck and drove along the steep cliffs towards the top of the canyon.

But they couldn't stop thinking about the sounds and music they had heard.

They were confused where it came from.

So on their way up the canyon, they stopped at a little ramshackle cabin to visit their friend Al.

He was the caretaker of a little cabin down there and he was, you know, kind of an old, soft-spoken, slow-talking, kind of lanky guy with a, you know, handlebar mustache.

Al moved to the South Motherlode in 1959.

Whenever Shannon had a question about the area, Al was his go-to.

Al didn't eat breakfast.

He didn't eat lunch.

He started drinking beer at noon.

And he would eat about a two to three pound tri-tip for dinner every single night.

I've never seen anything like it.

You know, he would drink so much beer during the day that he would literally pass out at about seven o'clock at night.

So you had about a three or four hour window that you could get a lot of information out of Al.

And so my wife said, hey, Al, we keep hearing all these voices and this music and these dishes clinking down there near the mine shaft.

And Al, you know, in his little southern drawled voice, well, yeah, that's just the old timers down there.

You know, you'll still hear them.

In the 1850s, miners from all over the world poured into gold country.

They came by the thousands, men from Hawaii, Mexico, Sweden, China.

From France and Belgium and Australia, I mean, all across the world.

And they all had the same dream to win nature's lottery or even just a piece of it.

But most of the miners didn't make it very far.

People were always getting injured or dying in mining accidents.

They had no safety procedures or anything like that.

So they would go into these mine shafts and they were using real dynamite.

You know, you drop it or something, and it can just go off and it instantly kills you.

Thousands of men never even made it out of the mines.

And I've heard of what they call Tommy Knockers, and that is the old-time miners.

It's what the mining community says that there's residual ghosts of miners that work in mine shafts.

They call them Tommy Knockers because you hear rock picks on walls from ghosts.

I kind of laughed at it, you know, because I thought it was really unusual.

He basically told her, you know, you just kind of leave them alone and they'll leave you alone.

You could say this was Shannon's first warning.

But he's not the kind of guy who listens to warnings from the other side.

A couple Tommy knockers weren't going to keep him out of the mines.

So he didn't give much thought to it until the fire.

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In the end of July, we had a big fire sweep through there.

It burned off about 85,000 acres.

You know, we've hiked every mountain, ridge, canyon, creek, gully, and everything else within 20 miles.

And we knew that there were other mines out there, but we could never find them.

After the fire burned through all the underbrush, Shannon would look out beyond the ridge and see mine after mine for the next two miles.

The first few jutting out the walls of the steep cliffs, each one a potential new claim that would bring them closer to the motherload.

He zeroed in on one, about a mile away.

It's literally hanging off the side of one of those cliffs up there.

And we could see what looked like some big old-time cast iron equipment.

Shannon figured this expedition would be just just like all the others, so he planned a quick scouting trip.

I was real excited to go in there and so

I called another buddy of mine and

his wife and they came out with me.

It was a real struggle to even get down there wearing the backpacks and then you cross a creek and a ravine and then you have to hike through all these rocks.

And

there's, I mean, there's not really a trail, so you're kind of just blazing your own way.

The mine shaft kind of hangs on the side of a mountain, and the area around it has been burned, and so the trees are black, and they have no leaves or anything like that.

It just kind of looks like skeletons, and then there's just this gaping black hole mouth that's just kind of peering out of the side of the hill and it's got this orange little gooze, oozy kind of gooey stuff flowing out of it.

It's just kind of uninviting.

Shannon, his friend Kathy, and her husband cautiously hiked their way down the cliff.

and into the load mine.

It was about knee-deep in literally goopy clay, just brown, baby-pooped-style mud, and you could feel that there were orcart tracks, like train tracks, underneath your foot, but then you'd try to step in the middle and you'd just smoosh all this old wood stuff.

It was really weird because I've been in literally hundreds of load mines

in my lifetime, and I've never

I've never been scared of anything.

Something was what didn't feel right, and I couldn't explain it.

We went in about probably 800 feet.

We wound around a couple of corners, and so it was pitch dark.

You couldn't see the opening at all.

You couldn't hear anything.

I had my movie camera because we do YouTube videos of mining.

And we kept filming, and then eventually we left.

At that point, you knew something was kind of like unexplainable, right?

So

what made you go back?

I was

more interested in

the gold than the ghosts.

There's a mine that is really close by there that was extremely well known for high-grade ore, visible veins of gold the width of your finger, jewelry-quality gold, the stuff, it's stuff of dreams.

Not only did he decide to go back, he brought his friends and made a weekend out of it.

And so we decided all eight of us were going to go down there.

We loaded up backpacks.

And even though Shannon didn't believe in ghosts or Tommy knockers, he was still amused by the whole thing.

I had taken in additional cameras this time because if there was noises and stuff in there and it was somebody playing pranks or whatever, then damn it, I was going to find out and I was going to expose it.

So, the weekend of New Year's Eve, Shannon and his friends hiked down the three-quarter-mile cliff and crossed the ravine to the area with the black trees that looked like skeletons.

Once they reached the mine shaft, they all geared up with cameras, rock picks, and headlamps, unsure of what to expect as they walked in.

So, we're in,

and it sounded to me like there was

if you're a load miner, there's an unmistakable sound of a rock pick on solid rock that we all know.

And I look, and there's Kathy and Joe are standing next to me.

I know nobody else is in the mine.

Moments later,

there was another sound.

This one,

much, much louder.

It sounded to me like an earthquake was starting to happen, where you have this deep,

deep, deep, guttural, kind of rolling sound deep in the earth.

It was coming from farther inside the mine.

I'm holding the camera, you know, kind of up facing them up by my shoulder.

And we're looking at each other with this puzzled look on our face, like, you know, I don't know if it's an earthquake.

Do I need to just turn and bolt and knock these people down and fight for my life to get out of the damn thing

kathy's like oh god we got to get out of here and it kept getting louder and louder and louder and louder

the sound came down the mine shaft went between us and then out towards the entrance beyond us we stopped there

Today, we're going to go back into this mine and we're going to set up a couple of cameras inside.

This is the video from the cameras Shannon placed in the mine.

You can hear them splashing through the mud as they walk into the mine.

It's dark and mysteriously foggy.

The only light is coming from their headlamps.

Did you hear that?

Yes.

What the hell was that?

This is when he heard that deep rumble coming from inside the cave.

The one one that sounded like an ore cart.

What the was that?

Sounded like a cart on the track.

It did!

It sounded like carts running on the track.

Oh, I hope the camera picked that up.

And then

there's the devil growl.

It's about 11 minutes in.

Shannon says he didn't hear it when he was actually in the mine.

He only heard it after, when he got home and started watching the video.

The playback is brief, but when Shannon remembers how he felt in that foggy mine with whatever was making that sound, it still scares him to this day.

And it literally gave me chills.

I've heard cougars, I've heard bears growl at me, I've heard a lot of different animals that you know can take a human's life, but this I knew was not an animal.

It raised the hair on the back of my neck, and I don't very often get scared, but that actually terrified me.

I don't know if it's a bad omen or are they trying to tell people to get out or they do they have bad intentions?

I don't know how well that stuff works.

So it's best in my opinion to just not deal with it anymore.

Just avoid it.

Just let it just let it be.

I'm a gold miner.

That's what I do.

And we found a mine that has really good gold in it.

and I'm not going in that mine for a reason and it has nothing to do with the safety or the integrity of the mine shaft.

It has to do with the crap that I can't explain that's going on in there that is keeping me out.

It just gives me the impression of evil.

When I first spoke to Shannon about the ghost mine, he said he would never go back.

It wasn't worth it.

Not for all the gold in the world.

But now

he's changed his mind.

I've had, I can't even tell you how many people have asked me to take them in there, and I resisted for a very, very long time.

I'm supposed to be this big, tough, rugged miner, so I kind of feel obligated.

So is it fair to say, like, you're going, but you're a little reluctant.

Yeah, I'm I'm reluctant to go in there.

But, you know, I'm gonna do it.

And if they want to go in, then that's fine.

And then after everybody goes in, then I don't have to take them in again, do I?

Big thanks to Shannon Poe.

We can't wait to hear what happens when you go back into that mine.

We're just glad we don't have to make the descent with you.

Now, when the spook returns, you already know not to go into that old place on the outside of town.

You know this.

You know this.

Well,

Ginny,

she missed a memo.

Spook.

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So, Ginny and her husband had just moved to LA.

Ginny's mom, she came for a visit, and they all decided it would be a good idea.

A really good idea to just check out that big old Spanish mission chapel right on the outside of town.

A really good idea.

Spooked.

It's actually called the San Fernando Valley Mission.

When you walk through the gate, there was a big field of green grass, and then that plaza was surrounded by smaller white buildings, but in the far corner of the plaza was this little chapel from the 16th century.

In front of it was a sort of mosaic tile fountain.

It was very hot, and my mom saw this fountain across the grass plaza.

And she just starts tromping across the grass, and she's like, Oh, thank goodness, a fountain.

I need to get some, I need to splash some of that water on me.

And then my husband at the time went with her, and they're laughing and just walking across.

And that's when this feeling came over me of total humility, like they're being really loud and disrespectful.

And that's why I

went after my mom and said, Mom, you have to stop making that noise.

You have to stop splashing that water on you.

We're being completely disrespectful to this space.

And she was just like, whatever.

There's nobody around.

You're making too big a deal out of this.

And I insisted, and she said, well, why don't you go take a look then?

And that's when I walked over to the wooden doors.

And

there was like a little foyer, and then just the blackness in that space between the actual chapel and the wooden gates was the darkest space I've ever seen.

So I stepped into the chapel, into that darkness, and

there were curtains.

The anteroom anteroom was divided from the chapel with big, heavy curtains.

And I opened them,

and sure enough, there were rows and rows of dark wooden pews.

The floor was all this sort of rough terracotta tile.

The walls were painted white.

There was a statue of Christ on the cross at the front of the chapel.

And in the pews, there were rows and rows of people praying in these heavy brown sort of woolen cloaks.

They were male figures.

I couldn't see anybody's actual face or features because they were fully clad in these woolen cloaks.

There were probably

two dozen of them.

And they were just lined up in these wooden pews, and they were sort of bent over, and I knew that they were praying.

And it felt like, oh my gosh, what have I interrupted?

And I could still hear my mom very faintly outside and

being in between that sort of somber moment and still hearing the frivolity outside,

I just felt horrible.

My heart just dropped into my stomach.

I sort of felt like I couldn't move for a minute, just sort of taking this all in.

And then I turned around and I went back through the curtains and then back through the wooden doors.

And

I said, Mom, that chapel is full of people praying.

You have to stop now.

We have to leave.

And again, she laughed and she said, Yeah, right, Jenny, the joke is over.

And I was completely serious about it.

And that is when she made the decision to go look for herself.

She was in the chapel probably for 10 seconds.

And And she came back out with a look on her face like, Good one, Jenny.

And that's when I decided to go back in there.

When I stepped back into the chapel, the first thing I noticed was that the curtains were different.

They were velvet now.

Before they had been like a heavy sort of wool burlap sort of fabric.

And the inside of the chapel had changed 100%.

Now it was light and bright in there.

The walls were painted turquoise.

The terracotta tile was gone.

It was now carpeted with sort of that red, really flat industrial carpet that they put in churches sometimes.

The pews had all been replaced with these sort of shiny, glossy, light wood pews.

The atmosphere was as different as the interior.

It was light and airy, and

felt joyful.

And most amazingly, at the very front of the chapel, there was a woman standing on a ladder putting up decorations for a wedding.

And she just looked over at me like

she'd never seen me before.

And she said, Come on in, honey.

And

when when I stepped back out again, my husband said, you look like you're going to be sick.

And I kind of felt like I could not understand what had just happened.

And I literally was shaking.

I just stood there, you know, and saying, I don't know what I just saw.

I don't know what I just saw.

And

at this point, my mom had already started walking toward the gift shop.

The closest thing I can liken it to is the first time I felt an earthquake.

Like,

I can't believe that something that I so strongly knew to be true my whole life or knew to be solid my whole life is now shaken.

How had that entire space changed in 20 seconds?

Thank you, Ginny Prang Baran, for scaring the heck out of us.

Now, Ginny is a spook listener, and let me tell you, we love listener stories here at the Spook.

If you have a terrifying tale to tell,

be sure to drop us a line at spookpodcast.org.

Know this.

However the forces of darkness try to stop us, no matter the barriers or psychic turmoil thrown into our path, be afraid.

Spook was produced by Mark Ristich, Anna Sussman, Elijah Smith, Adiza Egan.

The original Spook theme song was by Pat Messini Miller and you can download it yourself right now at spookpodcast.org Leon Morimoto created the soundscape for both of the stories that you've heard and additional audio support was by Renzo Gorio.

A finer team of musicians you will never find.

And understand

as you travel down the dark road, as you wander the untraveled path, and even as they tempt you, coerce you, go so far as to threaten you and everyone that you love.

Hold fast,

hold fast

to never,

ever,

never, never, ever, never, ever

turn out

the lights.