Happy Halloween

 

Bear Lake Monster

A Utah Ghost Story 

retold by

S. E. Schlosser

If you travel to Bear Lake in Utah on a quiet day, you just might catch a glimpse of the Bear Lake Monster. The monster looks like a huge brown snake and is nearly 90 feet long. It has ears that stick out from the side of its skinny head and a mouth big enough to eat a man. According to some, it has small legs and it kind of scurries when it ventures out on land. But in the water - watch out! It can swim faster than a horse can gallop - makes a mile a minute on a good day. Sometimes the monster likes to sneak up on unwary swimmers and blow water at them. The ones it doesn't carry off to eat, that is.

A feller I heard about spotted the monster early one evening as he was walking along the lake. He tried to shoot it with his rifle. The man was a crack shot, but not one of his bullets touched that monster. It scared the heck out of him and he high tailed it home faster than you can say Jack Robinson. Left his rifle behind him and claimed the monster ate it.

Sometimes, when the monster has been quiet for a while, people start saying it is gone for good. Some folks even dredge up that old tale that says how Pecos Bill heard about the Bear Lake monster and bet some cowpokes that he could wrestle that monster until it said uncle. According to them folks, the fight lasted for days and created a hurricane around Bear Lake. Finally, Bill flung that there monster over his shoulder and it flew so far it went plumb around the world and landed in Loch Ness, where it lives to this day.

Course, we know better than that. The Bear Lake Monster is just hibernating-like. Keep your eyes open at dusk and maybe you'll see it come out to feed. Just be careful swimming in the lake, or you might be its next meal!

 

No Trespassing

A Texas Scary Story retold by S.E. Schlosser

     Peggy and her boyfriend Tommy were driving down a lonely stretch of highway at dusk when a thunderstorm came crashing down on them. Tommy slowed the car and they crept their way past a formidable abandoned house. Plastered all over the fences and trees were no trespassing signs. A mile past the house, the car hydroplaned. Peggy screamed as the car slid off the road, plunging down into a gully. The car slammed into a large boulder, throwing Peggy violently into the door, before it came to a rest under a pecan tree. Her head banged against the window, and a stabbing pain shot through her shoulder and arm.      Tommy turned to her. “Are you all right? You’re bleeding!”      “Arm, shoulder.  Feel bad,” Peggy managed to gasp.     Tommy glanced cautiously at her right arm. “I think your arm is broken,” he said, and he tore a strip off his shirt and pressed it to the cut on her head.   “I’m going to call for help,” he said when it became obvious that the bleeding was not going to stop right away.  But neither of them had their cell phones.      “That house we just passed will have a phone I can use.” Tommy said.      Peggy’s eyes popped wide open at this statement. Despite her pain, she remembered the creepy abandoned house. “Stay here. A . . . car . . . will come,”       “I can’t stay, Peggy,” Tommy said, “It could take hours for another car to come, and you‘re losing too much blood.” He tore another strip of his shirt and placed it gently on the cut on her head.  Then he went out and retrieved a couple of blankets from the trunk to cover her with.  “I’ll be back as soon as I can.” He raced out into the storm, shutting the dented car door behind him.
     Peggy drifted in a kind of daze.  Something at the back of her mind was making her uneasy. She slid down on to the floor and put her head on the seat, completely covering herself with the blankets, head and all. Feeling safer, she allowed the weariness caused by the wounds to take over and fell asleep.
     Peggy wasn’t sure what woke her.  Had a beam of light shown briefly through the blanket?  Did she hear someone curse outside?  She strained eyes and ears, but heard nothing save the soft thudding of the rain, and no light shown through the blanket now.  If Tommy had arrived with the rescue squad, there surely would be noise and light and many voices.  But she heard nothing save the swish of the rain and an occasional thumping noise which she put down to the rubbing of the branches of the pecan tree in the wind.  The sound should have been comforting, but it was not.  Goosebumps crawled across her arms – even the broken one -- and she almost ceased breathing for some time as some deep part of her inner mind instructed her to freeze and not make a sound.        She did not know how long fear kept her immobile.  But suddenly the raw terror ceased, replaced by cold shivers of apprehension and a sick coil in her stomach that had nothing to do with her injuries.  Something terrible had happened, she thought wearily, fear adding yet more fatigue to her already wounded body.  Then she scolded herself for a ninny.  It was just her sore head making her imagine things.  Somewhat comforted by this thought, she dozed again, only vaguely aware of a new sound that had not been there before; a soft thud-thud sound as of something gently tapping the roof.  Thud-thud.  Pattering of the rain.  Thud-thud.  Silence. Sometimes she would almost waken and listen to it in a puzzled manner.  Thud-thud.  Patter of rain.  Thud-thud.  Had a branch dislodged from the tree?        Peggy wasn’t sure how long she’d been unconscious when she was awakened by a bright light blazing through the window of the car and the sound of male voices exclaiming in horror. A door was wrenched open, and someone crawled inside. She lifted her head and looked up at a young state policeman.
     “Miss, are you all right?” he asked and then turned over his shoulder to call for help. Peggy told the officers her story and begged them to look for Tommy. They deftly avoided answering her and instead called the paramedics.      As the paramedics carried her carefully up the slope of the incline, Peggy looked back at the car—and saw a grotesque figure hanging from a branch of the pecan tree.  For a moment, her brain couldn’t decipher what she was seeing in the bright lights of the police car parked at the side of the road.  Then she heard a thud-thud sound as the foot of the figure scraped the top of the totaled car, and she started screaming over and over in horror.  One of the police officers hastened to block her view and a paramedic fumbled for some valium to give her as her mind finally registered what she had seen.  Tommy’s mangled, dead body was hanging from the pecan tree just above the car, and nailed to the center of his chest was a No Trespassing sign.   

You can read more Texas ghost stories in Spooky Texas, by S.E. Schlosser.

Yancey's Ghost

A Yellowstone National Park Ghost Story 

Excerpted from Spooky Yellowstone

retold by S.E. Schlosser

Yancey was a quirky old-time pioneer, gold prospector and Civil War veteran —perhaps the last of that breed—who came to Yellowstone National Park in the 1870s and built a hotel in “Yancey’s Hole”;  current day Pleasant Valley near Roosevelt Lodge. The hotel provided accommodations and provisions to the stagecoach traveling back and forth between Mammoth Hot Springs and the mining camps in Cooke City. It boasted five bedrooms and could accommodate twenty guests. Rooms were $2 per day, $10 per week, and included meals. There was also a saloon handy for anyone wishing a splash of moonshine after dinner.

Folks around Yellowstone called him “Uncle John” Yancey.  He was popular with just about everybody in the park and its vicinity. Uncle John Yancey had important friends among the posh families back east, some of whom dropped by the hotel from time-to-time. Yancey knew all the good fishing holes and had plenty of tall tales to amuse people. He welcomed all and sundry with a libation of “Kentucky tea,” reputed to be the best whiskey in the park.

John F. Yancey was seventy-seven years when he traveled to Gardiner, Montana, to witness the dedication of the Roosevelt Arch by President Theodore Roosevelt on April 24, 1903. Yancey met President Roosevelt during the ceremony, but he caught a cold at the event and died of pneumonia a couple of weeks later. He was buried in the old Tinker’s Cemetery near Mammoth, and folks thought that was the last they’d ever see of Yancey.  But not so! 

It soon became apparent that Yancey’s had gone right back to the Pleasant Valley; and Yancey's ghost made himself at home in Roosevelt Lodge for the next 100 plus years. According to the park employees, Yancey’s ghost will bang a tin cup on the walls of the staff quarters at three a.m.  He hides things and makes them reappear in unexpected places.  Yancey’s ghost has also been known to unsaddle horse (especially those of pretty girl wranglers) at the end of a long day on the trail.  A trickster and a bit of a nuisance, Yancey's ghost is still as wild as the West he helped tame. 

A psychic has an unexpected vision into the past while riding horseback through Yancy's hole in S.E. Schlosser's Spooky Yellowstone. 

 

 

 "Used with permission of S.E. Schlosser and AmericanFolklore.net. Copyright 20__. All rights reserved."