You don't have to be dead to be buried.

Louise and the Professor were in Flagstaff yesterday and we got a private showing of the latest petroglyph photography of an artist friend who used to live in Jerome. He hadn't seen our "Spirits of Jerome" DVD, so of course we had to ask if he had ever had any experiences. Oh yes. He had heard the Tommy Knockers on the lower hogback and seen a ghost cat in the Flatiron building, but he told of one particularly interesting encounter. While walking to work one very foggy morning, a figure that looked like a disheveled derelict stepped out of the mist. They exchanged nods, then the figure spoke. "You don't have to be dead to be buried" and disappeared into the mist again.

Our friend thought it an odd comment, but didn't understand what it meant until later. Turns out there was a ten fold miscalculation of dynamite for a mine explosion in about 1935, that caused the "Sliding Jail" to begin it's journey, and fractured the now missing buildings in Jerome beyond repair. The sad story our friend heard was that 78 miners were buried alive that day, and some didn't survive. No, you don't have to be dead to buried.

Ghost City DVD

“The Spirits of Arizona live on Cleopatra Hill”

Liner notes from "Spirits of Jerome - Ghost City Hauntings"

Copyright 2005, George C. Hall

Perched like a raven more than a mile high, the white “J” on Cleopatra Hill overlooks the Verde Valley. The “Laughing Mountain” known as Cleopatra Hill looks down on the town of Jerome and its inhabitants, and must sometimes wonder why it was named a hill rather than a mountain, and why all this fuss over a bunch of rocks in its bosom.

“Ghost City” is a moniker used to refer to all the human energy that has been spent on the side of a mountain for more than a century. No matter what the role in life was, from building God-loving churches to entertaining miners in brothels, once released from the human body, all that spiritual energy had to go somewhere, and much of it remains in Jerome evermore.

Edgar Allan Poe would have had a field day with the tortured souls - wrongful deaths, from suicides to mining accidents to murders in the street, yet the ghostly spirits in Jerome include the kindest and most caring as well, just as they were in real life but now in a different form.

Ghosts pretty much have saved Jerome from oblivion. Had it not been for the efforts of the Jerome Historical Society in the 1950’s to preserve their town by promoting it as the “World’s Largest Ghost Town”, there would have been many homeless Ghosts and not many buildings left twenty years later. That was when another generation moved in and changed the direction from a tired mining town to that of an artist community. Love ‘em, hate ‘em, don’t believe in ‘em - it doesn’t matter. Jerome is a story of Arizona, and Ghosts are an integral part.

As an Arizona native born in Tucson in 1950, the author has paid considerable attention to historical facts as well as to how Arizona has promoted itself to the rest of the world. Were it not for 30 seconds of violence at the OK Corral plus a clever slogan “The Town Too Tough to Die”, Tombstone might well have been forgotten. So, what can one do for the Ghosts who saved Jerome?

I say make a DVD video, not as a Hollywood sensationalist project, but one that simply tells the true stories of genuine Jerome residents who live and breathe Ghost stories every day. It is not just a matter of telling the tourists what they want to hear. There is some real substance here based on historical fact and the repeated experiences of sceptical, well-grounded observers.

So, do you believe in Ghosts? Probably. Do you want to see one? Probably not. Jerome nowadays is much more than the product of a sordid past. The million dollar view, the food, the lodging, and the inspired artwork, make it a most special place - a truly unique representation of the remarkable State of Arizona.

This DVD video project came about because the participants love Jerome. We all gave our time and stories because we believe our Ghosts want their stories told. This is the true story of the Spirits of Jerome and how we deal with them as everyday occurances in the Ghost City. This is a uniquely Arizona story, locally produced, dealing with a delicate subject in a respectful manner.

Fatal Blizzard of 1930

The 2007 New Year brought some interesting ghostly activity in Jerome. The first weekend there were no less than 8 separate incidents reported to the front desk of the Jerome Grand Hotel, and all occured in different parts of the building. This was an all time weekend record for one of the most concentrated areas of ghostly activity in Jerome.

Note; The author played the role of Claude Harvey in “Spirits of Jerome – Ghost City Hauntings”. Claude was found dead in the elevator shaft of the building under suspicious circumstances in 1935.

One of the most chilling - literally - experiences happened to Professor Hall and Dave Johnson, the co-producer of "Spirits of Jerome", on the anniversary of the fatal blizzard of 1930. The story begins with a 16mm home movie made by Harry Amster on January 11, 1930, of his trip to retrieve a stranded car on Mingus Mountain. This all took place on 89-A, which is the famous curvy mountain roadover Mingus Mountain from Jerome to Prescott, that all the bikers love. In 1930, there had been a terrific snowstorm all across Arizona and with several feet on the road to Jerome, the town was entirely cut off. There were several vehicles stuck on the mountain, including a freight truck full of supplies that the town desperatly needed. The freight truck belonged to the company that Tim Kirkpatrick and Dave King worked for, and they went out in a pickup to break through and get the supplies for Jerome. Harry Amster made a 16mm movie of his new Chevrolet 6 cylinder sedan that day, as well as shots of Kirkpatrick and King helping other motorists. The Amster party returned to Jerome thinking that Kirkpatrick and King were fine, and could at least make it to the road camp at the summit. The newspaper tells what happened. The movie shows two men on their way to their deaths.

Fast forward 77 years. Jerome was in the middle of another winter cold snap, but this time without the blizzard snow. Armed with meticulously detailed newpaper articles, Dave Johnson and myself decided to document the exact places on 89-A that Kirkpatrick and King slipped off the road in their pickup, and where they perished on the 11th or 12th of January, 1930. With the wind chill around zero, we didn't plan any elaborate ceremony and certainly did not make our pilgrimage thinking we would discover any ghosts. Our first stop was to video the place where Kirkpatrick and King lost control of their pickup, and as if by magic, a modern snowplow appeared perfectly on cue. I managed to play "Amazing Grace" on the trombone in the cold, before we beat a hasty retreat to our 4x4 to look for the spots where the two men died. What a welcome sight a snow plow would have been 77 years earlier!

The body of Kirkpatrick was discovered two miles further down the road, where suffering from the delusions of hypothermia, he had taken off his coat and overalls. Dave doffed his cap and I again played the trombone, and we noted the increasing cold and wind as we proceeded toward the 7,726 summit of Mingus Mountain.

At the exact spot where Dave King lost his life, there is a narrow pull off on 89-A with rock work that has all the signs of being a WPA project from the 1930's. The pull off is a quarter mile from the summit where the road camp was in 1930.After the tragedy, the Highway Department put in emergency telephone call boxes, so the event had quite an impact and the rock pull off might well have been some sort of memorial, but there is no sign or plaque.

Dave set up the camera again and we started to repeat our "Amazing Grace" routine. This time something special happened. A large white object suddnly blew around the camera position just as I started playing the trombone. It hovered and flapped supernaturally before flying in front of the lens as I finished. The timing was so perfect that Dave and I thought it had ruined our shot when we realized what the white object was. Not an orb or glowing light... but somehow a large white plastic bag had found it's way up Mingus Mountain to the exact spot where a poor man had frozen to death, on exactly the anniversary, and at the precise moment the sad event was being documented. In and of itself, a plastic bag in the wind cannot be claimed to be an apparition, but given the set of circumstances our white plastic bag appeared, it may well be an example of psycho-kinesis rather than coincidence.

When you live in the World's Largest Ghost Town, you learn that "Ghosts" and "Spirits" are really just different forms of humanity with feelings and emotions like the rest of us. Read the poem "Phantasmagoria" by Lewis Carrol for a humanzing look at Ghosts and an understanding of the hierarchy that governs the hauntings of buildings.

Dave and I weren't out looking for a ghostly experience that cold January morning, but to respectfully document a tragedy, the beginnings of which had been captured on film 3/4 of a century earlier. Tim Kirkpatrick and Dave King were just saying "Thanks for remembering".