BLASTS FROM THE PAST

Terror down below

Mines have often suffered horrific disasters and many became haunted places. In 1901, an American engineer pointed out that of all elevator accidents each year very few resulted from the breaking of cables or brakes. The victims stepped into the shaft, thinking they saw the elevator car. This was plaguing the mining regions of Colorado. It began in one of the deep silver mines of Leadville. A miner had stepped into a shaft where there was no cage. Before he died, he told the doctor that he ‘saw’ the cage in the shaft. This started an epidemic of similar accidents in mines out West. “I have talked to old miners and they said they dread nothing more than the ‘ghost of the cage’.” 1

Tales like this hindered the exploitation of American mines, chemist and mining expert John Finn Jr pointed out in 1936. He had just returned from an investigation of 30 mines in the Western states and had found that each one had a ghost legend. 2

Other mine disasters gave birth to new tales. When a terrible explosion took 200 lives in the Winter Quarter Mine in Utah in 1899, miners soon concluded that it was haunted. Strange and unusual noises were heard at times; others had seen a headless man walking about, and even climbing into a coal car and riding with the driver to the mouth of the tunnel – where he disappeared. Mysterious lights were seen in the graveyard where many victims of the explosion were buried. “These lights are always followed by a death…” 3

In 1889, a mine near Barnesville, Ohio, was plagued by the sudden appearance of a ‘dazzling star’. “The other day two of the miners were out in the main entry of the mine… when a bright ball of fire, in the shape of a star, suddenly appeared before them. In a moment the star became intensely brilliant and fairly dazzled their eyes. Now it swayed back and forth, up and down, with great rapidity.” The star-like light played hide-andseek, going inside the mine for a distance of about 300 yards, to disappear and suddenly reappear behind the startled miners. This went on for some time. When a cave-in followed, the light was seen as an omen. 4

When disaster struck the Courrières mine in France in 1906, a journalist from the

Petit Parisien investigated miners’ lives and their stories. He found that although the miners in the Loire basin were the least superstitious, they still believed that there were places in the mine they were forbidden to enter, “based on a compact with the Earth”.

Miners refused to work after “the figure of a woman bearing a lamp had been seen in the workings and the screams of a woman heard...”

The reporter was also told about sudden appearances of victims of earlier disasters and of mysterious hammering sounds emerging from deserted galleries. It was remembered that Emile Zola already recorded, in his novel Germinal, the belief held by many miners in the Northern basin in a ‘black man’, a mysterious inhabitant of the mine, and of how every explosion was announced by strange portents; white bats would suddenly appear or white specks would fill the air. 5

Miners also often complained of hearing unusual sounds. In 1871, miners working in the pit at Cwmnantddu colliery at Abersychan, near Pontypool, Wales, had become so terrified by subterranean noises and stories of extraordinary ‘sights’ that the mining company was forced to conduct an inquiry: natural causes, it concluded, and the doings of a prankster, a man named John Harvey, who was brought before court. 6

In 1890, the newspapers mentioned a remarkable story in connection with an explosion at the Morfa colliery in Wales that killed 87 people. Weeks before the disaster, there was talk among the miners of inexplicable noises and shouts, “spirits and noises and slamming of doors”. Miners returning to the surface told of being accompanied by an invisible presence. Such was the atmosphere of supernatural fear and foreboding that a number of miners were said to have stayed away from work in the days before the explosion. 7 Twelve years later, some 300 miners refused to work at Glyncorrwg colliery near Port Talbot in Wales, because “the figure of a woman bearing a lighted lamp had been seen in the workings and the screams of a woman heard”. 8

The weird sounds in the Refugio mine in the Cluspa mountains, 60 miles southwest of Alpine, Texas, may hold the record. A hundred feet (30m) down in the mine, Henry Body reported that “a noise like the bursting of a thousand cannons sounded in my ears and was followed by the most terrific rush of air… I was lifted from my feet and thrown against the rock walls of the shaft with such force that I was badly bruised and almost knocked senseless…” When he dug a new shaft, it delivered the same results: “The noises became so pronounced that the workmen refused to go on with it, and the whole project was abandoned”. Entering the old shaft, all was quiet at first. Then “the phenomena suddenly broke forth in all their fury”. The men were hurled with great force several feet and thrown repeatedly against the rock walls of the shaft. They reached the surface bruised and with their clothing torn. Boyd gave up, describing the mine as “an inferno occupied by hellish spirits”. 9

A year later, strange poltergeist effects began to plague a mine in Sonoma, California. When one man went down the shaft he suddenly felt he was not alone. “He turned around and for a moment as he peered into the darkness, lessened only by his miner’s lamp, he could see nothing; but gradually his eyes beheld a man of enormous stature.” Eventually, the mine was abandoned. 10 Sometimes the appearances were more gruesome. In 1887 a “bent, crushed figure” was seen deep in the bowels of the Brazil mine in Indiana, shambling “amidst the subterranean chambers”. 11

Similar anomalies were often seen as portents of doom. An old miner, for instance, refused to work because he had heard “the measured tolling of the church bell” deep down in the mine: “He was laughed at, but persisted in going home, and subsequent events proved his good fortune in so doing, for before night the entire gallery caved in...” 12

Vengeful spirits haunted the pits as well. In an old mine, a miner had met his death under a heavy fall of earth while his companion remained unhurt. One day, the light flickered out. In the darkness the companion suddenly called out the name of the dead miner and then a terrible cry was heard. When the lamp was relit, they found him dead at the bottom of a shaft. “Orders were at once given to wall up the fatal chamber, and now its existence is unknown to miners working in the colliery.” 13

Even stranger manifestations occur deep below the surface. One day in 1895, Patrick Shea, Victor Dougherty and Thomas Durkin entered a Germantown mine as they had been doing for the last 30 years. Then things got weird: “…an apparition suddenly appeared on the gangway. The opening was transformed into a fairyland and forms flitted about. The dark recesses were illuminated, spirits manifested themselves and the ‘black diamonds’ shone brilliantly. Cars were moved by invisible hands and doors were swung open.” Villagers remembered the old legend that the Germantown mine had been haunted since a cave-in caused the deaths of 13 members of one family. 14

Something similar occurred as recently as 1963. Miners David Fellin and Henry Throne were entombed in Sheppton mine in Pennsylvania. It took two weeks to dig them out. Throne said that during their ordeal they saw “lights, figures of people and a door”. Fellin maintained it was no hallucination: “We saw what we saw. These things happened. I can’t explain them… on the fourth or fifth day we saw this door although we had no light from above or from our helmets. The door was covered in bright blue light. It was very clear, better than sunlight. Two men, ordinary looking men, not miners, opened the door. We could see beautiful marble steps on the other side.” 15

But perhaps the most malevolent of all American mine monsters is the terrible ladder dwarf, a hunchbacked creature with a short body, large head and enormously long and powerful arms. “In fact, he resembles an exaggerated gorilla. His favourite trick is climbing the ladders by means of which the miners leave the mines, raising himself with his long arms, and, as he passes the rungs, kicking them out one by one. He is supposed to always do this just before an accident of some kind.” The mines of Mexico suffered a similar demonic pest. Miners entered the shafts by means of tree trunks with notches for the big toe of the miners to take a brief rest. “The demon in such places was believed to have on each big toe a huge nail or claw, with which he would gouge out the pieces on which the feet of the miners rested. 16 In Germany, the mines were haunted by two supernatural creatures called Kobold and Nickel. Nickel was not so bad, but if Kobold held a grudge against a miner, he would “drag him about by the nose or the hair or even throw him down a ladder or crush him beneath a downfall of rock”. 17

The most incredible tale of a mine haunting is that of the centaur roaming the Chickasaw coalmines in 1913. With a sepulchral voice it commanded the miners to drop their tools and go. “According to the men, the upper half of the spectre was like the body of an emaciated man, while the lower half resembled the hind quarters of a horse.” In one hand it held an object from which streamed shafts of light. 18