Bannack and the Hotel Meade

Bannack began with a gold strike on Grasshopper Creek on July 28, 1862 – Montana’s first major discovery – and within months thousands of miners had crowded into the gulch. In 1864 it briefly served as the first capital of the new Montana Territory. It was also the stage for one of the West’s most argued-over episodes: Sheriff Henry Plummer, accused of secretly leading a gang of road agents, was hanged without trial by vigilantes at Bannack on January 10, 1864. Historians still debate whether Plummer was an outlaw chief or the victim of a vigilante campaign.

The town shrank as the gold gave out, but it never quite died. Its brick courthouse, built in 1875, lost its purpose when the Beaverhead County seat moved to Dillon in 1881; Dr. John Singleton Meade turned it into the Hotel Meade around 1890, and it opened and closed with the fortunes of the mines until the last residents drifted away in the 1940s. The state of Montana made Bannack a state park in 1954, and it became a National Historic Landmark in 1961. More than 50 weathered buildings still stand along Main Street, preserved rather than restored.

The town’s best-known ghost story is rooted in a documented tragedy. In August 1916, 16-year-old Dorothy Dunn went wading in a gold-dredge pond with her cousin Fern and a friend; the girls stepped off a submerged shelf into deep water, and although the other two were pulled out, Dorothy drowned. According to local tradition, her best friend Bertie Mathews, whose parents were running the Hotel Meade, later saw Dorothy upstairs in the hotel, recognizable by her long blue dress. Bertie is said to have rarely spoken of it.

Since the park opened, visitors – children especially – have described a girl in a blue dress on the hotel’s second floor or looking out of an upstairs window, along with cold spots and the sound of children crying. The stories are told on the park’s own Ghost Walk each October, which uses Bannack’s real residents and their history to frame the legends.

A teenage girl in a long blue dress seen upstairs in the Hotel Meade or at a second-floor window; cold spots, a child’s crying, doors that open by themselves, and figures of women in old-fashioned finery elsewhere in town – reported by visitors, often children.

The second floor and upstairs windows of the Hotel Meade, its staircase and lobby; other stories attach to houses along Main Street. Most reports come from daytime visitors and the October Ghost Walk.

Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks hosts an annual Ghost Walk each October, and Bannack Days on the third weekend of July brings living-history reenactors and a breakfast in the Hotel Meade. Bannack features in Ellen Baumler’s books on Montana ghosts and in countless “ghost towns of the West” lists.