Brunckow’s Cabin

Years before Tombstone existed, a German-born mining engineer named Frederick Brunckow staked a silver claim in the hills above the San Pedro River in southern Arizona. According to Wikipedia’s account, he was born in 1830, trained as a mining engineer, emigrated in 1850 and by 1858 was developing his own mine about eight miles from the future town, where he built a supply store and a small adobe sleeping cabin. Arizona Highways, which describes the cabin as standing on a barren hill off the Charleston Road, dates the house to about 1857.

In July 1860 Brunckow and two of his men were killed. The sources agree on the outline: a worker named William Williams returned from a trip for flour and found the camp ransacked, and soldiers from Fort Buchanan later found the bodies. Brunckow lay in or near the mine shaft. Beyond that the accounts differ. Wikipedia names the other dead as James Williams and the chemist John Morse, and says the laborers who vanished with the livestock were never caught. Arizona Highways names Williams and John C. Moss, says eleven laborers were responsible, and says nine suspects were captured in Mexico, where the governor of Sonora promised to have them shot if convicted. That the two accounts cannot be reconciled is itself a useful warning about how loosely the story has been repeated.

The cabin kept attracting violence. According to Wikipedia, Milton B. Duffield, the first U.S. Marshal of Arizona Territory, was shot dead there on 5 June 1874 in a dispute over ownership; Arizona Highways says the shooter, Holmes, claimed self-defence and was sentenced to three years for manslaughter; Wikipedia says he escaped before serving any of it. By 1881 the Prescott newspaper the Arizona Democrat, as summarized by Wikipedia, counted seventeen more deaths, described graves lying thickly around the adobe, and said prospectors avoided the place because they believed the dead wandered there by moonlight. Arizona Highways credits the same 1881 report to Patrick Hamilton and quotes a total of twenty-one killed.

The ghost stories are therefore as old as the town. A Tombstone newspaper in 1897 reported a figure that vanished when approached and mining sounds, such as drilling and sawing, from the shaft. In the 1960s the writer Nell Murbarger recorded a woman’s account of hearing singing in the air, and in summer 1965 Tombstone Epitaph editor Wayne Winters camped at the ruin hoping to see something; he reported only a rattlesnake curled beside his bedroll. Today only foundations and low wall sections survive, damaged by theft, vandalism and weather.

Newspaper-era reports of wandering spirits and a vanishing figure, phantom mining sounds from the shaft, and a witness’s account of singing in the air. No named witness has described an apparition at first hand.

The ruined adobe and the old mine shaft on the hillside southwest of Tombstone, with the unmarked burials said to lie around it.

The cabin appears in Arizona ghost-town books such as Philip Varney’s Arizona’s Best Ghost Towns and in Wesley Treat’s Weird Arizona, and is a stop for Tombstone-area ghost tours.