Di Lee of Deadwood’s Chinatown

Di Lee was a young, unmarried Chinese woman who, according to historians Jerry Bryant and Bill Markley, reached the Black Hills gold camp of Deadwood in 1876. She owned three lots with houses on Sherman Street, then the town’s main thoroughfare, and Bryant and Markley found no evidence that she was a prostitute or involved in the opium trade, as later retellings often implied. She was part of the first Chinese community in Deadwood, whose Chinatown clustered along the lower part of the town. Old-timers later gave her the nicknames “China Doll” and “Yellow Doll”; no photograph of her is known.

On the night of 27 November 1877 she was attacked in her home, most likely, Bryant and Markley conclude, by two intruders. An inquest the next morning, with the acting coroner Dr. Charles W. Meyer, found two skull fractures and a non-fatal stab wound, and a jury concluded that unknown people had killed her. The Chinese community held her funeral on 29 November with music, firecrackers and burning incense and paper. A man named Hong Lee claimed kinship and, on the coroner’s order, received her property. In early December a couple, Ah Sing and his wife, were arrested and then released for lack of testimony. About four months later a young Chinese woman fled into a Deadwood hotel and said she had seen her companion kill Di Lee; she said police had ignored her accusation, nothing more is known of it, and the Black Hills Daily Times was still calling the case unsolved in January 1880. A Deadwood History spokesperson has called it an unsolved murder and an “inside job”.

The ghost story appeared within a month. According to Bryant and Markley, who cite the Black Hills Daily Times of 22 December 1877, on the first night after the house was reoccupied the new occupants heard tapping at the door and, the paper said, the dead woman’s voice answering, then the hurried steps of two men, the sounds of a struggle, and then silence. When they looked, the room was in order and the door fastened, and the occupants promptly moved out. Neighbours in adjoining houses reported cursing and a woman’s voice pleading in Cantonese before it faded as though she were being choked. The paper added that Chinatown believed her spirit was disturbed, in part because the authorities had interrupted the burial rites, and it joked about property in the neighbourhood losing value. A Yankton newspaper, the Press and Dakotan, carried the story in January 1878.

The account was written in a mocking tone, ending with a joke about property prices, and it names no witnesses. Yet it is one of the earliest documented ghost reports in the Black Hills, and Di Lee remains a reminder of a murdered woman whose case was never solved and whose name appears in several spellings.

Tapping at the door, the dead woman’s voice answering, two men’s footsteps and sounds of a struggle, cursing, and a woman’s voice pleading in Cantonese, reported by new occupants and by neighbours. No figure was reported.

The house on Sherman Street in Deadwood’s Chinatown where she was killed, in the weeks after her death.

The haunting was retold in Wild West magazine in 2013 by Jerry Bryant and Bill Markley, in a 2024 Forum News Service piece on Deadwood’s Chinatown, and on a regional history podcast in 2020. Archaeological work on Deadwood’s Chinatown in the early 2000s has added to what is known about the community.