Fort Laramie and Old Bedlam

Fort Laramie began as a fur-trading post. William Sublette and Robert Campbell built the stockaded Fort William at the meeting of the Laramie and North Platte rivers in 1833–34; in 1841 the American Fur Company replaced it with an adobe fort called Fort John. In June 1849, as the Oregon Trail filled with emigrants, the army bought the post for $4,000 and garrisoned it. For forty years it was a mail stop, supply depot and diplomatic stage: the great treaty council of 1851 gathered Plains nations near the post, and the 1868 treaty that ended Red Cloud’s War carried its name, while the nations that came there to trade and negotiate increasingly disputed the terms.

The most famous building, Old Bedlam, was built in 1849 as officers’ quarters and is the oldest standing military building in Wyoming. Its nickname is generally credited to the rowdy bachelor officers’ parties, though a ghost-story book places the name in 1863–64, when it was the social centre of the post under Lieutenant Colonel William Collins. The army abandoned Fort Laramie on 20 April 1890, its buildings were sold, and the site passed to Wyoming and then, in 1938, to the National Park Service.

The ghost stories have been collected by popular writers rather than by the park. In Old Bedlam the apparition is said to be a cavalry officer who walks through the rooms and sometimes tells visitors to be quiet. Staff are said to call the spirit of the 1870 Captain’s Quarters “George”, and to report doors that open, footsteps and bright lights at night in a building without electricity. Heavy bootsteps are said to sound on the cavalry barracks boardwalk around the time of reveille. The best-known tale belongs to the plains rather than the fort: a Lady in Green, said to be the daughter of the fur company’s agent who rode off on a black horse and never returned, is reputed to be seen in her long green riding dress on the Oregon Trail every seven years.

None of these stories comes with named witnesses or firm dates in the sources consulted. The Lady in Green in particular reads as a campfire legend, with no documented person behind her. Legends of America also lists a headless man throwing stones in Deer Creek and a Civil War soldier at Bovee Draw, stories that are told with a warning to keep away rather than with any evidence. The National Park Service itself presents the fort through its documented history, which holds drama enough.

A cavalry officer who walks the halls and tells people to be quiet, a spirit nicknamed George with opening doors and lights in an unpowered building, boots on the barracks boardwalk before dawn, a Lady in Green on the Oregon Trail, and roadside figures such as a headless man at Deer Creek.

Old Bedlam, the Captain’s Quarters, the 1874 cavalry barracks, and trail sites outside the fort at Deer Creek, Bovee Draw and Detention Dam.

The Phantoms of Fort Laramie appear in the ghost collections of Western writers, and the site lives on in Oregon Trail histories and living-history weekends. Tribal nations remember Fort Laramie as a place of treaties and broken promises, a history the park now interprets alongside its military story.