Virginia City and Nevada City, Montana

On May 26, 1863, prospectors Bill Fairweather and Henry Edgar found gold in Alder Gulch, and within a year a string of camps along the creek held thousands of people. Virginia City became the biggest, and from 1865 to 1875 it was the capital of Montana Territory. Its early months were violent: in the winter of 1863–64 the Montana Vigilantes hanged accused road agents across the goldfields without trial, five of them in a single day in Virginia City in January 1864. Their graves are on the town’s Boot Hill, above Wallace Street.

When the gold faded, so did the towns, but much of Virginia City’s main street survived. Collector Charles Bovey bought and restored many buildings in the mid-20th century and moved historic structures to nearby Nevada City to create an open-air museum; the State of Montana later acquired the properties, now run by the Montana Heritage Commission. Virginia City’s historic district is a National Historic Landmark.

Ghost stories cling to the old buildings. Montana Historical Society historian Ellen Baumler collected many of them in Spirit Tailings: at the Sedman House in Nevada City, staff say they find bedding rumpled in a room no one uses, and a tourist once asked about a little girl in Victorian dress when there was no girl there; a film crew working in a Virginia City building heard steps in a locked, empty upstairs room. The Nevada City Hotel is said to be visited by a silent old cowboy and a weeping woman.

In Virginia City itself, the Bale of Hay Saloon – which bills itself as Montana’s oldest – has its own lore. Bartenders have described a smell of mothballs drifting toward the bar, a jukebox and an old player piano starting on their own, and figures peering in through the window. Staff at the Wells Fargo Steakhouse talk of a “lady in blue.” Local guide Lois Stephens, who calls herself a skeptic, has gathered these accounts on the town’s nightly ghost walk and in her book Ghosts Walk in Virginia City.

A woman in blue, an old cowboy who never speaks, a weeping woman, a little girl in Victorian dress, footsteps in locked rooms, unmade beds, music machines starting by themselves and drifting smells – reported by shop and restaurant staff, a film crew and tourists.

The Bale of Hay Saloon and Wells Fargo Steakhouse on Wallace Street in Virginia City; the Sedman House and Nevada City Hotel in Nevada City; Boot Hill above town. Most stories come from evenings in the summer season.

Virginia City’s ghost walk runs nightly through the summer, the Montana Heritage Commission offers cemetery and Halloween tours, and Ellen Baumler’s Spirit Tailings: Ghost Tales of Virginia City, Butte, and Helena brought the stories statewide attention. The Bale of Hay’s bar appears in the 1970 film Little Big Man.