TRAIL TALES: Much ado about ghost stories in Shakespeare

SHAKESPEARE, New Mexico -- Janaloo Hill and her husband, Manny Hough, make up the town of Shakespeare's entire population these days.  They say that on some nights, three murdered miners known as Los Negros walk along the railroad tracks through this dusty ghost town just south of Lordsburg. 

Never mind that the railroad tracks are long gone. Ghosts don't bother with details.  They say that sometimes, just at twilight, the Lady in Black walks through the walls of the Stratford Hotel here. Ghosts don't bother with doors either. 

And on some nights - windy nights, as it so happens - they say that over at the mail station you can hear the moaning of a man tortured to death 140 years ago.  There are other things too. Not stories so much as just things.

Hough recalled the phenomenon they named the sulphur fire ghost.  "Just for no reason at all, you'd smell sulphur - like someone had just struck a match," he said.

Shakespeare was founded in the 1850s as Mexican Springs, a stagecoach and watering stop on the immigrant trail to California. After a silver strike in the 1870s, it grew to 3,000 people and perhaps as many as 200 buildings. 

Today only five structures dating back to the frontier period are still standing in Shakespeare, but most of them have ghost stories to go with them. Decades of attacks by American Indians, gunfights, desperation and greed are bound to leave some restless spirits behind. Some more here than there. 

"The Grant House has very few ghosts associated with it," Hill said as she gazed at the adobe and rock structure that was the town's stagecoach station. "Which is odd, because men were hanged there." Hill heard stories of "people looking in the windows at the Grant House and seeing bodies swaying in the air."

Los Negros were three mine owners - black men or very dark men - murdered during the 1920s for the payroll money they were carrying. Their bodies were said to have been dumped in a mine shaft.  "People who were children here then heard the story of the killings whispered by adults," Hill said.

The story of the Lady in Black - sometimes it's the Lady in White - comes from Joe Woods, who drove the horse-drawn taxi to Shakespeare in the 1880s. In the 1940s, Woods told Rita Hill about the mysterious woman who came here in search of a lost love.  "Joe said she was very beautiful and that she always wore black when he saw her - a trim, ladylike black," Janaloo Hill recalled. "He said she was looking for a particular man and she stayed here a number of days."

After the woman learned that her man had been killed by Indians in Mexico, she just disappeared, leaving her belongings in the hotel.  "They couldn't find her or her body," Hill said. "But after that, people talked about seeing a woman walking down the street at twilight and going through the wall of the Stratford Hotel."

Shakespeare's mail house was built in the 1850s as part of an Army mail relay line. According to the story, three men were living there in the 1860s.  Hill said one of the men was killed by Indians and another, a Southern sympathizer, was tortured to death by Union troops that passed through here during the Civil War. It's supposed to be the ghost of the latter that people have heard groaning here on windy nights.  The third man lived on at the mail house for a long time - at least into the 1880s when Emma Muir moved here as a child.  Muir, who lived until 1959, visited often with the Hills in Shakespeare. She told them that on the inside of a shutter of the mail house the old man had written a full account of what had happened here during the Civil War.

"Mrs. Muir said the man had a very long beard and he used to show her and the other kids what he had written," Hill recalled. "When she visited, she would come look at the shutter and try to remember what he had written there. She said if she could just see a little of it, maybe she could remember most of it."

Stories don't really stay lost in Shakespeare. They may change, grow, get better - but not get lost.

In April 1997, a tragic fire burned an old general merchandise store building right down to the basement, destroying a large and invaluable historic collection displayed there.  "Since the fire, I haven't had the spirit to tell ghost stories about the merchandise building," said Janaloo Hill.

She and Hough made their home in that building. It was there, in the years before the fire, that they experienced a phenomenon they called the 'sulphur fire ghost.' "Just for no reason at all, you'd smell sulphur - like someone had struck a match."

The historic ghost town of Shakespeare is about 300 miles southwest of Albuquerque.  To get there from Albuquerque, drive south on I-25 until you reach the N.M. 26 exit between Truth or Consequences and Las Cruces. Follow N.M. 26 southwest through Hatch to Deming, get on I-10 at Deming and follow it west to Lordsburg. At Lordsburg, take the Main Street exit off I-10 and follow signs two miles south to Shakespeare. --excerpted from Haunted America Update

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