Bannack - A Spirited Town

Ellen Baumler, Interpretive Historian for the Montana Historical Society, with Tom Lowe, Assistant Manager at Bannack State Park

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At the annual October Ghost Walk, long-told stories of spirits shroud the ghost town of Bannack, Montana. Vigilantes bestowed violent beginnings. But dig deeper. The town’s windswept cemetery where its spirits rest, or don’t rest, is an indelible record of the lives and tragedies that will forever color the history of Bannack.     

Perry Meade, for example, whose parents ran the Meade Hotel, went to work at the Eugene Mine on August 18, 1895, promising his wife that this would be his last shift underground. It was. Mud filled the south drift, suffocating him. Then a year later, Meade’s little son died during a measles epidemic.   

Or consider Katherine Moore who, in May of 1916, took an ax and as her miner husband slept, bludgeoned him to death claiming abuse and mental illness. The judge acquitted her.    

And then there was sixteen-year-old Dorothy Dunn. In August of 1916, she, her cousin Fern, and Ruth Wornick waded into a dredge pond and stepped off a shelf into deep water. None could swim. Twelve-year-old Smith Paddock saved Ruth and Fern, but lovely, vivacious Dorothy drowned.  

If you enjoy ghost stories, don’t miss the annual Bannack Ghost Walk Oct. 22 and 23, by reservation only. Bannack State Park is located southwest of Dillon. For details, call 406-834-3413.

Spirits are everywhere at Bannack, especially at the Meade Hotel. Built circa 1875 as the Beaverhead County Courthouse, it was, and is, the town’s centerpiece. In 1877, barricaded and fortified, panicked settlers took a week’s refuge there amidst unfounded rumors of a Nez Perce attack. In 1881, the county seat moved to Dillon. The building sat abandoned until 1888 when Dr. John S. Meade remodeled it as the Meade Hotel. But after losing their son and grandson, the Meades moved to California leaving their hotel to others.

Rufe Mathews and his wife, Montana, later managed the hotel where their daughter, Bertie, spent much of her childhood. Bertie took it hard when her best friend Dorothy Dunn drowned. Just several months later, Bertie’s sister, Hazel Jaggers, and her brother-in-law, Roy, died of influenza. The Mathews family took in the Jaggers’ two little children. It was a terrible time. Lee Graves, Bertie’s godson, says that some time later, Bertie was upstairs in the hotel where she saw the apparition of her friend. Bertie recognized Dorothy’s long blue dress. The experience scared her, and she seldom talked about it.

Others, too, have seen Dorothy upstairs in the hotel. Visitors reported unusually cold spots and sometimes find breathing difficult as if they were underground, or underwater, and unable to breathe.

It takes little imagination to sense spirits at Bannack. They drift cold through the empty buildings, peek around the corners in the old hotel, and cry into the wind like children wanting attention.   Pick a quiet afternoon, and see for yourself.

Bannack State Park is open is open 8 a.m.- 5 p.m. seven days a week through October.