Ghost Towns, Ghost Stories and Jean

This trip was inspired by staring at a map of Montana and noticing four slanted looking black house symbols that the key designated as ghost Towns.  The images conjured up in our heads pivoted around barren landscapes and gray wood water rotted buildings from the 1800s; a tumble weed rolling down the way.  The usual expectations that might come to the unexperienced traveler hoping to prove that everything westerns taught us were true and could be rediscovered in our present day.  We set out for Virginia City, Nevada City, Alder, and Laurin.    

When we arrived, Virgina City was a thriving county seat, Nevada City resembled This is the Place Heritage Park in SLC (meaning that half of the buildings were taken from other parts of the state and full of reenactments by actors dressed in period clothing with an admission price) with a few abandoned trains and a really cool old saloon and music hall open to the public, Alder looked like a ghost town from 1994 full of people for a car show, and Laurin was on old church and a long gravel road into sprawling fields of hay.  The whole experience raised a lot of questions concerning the qualifications required for a community to claim ghost town status.

 

While driving back from Laurin we stopped by a place where people can dig up buckets of gravel and screen out little red gems called Garnets.  Steven Cox, the owner, lives on site in a little house surrounded by various beds of fruits and vegetables.  We know this because at one point he gave us a tour of his property and fed us strawberries from his personal strawberry patch.  He is looking for ways to expand business beyond the scope of his front yard.

 

Our visit to a saloon in Nevada City.

 

The town of Virginia City was very fond of displays for tourists.  This one depicts what a town hanging would have looked like over a hundred years ago. 

Surprisingly, some of the most impressive and unsettling displays in town can be found in the local T-Shirt shop which carried collections of old guns, deformed lambs, and a complete human skeleton hanging on the back wall.  The deformed lamb featured in these two pictures has 7 legs, 4 ears and 2 butts. 

 

We were convinced there was something Biblical about this creature.

 

After we had taken in all that our "ghost towns" had to offer we headed back to West Yellowstone to meet up with our friends there and then to Island Park to visit Ben Rock and his parents at their cabin for some pizza and then smores around a camp fire.

 

 

 

Ben Rock (pictured sitting next to Ben Nelson) told us an American style scary story around the fire for our friends Anar from Azerbaijan and Enes from Turkey. 

 

Enes returned the favor by telling us about a demon named Jean that is considered to be very frighting in the Muslim world.  He described Jean as being 2 Seans tall and very fat.  Jean has claws where his finger nails would be which he uses to slash person's throat and has backward feet but he walks forward like normal; jean is covered in ruddy red hair.