WARNING: These haunted Western mysteries are not for the faint of heart. Check out these spooky stories of the Wild West.
Fact can truly be stranger than fiction, especially in the Old West, where lawlessness and tall tales went hand in hand. We dug into some of the Wild West’s spine-tingling unexplained mysteries. Are there Sasquatches tromping through the woods? How can a ship disappear into thin air? Uncover these spooky stories of the West.
Meet The Master Of Western Fringe Folklore
When historian John LeMay looks back on the legends of the Old West, he often revisits familiar figures such as Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, and Geronimo. But his journeys into the past also bring up subjects that some people do not associate with the Old West history — UFOs, dinosaur sightings, hideous monsters, marauding mummies, and bloodthirsty vampires.
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PHOTOGRAPHY: Courtesy of Tubi
Abducted By Sasquatches!
The vast majority of reported encounters involving the elusive Sasquatch — those huge, hairy, humanlike creatures reportedly sighted all across the U.S. — are mostly cases of passive observation. Those who insist they’ve been within sight of the creatures are usually watching them go by from a blurry distance. Stories of direct physical contact with a sasquatch are less frequent, and the experience claimed by Albert Ostman — in which he was physically kidnapped and held by a family of Sasquatches for up to a week — was truly unique.
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The Rampage Of The Red Ghost
In 1883, an Arizona newspaper called the Mohave County Miner ran a story about huge and strange animals that were seen roaming through the Eagle Creek area. One of these animals was blamed for the trampling death of a rancher’s wife. This grisly incident was witnessed by another rancher’s wife, who described a “huge reddish-colored beast” with a “devilish-looking creature” riding on its back.
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The Lost Ship Of The Desert
In 1870, articles began appearing in newspapers about the unlikely presence of a great wrecked ship laying within the sands of the California desert, far from the Pacific Coast. An explorer named Albert S. Evans claimed to have seen it while traveling to San Bernardino. He wrote in the January 1870 edition of The New York Galaxy about how “the moon threw a track of shimmering light, so bright as almost to dazzle the eye of the beholder. Right in this burning pathway of light, far out in the center of the ghostly sea, where foot of man had never trod, lay in the distance the wreck of a gallant ship, which might have gone down there — centuries ago, when the bold Spanish adventurers were pushing their way to the northwest in search of the fabled treasures of the famed Kingdom of Cibola.”
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PHOTOGRAPHY: Courtesy of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.
The Ghosts Of The Little Bighorn Battlefield
The Battle of the Little Bighorn was the culmination of an attempt by the U.S. Army to halt attacks by the Lakota Sioux led by Sitting Bull on encroaching American settlers and miners. When the battle ended on June 26, 1876, the 7th U.S. Cavalry Regiment under Lt. Col. George Custer suffered 268 dead, with six more soldiers dying later from among the 55 wounded. The number of casualties of Native American warriors was never officially tabulated, but consensus among historians would place the total at around 100. Battlefields are known to have a disproportionately higher share of reported ghostly occurrences than other historic sites, and Montana’s Little Bighorn Battlefield is no exception.
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PHOTOGRAPHY: Courtesy of Library of Congress
HEADER IMAGE: Lt. Col. George Custer (PHOTOGRAPHY: Mathew Brady)