The Good-Time Ghosts

Al Wahlin is another person who has spent a great deal of time in Garnet, both as a summer visitor and as a former caretaker. He admitted that he has often wandered around the town late at night hoping to stir up the ghosts but having no luck. One night he thought he heard mysterious voices talking in another building, but then he realized that the sound was merely the buzzing of flies trapped between the trim and the window.

Al did experience a bona fide eerie encounter one spring day in 1978 or 1979 when the ice and snow were breaking up and melting off. "That time of year was especially nice," he said, "because usually no one came to town and I had the whole place to myself. I had been working on some project up in the shop, and I was about halfway back to my cabin when something made me glance over my shoulder.

"I saw a man, a woman, and a small child walking about thirty yards behind me. I hadn't talked to anybody for a week or two, and I was surprised to see them. I decided it would be nice to find out what they were doing in Garnet, so I turned around again to call to them-and no one was there.

"I couldn't figure out where they could have gotten to so quickly, especially as they were strolling along with the child between them, and the middle of the street was the only place where the snow was packed well enough to walk. I checked behind bushes and everywhere else I could think of, even going off on little side trails before convincing myself that I was the only person in town. And when I looked for footprints, the only ones I saw were the distinctive waffle patterns made by my own boots.

"Nothing seemed to be unusual about these people," Al insisted. "They were dressed normally for winter and they looked like a modern family, not inhabitants of early-day Garnet. The woman, for example, was wearing pants instead of a dress. I don't know who they were or how they managed to get out of sight so fast."

Al's desire to experience the unexplained at Garnet was rewarded on one other occasion, and he later learned that his wife, Gloria, had had an identical experience at the same place on a different evening. "It was winter sometime in the early 1980s," Al explained, "and we had rented a cabin known as the Dahl House. I woke up one night to see a glowing light floating over the woodstove in the center of the room. The whitish yellow light was about the size of a soccer ball, and after a while it rose to a distance of about five feet and began moving toward me. Then it floated up to a corner of the room above my head and disappeared.

"I wasn't really frightened, but I was puzzled, and I know I wasn't dreaming. I didn't find out that Gloria had seen exactly the same thing in the same place until we both began talking about the odd things that happen in Garnet."

Those "odd things" certainly are well documented, for Garnet also has been featured in D. F. Curran's True Hauntings in Montana and in Earl Murray's Ghosts of the Old West. Perhaps the ultimate irony of this town not built to last is just how permanent its ghostly inhabitants appear to be.

© Article copyright Pruett Publishing.