Member-only story
The Ghosts of Silver Hollow
Silver Hollow, Utah — 1896
The wind howled through the canyon like a chorus of Banshees over the Cliffs of Moher. Clara Whitaker stepped off the creaking stagecoach and into the dust-choked streets of Silver Hollow. The mining town was carved from the red-rock cliffs of southern Utah, and its clapboard houses and saloons were weathered to skeletal gray. Clara adjusted her woolen shawl, her breath visible in the autumn chill, and glanced at her father, Dr. Elias Whitaker. His face was drawn but determined. They had come west for a fresh start after her mother’s death, lured to the town by an ad in the newspaper of her hometown. “Doctor needed for a growing mining community.”
“Welcome to Silver Hollow, sir,” Charlie, the coach representative, said.
The sounds of mining floated in the hot, dry air as she and her father looked down the valley toward the mine’s gaping entrance at the edge of town. The words Holloway Silver Co. were painted in peeling crimson letters above it.
The first week passed in a blur of unpacking and polite introductions. Clara’s father set up his medical practice in a cramped office beside the general store, treating miners for broken bones, lung ailments, and the scrapes and bruises from the occasional bar fight. But by the second week, Clara noticed the whispers.
“Folks say the mine’s cursed,” she told her father. “They say that Old Ezekiel Holloway dug the first mine too deep. And woke something old and evil up.”
“Superstitious nonsense,” the Doctor told his daughter.
Late one night, a frantic knock rattled their door. A miner named Joe staggered in, his face ashen.
“Doc, you gotta help Pete,” he gasped. “He’s down at the bunkhouse… saw something in the tunnels. Won’t stop screaming.”
Clara followed her father, lantern in hand. Pete, a burly man with a beard singed from blasting powder, was curled on a cot, clawing at his own arms. “Eyes in the dark,” he rasped. “Eyes and voices… they’re still down there.”
Dr. Whitaker administered morphine, but Pete raged on until exhausted he slept. When Clara asked Ezekiel Holloway about the incident, the mine owner scoffed.
