The Haunted Mine: A Lorimer Graveskeeper Choose Your Own Adventure Story

Chapter 2: Ghost Adventure Tours

"Good evening brave travelers! So glad you could join me this evening for a stroll down the most haunted street in America! My name is Jim, I'll be your guide through one hundred and fifty years of the dark and terrible history of Saul, Arizona," Jim paused, looking around at his audience of five. Two middle aged women wearing fanny packs and white sneakers clutched the cameras hanging around their necks with anticipation. Next to them, a dad was standing with his teenage son,  who was trying his best to look bored while glancing around the dark street nervously. Lorimer hung back behind them, leaning on the building decorated with the sign "Ghost Adventure Tours, est. 2008." 

"As you've undoubtedly heard, this is no ordinary town," Jim continued, "The building you are currently standing in front of was purchased by us 10 years ago, refurbished and repurposed into our tour headquarters. Prior to our extensive remodeling, this building was the ruined and condemned office of the billionaire copper mining tycoon Rudolph Henderson, a bastard so ruthless that he was driven out of business in New York City in 1882. His callous disregard for the rights of his workers was too profound even for the poor standards set in place during the start of the industrial revolution, and his meat packing plants were shut down by the federal government.  In 1883, he moved to this remote part of the desert for the purpose of continuing to expand his already extensive wealth with minimal oversight. He hoped that the Wild West would be a more permissive setting for the acts of cruelty and violence that made him notorious in New York. He lived here from 1883- 1903 in that house at the very end of the street," Jim said, gesturing into the darkness, "which, of course, we will get a better look at later in our tour.  Now, besides the lack of  law enforcement and government interference in Saul, what drew Henderson here was the copper.  He arrived here with a train full of near slaves, poor folk running from hunger and typhus in their big city tenements, seeking their fortune, lured by the promise of 3 dollars a day for laboring in Henderson's mines. Please follow me to our next location."

Jim led the group down the street, past the only cafe in town and the saloon where he and Lorimer had their drink. They walked a few minutes until they reached a clearing and the single road that made up the entirety of Saul, Arizona abruptly stopped. Directly in front of them was a chain link fence, twice as tall as any of them with barbed wire over the top. Hanging over the fence were skull and crossbones signs that read "Do Not Enter" and "Extreme Danger, Explosive Natural Elements." It was hard to see past the fence, but Lorimer could just make out the enormous cavern beyond. The mountain rose before them, red and terrible and he could see a small staircase made of rickety wood leading up to a doorway.

"You can see just over there the entrance to the mines," Jim said.

Lorimer felt suddenly nauseated. The air was so heavy around him. The night was freezing cold but he felt somehow stifled, claustrophobic. The miles of open desert around him was not liberating, but dampening somehow, like he was tethered by invisible ropes to this lonely and stunted place. He knew, unequivocally, that the last place he would ever want to find himself was inside that  mine.

"Over here, just beyond the fence and before the big drop off there was a rickety building where Henderson's workers slept. They didn't have proper housing quarters, and a bed was rented out  in 7 hour blocks to the miners. Because the mines were operational 24 hours a day, the beds were in constant use. They called them 'hot beds,' because they were still warm from the last guy who slept in it when you got there. The hot beds were just one of the cruelties Rudolph Henderson inflicted on his workers. In addition to denying them proper housing, he paid large percentages of the worker's salaries in tokens to be used at the Saul General Store, guaranteeing that the workers never accumulated enough money to find a way to escape their slavery. Henderson also owned the only train in and out of town, and the price of a ticket to the nearest town was so exorbitantly expensive that his men could work a hundred years and never have the money to get a ride. To leave on foot was a death sentence after a hundred miles of starvation and thirst in the barren desert," Jim stopped here, admiring the effect of his narrative. The middle aged women were staring at him open mouthed, nearly drooling with excitement at the description of the tortures hundreds of men endured. The teenage boy couldn't look bored anymore. He stood, pale and terrified, looking up at the doorway to the terrible maw of the beast, the entrance to the forbidden mine.