Miners? Outlaws? Locals say spirits linger in ‘ghost town’ of Eureka

EUREKA, Juab County — It may not be a true ‘ghost town’ with nearly 700 living residents, but some of the townspeople say Eureka definitely IS a ghost town if you count the spirits that dwell there.

“I don’t see them but I know people who have and they swear by it,” said former mayor Nick Castleton. “Most every family in one of these old houses will tell you they’ve had encounters with things being moved, footsteps.”

Castleton said nobody was certain exactly which entities haunted the old mining boomtown, which brought miners from all over the world during Eureka’s and the Tintic Mining District’s heyday in search of gold, silver, lead, copper and zinc ore.

“As far as any place in Utah goes, I think Eureka was probably one of the wildest,” Castleton said. “There’s people that have died young, died before they should have.”

He acknowledged those in the town could potentially be encountering deceased cowboys, outlaws, those who died during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 or even the souls of dead miners.

Castleton recalled an old poem he knew by heart about the mischievous “Tommyknocker” and its knock or tap that offered a warning to miners — or potentially signaled doom.

“’Have you heard of the Tommyknockers in the deep, dark mines of the West?’” Castleton recited. “’For it be whoever hears it, will be the next in line, for the tap, tap, tap of the tiny pick is the last and awful sign.’”

City Hall and Eureka Main Street

What was certain to Castleton was there was no shortage of unexplained events and ghostly sightings along the town’s Main Street.

In particular, Historic City Hall had been something of a hot spot for paranormal activity.

“We’ve had people talk about voices, they hear people giving them a bad time or somebody laughing sometimes,” Castleton said. “While I was mayor we moved the city workers up here and this was their offices and they would come in and say, ‘That is not where I left that last night.’”

Castleton surmised that perhaps any spirits that called the building home were active late at night.

“I guess they do it after we lock the doors and they have free reign of the place and do their own thing,” Castleton said. “It was an everyday thing — you kind of come in and expect to see somebody or something because you don’t know what’s been moved or what somebody has done while you were gone.”

Sightings and experiences, however, have also occurred down the street.

“I work down at (Eureka Company Store) on Saturdays and we’ve had several people not connected to each other in any way, and they say there’s a young girl that hangs around in here — several different people have seen her,” said Mary Crank, owner of Crazy Mary’s Rocks and the Gatley building. She believes three spirits inhabit her space.

“There’s a man here, and I felt him right away and I knew something bad had happened to him — he had died violently at the Gatley,” Crank said. “I felt his negative energy when I walked in, but I felt positive too.”

Crank said she also believes the spirits of two children call the Gatley home, and others who have visited have claimed to see them.

She said the negative energy of the male spirit has seemed to have moderated.

“’I’m tired of negative energy, I insist on positive and having fun,’” she recalled saying. “’So you’re welcome to stay. You want to be negative? Get out.’ The man chose to stay and I felt a playfulness and I’m like, ah that’s interesting. They touch me, they feel me. I can see a whoosh and they play tricks on me.”

According to Crank, the known history of the building has pointed to nothing that would suggest who the spirits are.

“It’s very interesting and I want the proof but I think they are here,” Crank said.

Paranormal Investigation

With those questions in mind, members of the Western Association for the Science of the Paranormal joined a KSL TV crew for a paranormal investigation of City Hall and the Gatley building, along with other properties along the Main Street and an abandoned mine above town.

Even before getting started with the investigation, group co-founder Chris Harmon said he didn’t believe he could go back inside the Gatley following an initial tour.

“We walked around the entire building, it didn’t last long when we were in there,” Harmon said. “I was just so uneasy. I wanted to get out of there, and ever since then I’ve been really agitated, really frustrated, just not being myself.”

That led Harmon to surmise, “Something does not like me in there at all.”

“It is very displeased with me,” Harmon said. “I don’t understand why, but it just does not like me, so I’m not going in that building.”

Instead, a smaller group helmed by paranormal investigator Jacob Claypool entered to see if they could detect any possible energies or entities.

Moments after turning on a ‘spirit box’ communication device — which quickly switches through radio frequencies, in theory giving a spirit the opportunity to communicate through the cycling white noise — two unexplained, full-bodied, male yells were recorded, separate from the device and above the white noise sound, through a KSL TV microphone.

It was strange, since another mic worn by Crank at the time at the front of her store and further away from the white noise, did not pick up the yells — suggesting they didn’t come from outside the building.

Shortly after placing a REM Pod — which uses an electromagnetic field to detect nearby energy disturbances — in the back of the Gatley building, the device started going off continuously for nearly 25 seconds before falling silent again.

“At night when I’m by my bed, they come to me,” Crank said to the investigators.

She also observed others have encountered the spirits of the children by a stove in the building.

Though the investigators continued through additional investigative sessions over a half hour’s time, the group picked up no more electronic evidence of anything unexplained.

The shop’s owner offered an unsettling conclusion to the investigators.

“I don’t feel they trust you,” Crank said. “Me and the children don’t believe you’re doing the right thing.”

Meanwhile, a different team helmed by Harmon, investigator Sam Arky and psychic medium Stephanie Cowan began investigating historic City Hall.

Barely inside the front doors, Cowan picked up on some sort of energy by the stairs.

“I just got kind of a little bit dizzy, felt a little bit nauseous — usually that’s energy coming either up or down,” Cowan said.

The feeling sent the WASP investigators upstairs to see what they could detect.

Cowan said she started picking up on a male energy by the name of “Clyde” or “Claude” and then focused in on the name “Clyde” and asked if he was there at the bank.

There would be more clarity on that point later.

At the time, however, Arky deployed a “dead bell” device — which was like a traditional ring-for-service bell atop a box. According to Arky, the device could either be triggered by physical touch or by electromagnetic field (EMF) spikes, which can be interpreted as paranormal energy.

Soon after placing the “dead bell” in the corner of the room upstairs — where numerous vintage artifacts from the town resided, including tools and pickaxes from Eureka’s mining period — it started to go off in an intelligent manner and in accordance with the investigators’ questions.

“Are there multiple spirits in this room?” asked KSL TV News Specialist Andrew Adams. “Twice for yes, once for no.”

The bell immediately rang twice.

When the investigators asked how many spirits were in the room, the untouched bell rang 15 times to the shock of everyone in the room.

After that moment, the bell fell silent.

The investigators moved the device to two other places, including next to a miner’s pickaxe, but the team picked up no further evidence of paranormal energy, spirits or even “Tommyknockers.”

The name “Clyde”, though, continued to stick with Cowan as the investigators conducted a session in the City Hall’s jail area.

At one point, Cowan believed she was touched by an entity in the jail and immediately decided to leave the area. She believed what she felt might have been related to a prisoner or outlaw spirit.

“You can hear my voice is a little shaken,” Cowan said. “When I was in the center cell and we were sitting there with the two guys on the side and it was myself and another gal that was in there, (there was) just an overwhelming sense of fear, but the fear of being violated or touched. That’s when I had mentioned that we need to leave — the women — because there was a sense that we might be in trouble. Immediately when that happened, I felt a brush right against my chest and that’s when I said let’s get out of there.”

Later, after walking out of City Hall and stopping by the sheriff’s office in the front corner of the building, Cowan was in shock over what she found on the desk in that room.

There were several police documents Castleton later confirmed were authentic to an earlier era in Eureka. The paper on top left Cowan in disbelief.

“Look at the name of this one that was arrested for bank robbery,” Cowan exclaimed to the other investigators. “Can you see his name?”

The other investigators chimed out, “Clyde!”

It was a document containing photos and fingerprint information of Clyde Nimerick, a known bank robber from the 1930s who apparently was wanted by police across the country at the time.

Everyone marveled at whether Cowan had been channeling and whether the group had been possibly communicating with a wanted outlaw from an earlier era.

The group may have not encountered any of the dreaded “Tommyknockers” — even at a later investigation that night at a mine above town — but the unexplained sequence of bell ringing and a possible psychic connection to a wanted bank robber led the investigators to believe the night was a success.

None of that would have been surprising to Eureka’s former mayor, who had heard so many ghost stories around the town before.

“They’ve got too much detail to just throw it out and say, ‘no, that’s garbage,'” Castleton said.

Crank also believed the spiritual energy she felt in her building was very tangible and lasting.

“It’s a mystery to me,” Crank said. “There’s no explanation, there’s no science but energy is real.”