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Short Stories & Tall Tales
GHOST RIDER
By Connie Vigil Platt
The west is full of ghost stories that have been handed down from generation to generation, some have a basis of truth and some are merely entertaining. Stories of mysterious lights where there should be no lights, specters that rise from the grave to visit the ranch house on stormy nights, point bony fingers and float on filmy wings, tales of hidden treasure guarded by phantom spirits or sometimes a beautiful woman that would lure you into the dark regions, shadows that would leave gold coins for you to find in the morning, witches that change into animals, howling dogs that warned of impending death. Tales told around the fireplace on cold winter nights that made you shiver in delighted horror, at things that go bump in the night. I will let you be the judge of which one this is.
I will tell you this, it is true and it did happen to me.
As a young child growing up in the canyon country of Colorado, I was told that there were no ghosts and there was nothing that would harm me, that they were entertaining stories only. Of course there were rattlesnakes and other wild animals but that was not what worried me, there was always in the back of my mind the scary things that had happened to someone else, could happen to me, perhaps I was immune or perhaps not.
My father had cattle and horses and I was allowed to roam freely, riding my horse through the pastures and canyons. There were several abandoned buildings on the property, with doors hanging ajar, creaking at the slightest breeze, as if waiting for someone to shut them properly. Broken windows staring like empty eye sockets and sometimes if the wind was right I could hear a soft moaning. There were times when I would catch a glimpse of a pale floating shadow, more of a feeling than an actual outline, when I passed by. Yet I continued to go past theses scary buildings. One fall my father had gathered some calves to be sold at market. This was the first time the calves would be separated from their mothers and there was a lot of bawling and milling around before they settled down.
That night I woke to hear my grandfather shouting, "There's someone stealing your cattle. There's a man on horseback riding through the corral."
My father jumped up, by the time he had put on his boots, jacked a cartridge in his Winchester rifle and ran outside no one was there.
"I saw him, I did. There was a man on a horseback cutting out the best calves. He had the reins slack in his hand and his head down. The moon was so bright I could see the shape of his hat. I'm not making it up."
"Have you been drinking? Where'd you get whiskey?" My father asked.
"Don't talk to me like that. You know I don't have anything to drink, except water or that foul coffee you make." My grandfather answered.
"You had a dream, old man go back to sleep. If he was cutting cattle he wouldn't have the reins slack in his hand, you know that." My father told him as he put away the rifle.
"If his horse was well trained he might. I wasn't dreaming, I saw it." My grandfather replied.
I covered my head with the blankets. I didn't want to see the shadow rider and I didn't want to listen to them argue. No mention was made of the event again. But the next morning they did go look for tracks. Of course there was so many old tracks they would never be able to see new ones.
Both my father and grandfather were hard working down to earth men. They may not always have agreed on everything but neither one was prone to flights of fancy or imagination. If my Grandfather said he saw something, he saw something.
A few days later, on a clear October evening, the light was beginning to pale as the sun was almost down. It had snowed above timberline and the majestic Spanish Peaks, the Indians call Wahatoya, (Breasts of Nature) stood stark and beautiful in the background as they did every night. There are only a few days out of the year, in the spring and in the fall, when the sun will set exactly between the Twin Mountains and this was one of them. My father and brother were driving some cattle to the corral; they wanted to get them settled before it was completely dark. My sister and I were watching, always an exciting occasion, and we saw the cattle part for a few minutes and bunch up again. A cloud passed over the sun dimming our vision for a split second. At that moment she put her arm around me hugged me almost too tight. I struggled to free myself and looked at her, her face was white as the clouds in the blue sky. She was trembling so hard I thought she had gotten a chill. After we were all in the house she told us that she had seen the ghost rider. When the cattle parted, which we all noticed, she saw a man on horseback, with his reins slack and his head down as he rode through the herd. She said it was as if he were looking for something or else very tired. Even though no one else saw it nobody questioned what she claimed to see, there was no doubt that she had seen something. Naturally curious by nature, the next day I went out and scouted the area my self. Looking for something that didn't belong there among the rocks and grass. Walking along I tripped and fell, my hand landed on a piece of metal. Wiping the blood off I looked around to see what had scraped it. When I dug around I realized it was a rusted out handgun. After brushing it off I showed it to my father who said, "It's just and old gun that someone dropped. It's too rusty to be of any value, keep it if you want it."
"Do you think that it belonged to the rider Grandpa saw?" I asked
"No telling where it came from, don't let your imagination run away with an old mans ramblings. I don't want to hear any more about it." He answered. He wasn't usually that curt but it seemed as if he didn't want to talk about the ghost rider.
I put it away and never told anyone else that I had it.
After I grew up I researched the former owners of our ranch and found that there was one family that had lived there and had been accused of stealing cattle. When a vigilante posse caught up with them there was a terrible gun battle. The story goes that only one of the rustlers got away. Perhaps he was hurt and hid someplace to nurse his wounds, only to continue his nefarious occupation. Perhaps the gun battle did kill him and he is now riding for eternity looking for the companions that he abandoned. Since I still had the gun I found, I took it to a local gun historian and expert who told me it was probably made in the late 1800's. It was too old and rusty for him to make out the maker name, but from the size of the barrel he thought it might be a .45 caliber, a common caliber of the time. It could have been dropped by anyone but it is strange that it was there in the first place. The mysterious rider could have dropped it in another time and he was still looking for it.
However this is all conjecture because the rider was never seen or heard from again. Was it because I now had his weapon? I guess we'll never know.
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