Ghost Town (9 page)

Ashley gulped. She remembered her first wish— that Luke would put an arm around her shoulders and lightly kiss her lips. But how did he know? Her heart pounded. “Who are you?” she whispered.

Frightened by what she didn't understand, she strained to see his face in the growing darkness. Gripping her magic stone, she blurted out, “I wish I knew all about you.”

“No!” Luke shouted. He seemed upset. “No more wishes, Ashley!”

“Yes, I need to know!” Ashley cried. “I wish I could see you exactly as you are.”

A stream of moonlight burst through the clouds, and Ashley lifted her face.

There, directly in front of her, was a bleached skull with dead hollows where the eyes should have been. A few patches of dark hair still clung to what remained of the scalp.

“As…I… am,” a scratchy voice echoed.

A bony hand clutched her shoulder as the skull came closer.

Too terrified to scream, Ashley jerked away. She tried to run but tripped over tangled tree roots.

The skeleton came forward. It bent over her. “Wishes can come true,” the voice rasped.

Whimpering, trying to scramble away, Ashley reached into her pocket for the stone. It had performed magic, but not the kind she wanted. Even though the stone burned her fingers, she clung to it, holding it up so that the skeleton could see it. “I wish I had never met you!” she shouted at the skull.

With all her strength Ashley threw the stone into the darkness.

With a thump that knocked her breath away, she suddenly found herself in the hallway of the St. George Motel. Mrs. Blanton stood beside her, peering into her face.

“Are you all right, girl?” Mrs. Blanton asked. “I didn't mean to run right into you.”

Ashley leaned against the door frame of the prop room and breathed deeply, trying to steady herself. “I'm all right,” she said.

“Which way are you heading?”

For a moment Ashley struggled to remember. “I—I saw the open door and all the movie props inside the room. I think I was going inside to take a look.”

“Not everything in there belongs to the movie folk,” Mrs. Blanton said. She squeezed into the doorway next to Ashley and pointed to the photo on the far wall. “That's a picture of my little brother, Luke. It's about all I have left to remind me of him. He was a wild boy, always playing pranks that upset some of the neighbors around here. He wasn't a mean kid. He just liked to have fun. He liked excitement and always wanted something going on. And he liked to share the fun because he hated to be by himself. But one day when he was seventeen, he came home with a weird-looking stone. Looked just like an eye, it did. He told us he had discovered ancient mysticism.”

She sighed. “Soon after that, Luke went into the mountains alone and didn't return. His body was never found.”

“I'm sorry,” Ashley said.

“I still ache for him,” Mrs. Blanton went on. “To be alone, to die alone. Luke hated to be alone.”

Mrs. Blanton cleared her throat and dabbed at her eyes. With a last look at Luke's photograph, she turned and walked toward the motel office.

Ashley stood in the doorway a moment, staring at the boy in the photograph. High cheekbones, a strong, square chin, dark eyes that seemed to stare right into her own. Too bad he had disappeared. He
was certainly good-looking enough to have been a movie star.

As she shoved her hands into her pockets, Ashley was surprised that her new magic stone was no longer there. What had she done with it? She must have dropped it somewhere.

Oh well, it doesn't matter
, Ashley decided. After all, it wasn't really magic; it was only a stone.

In 1861 Mormon colonists left Salt Lake City to settle in southern Utah. Some of them established their homes on land close to the Virgin River under a rugged, majestic mountain known as Kinesava. The leader of the Mormon church, Brigham Young, told the settlers this would be Zion, their homeland. This is how Kinesava and more than 146,000 acres of wild, colorful, massive rock formations received the name they have today. Zion was established as a national park in 1919.

Nothing has been recorded to tell us how the town of Grafton was named, but some believe it was named after one of the original settlers.

The settlers brought with them flocks of sheep
and planted cotton. One colonist, hoping to take part in a new venture—the raising of silkworms— brought mulberry seeds and cuttings to her new home and established a small orchard. The silkworm eggs, imported from Asia, were sprinkled on shredded mulberry leaves from the orchard.

Silk production succeeded in the nearby colonies, but not in Grafton. The settlers were too busy defending themselves against Indian raids and the frequent flooding of the Virgin River to make a success of any of their projects. Even rebuilding the town on higher ground and building levees and canals didn't protect it from the heavy spring floods. Family after family left, until by 1930, Grafton was entirely deserted.

Films such as
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
, starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman, have been shot in Grafton, but now the remains of the town and its cemetery are inhabited only by memories and ghosts.

The town is privately owned, but it is open to those who wish to explore it.

To reach Grafton
, from Highway 15 out of St. George, drive approximately thirty miles on Highway
9 to Rockville. Then take the old bridge road in Rockville and drive about four miles until you reach the town of Grafton.

To learn more about Grafton
, contact the Washington County Travel Bureau, 1835 Convention Center Drive, St. George, Utah 84790, and ask for a copy of its tourist guide.

Web sites:

“Wind in the Sage: A Story of Utah Ghost Towns”:
www.kbyu.org/tv/cover-march97.html

“Destinations Utah, Great Ghost Towns of the West”:
www.azcentral.com/travel/destinations/ utah/ghostutah.shtml

Publications:

Ghost Towns of the West
, by Lambert Florin, Promontory Press, New York, 1992, pages 366–369.

Historical Guide to Utah Ghost Towns
, by Stephen L. Carr, Zion Books, Salt Lake City, 1972.

“I
've been hoping you'd soon discover the direction your life might take,” Dr. Randall Nelson said to his son, Mike. “When I was your age I had already developed a strong interest in history. You can see where it led me.”

Mike took his eyes from the pine forests that bordered the mountain road and looked at his father. He slid down in the passenger seat of his dad's car and groaned. “I'm only eleven, Dad. I've got lots of time to decide what I'm going to be when I grow up.”

“Of course you have,” Dr. Nelson said, and Mike winced at the deliberate patience in his father's voice. “But these are the years to explore ideas, Mike. That's what you should be doing, instead of spending so
much time on television and computer games. Discover new pathways. Search for new thoughts. Look for your purpose and goals in life.”

“I thought this was going to be a camping trip— for
fun
,” Mike grumbled.

Dr. Nelson threw Mike a quick glance before he looked back at the road. “Oh, it
is
, son. It is. I only thought, since we'd be alone for a while without distractions, we'd have a good chance to discuss your future.”

Mike edged up in his seat. His dad had switched to the defensive. Now was the time to get his mind going on a completely different track. “Tell me about this ghost town where we're going to stop,” he said.

Dr. Nelson's eyes brightened, and he smiled. “Bodie,” he answered. “What an exciting history Bodie has. Legend has it that in 1859 a Dutchman from New York state, who had come to California looking for gold, shot and wounded a rabbit. The rabbit dropped into a hole, and Mr. Body— Waterman Bill Body—dug into the hole to get the rabbit. What do you suppose he found?”

“The rabbit,” Mike answered. He wished his dad would get to the point.

“Gold!” Dr. Nelson said. “He discovered flakes of
gold. However, Mr. Body died a short time later in a snowstorm, so it wasn't until the mid-1870s that gold and silver mining became successful in Bodie.”

He chuckled, and Mike asked, “What's so funny?”

“Just an amusing footnote,” Dr. Nelson said. “Rumor had it that in the early 1860s a sign painter was hired to paint a sign for Body's Stables. He misspelled ‘Body.' Instead of spelling it ‘B-O-D-Y,' he printed it as ‘B-O-D-I-E,' and the town has been known as Bodie with an ‘I-E' ever since.”

Mike couldn't believe that story was funny enough to make his dad laugh. He sighed, then asked, “How long do we have to be in Bodie before we can leave for our camping trip in Yosemite?”

“Only long enough for me to get the information I'm after,” Dr. Nelson replied.

“How long is that?”

“I can't be exact.”

Mike turned and studied his father. “Dad,” he said, “we
are
going camping in Yosemite, aren't we?”

Dr. Nelson kept his eyes on the unpaved road. “Of course. That's what I said we'd do, but remember, I did tell you that first I needed to do some research in Bodie for the lecture I'm preparing. We'll stay in a Bridgeport motel—it's fairly near Bodie— for just a night or two before we head to Yosemite.”

Mike sighed. He should have known they'd be in Bodie a lot longer than a few hours. As Mike's mother often reminded him, his father, a highly respected professor of history at California State University in Sacramento, was dedicated to his work.

As far as Mike was concerned, his father didn't live in the twenty-first century. He lived somewhere in California back in the 1800s—his period of specialization—and he only came out for meals, family birthdays, holidays, and an occasional baseball game.

Dr. Nelson slowed the van and drove into a parking lot next to the visitors' center. “The Department of Parks and Recreation maintains what's left of Bodie as a California State Park,” he said. “There's a nice little museum in the visitors' center, and you can tour the remaining buildings. You'll find a hotel, the Odd Fellows Hall, and—”

“Dad! Enough history, okay?” Mike said. He opened the car door and climbed out, impatient to stand up and stretch.

Dr. Nelson shook his head in bewilderment as he joined Mike. “I can't understand why you aren't excited about history, Mike. Just look around you. This was once an active town that was filled with prospectors and miners and bandits and gamblers and dance hall girls and—”

“Bye, Dad!” Mike said. He'd had enough. Bypassing the visitors' center, where his father was headed, he wandered alone down Bodie's main street. No one was in sight—probably because it was so late in the day.

A few beat-up and weathered wooden buildings faced the main street, with gaps between them like missing teeth. A scattering of buildings lay beyond, where the other streets of the town must have been. It was hard for Mike to imagine anybody wanting to work and live in a dump like this.

Eventually he strolled up to the Boot Hill cemetery, on a hill south of the town. But when he saw his father busily copying names and dates from the array of tombstones, he quickly turned away. The last thing he wanted was to hear his dad going on and on about some of the people buried there and how they'd died.