SPOOKY RESEARCH
Every book I have written has a story behind it. That makes like most authors in that sense.
The story behind PROSPECTING FOR MURDER is probably the spookiest of them all.
If you’ve read the book, then you know already that the primary locale for the story is a small mining town named Harqua Hala. This was a real mining town. I first visited it in 1972 with two friends, Bob and Phil. We made an overnight campout in the town, which consisted of a falling down adobe building and a couple to tin-roofed wooden shack. At the edge of the ghost town was a cemetery that was somewhat kept up. Most of the markers in it were wooden crosses and piles of rocks. One was a concrete slab that bore the deceased’s name and the years of his life. Buried there was one Lester T. Higgins, who happens to be an important character in PROSPECTING FOR MURDER.
Now to get up to where we were camped you had no choice except to walk. No roads. You just climbed up the side of the hill, which was literally covered with loose gravel from the mine.
Bob, Phil, and I belonged to a tiny religious group that held séances and tried to communicate with folks on the other side of the veil. That is another story for another time. For this piece here, suffice it to say we held a séance high up on the side of the main hill where the mining had been done more than 50 years before. We had a tape recorder going just in case we heard something in the night.
We did the usual ritual that accompanies a séance, then waited for something to happen. Nothing did. Or so we thought until the next day.
Over breakfast we discussed the séance of the night before. Bob asked Phil and me if we had seen or heard anything. I couldn’t recall any sounds or sights, but Phil said he thought he heard somebody climbing up the side of the hill in all that loose gravel. Well, if that were so, then we would have caught it on tape. We turned on the recorder, and, yep, you guessed it, there were the sounds of someone climbing up that hill in that loose gravel. Crunch, crunch, crunch. The rhythm was almost regular. We played it over and over to make sure we weren’t imagining what we were hearing. Crunch, crunch, crunch. It was real all right.
Phil theorized we had probably stirred up a ghost from the cemetery down by the road into the town. We went home with that thought in mind.
Two years later I took Peg out to Harqua Hala on a Sunday drive. It hadn’t changed a bit since the last time I was there.
Twelve years after that Peg’s folks moved out to Kingman, Arizona, and she and our son Torry went along with them to help out. I followed a week later. We spent the better part of the month of January in Arizona. One of our little one-day excursions was to Harqua Hala. I thought Torry would like to see a real Old West ghost town, and I wanted to do the research for PROSPECTING FOR MURDER.
Much to our disappointment, all the buildings were gone. Just a few foundations remained. Oh, well. I made a map of the town’s roads and the mine shafts and the arrastra bed. We also took some photographs.
Besides the personal onsite research, I also used a book titled GHOST TOWNS OF ARIZONA. Great book. That spring I wrote the book.
Three years later Peg and I got into genealogy for the fun of it. We spent hundreds of hours at the Wisconsin State Historical Society in Madison, digging through old records, genealogy books, and history books. Peg came across a rather unique book that was a collection of accounts written by women who had actually lived in the Old West. One that particularly caught her attention was written by the wife of a mining engineer who had actually lived in Harqua Hala in 1912 at the time of my story for PROSPECTING FOR MURDER.
Now keep this in mind. Peg found this story three years after I wrote the book. Much to her surprise and mine, the lady’s account of Harqua Hala included the story about the murder of the Yuma County Sheriff’s deputy who was the local representative of law and order. Somebody – nobody ever knew because the killer was never caught – dry-gulched the deputy in the middle of the night. The murder of the deputy in PROSPECTING FOR MURDER also took place in the middle of the night. Spooky enough for you?
The story behind PROSPECTING FOR MURDER is probably the spookiest of them all.
If you’ve read the book, then you know already that the primary locale for the story is a small mining town named Harqua Hala. This was a real mining town. I first visited it in 1972 with two friends, Bob and Phil. We made an overnight campout in the town, which consisted of a falling down adobe building and a couple to tin-roofed wooden shack. At the edge of the ghost town was a cemetery that was somewhat kept up. Most of the markers in it were wooden crosses and piles of rocks. One was a concrete slab that bore the deceased’s name and the years of his life. Buried there was one Lester T. Higgins, who happens to be an important character in PROSPECTING FOR MURDER.
Now to get up to where we were camped you had no choice except to walk. No roads. You just climbed up the side of the hill, which was literally covered with loose gravel from the mine.
Bob, Phil, and I belonged to a tiny religious group that held séances and tried to communicate with folks on the other side of the veil. That is another story for another time. For this piece here, suffice it to say we held a séance high up on the side of the main hill where the mining had been done more than 50 years before. We had a tape recorder going just in case we heard something in the night.
We did the usual ritual that accompanies a séance, then waited for something to happen. Nothing did. Or so we thought until the next day.
Over breakfast we discussed the séance of the night before. Bob asked Phil and me if we had seen or heard anything. I couldn’t recall any sounds or sights, but Phil said he thought he heard somebody climbing up the side of the hill in all that loose gravel. Well, if that were so, then we would have caught it on tape. We turned on the recorder, and, yep, you guessed it, there were the sounds of someone climbing up that hill in that loose gravel. Crunch, crunch, crunch. The rhythm was almost regular. We played it over and over to make sure we weren’t imagining what we were hearing. Crunch, crunch, crunch. It was real all right.
Phil theorized we had probably stirred up a ghost from the cemetery down by the road into the town. We went home with that thought in mind.
Two years later I took Peg out to Harqua Hala on a Sunday drive. It hadn’t changed a bit since the last time I was there.
Twelve years after that Peg’s folks moved out to Kingman, Arizona, and she and our son Torry went along with them to help out. I followed a week later. We spent the better part of the month of January in Arizona. One of our little one-day excursions was to Harqua Hala. I thought Torry would like to see a real Old West ghost town, and I wanted to do the research for PROSPECTING FOR MURDER.
Much to our disappointment, all the buildings were gone. Just a few foundations remained. Oh, well. I made a map of the town’s roads and the mine shafts and the arrastra bed. We also took some photographs.
Besides the personal onsite research, I also used a book titled GHOST TOWNS OF ARIZONA. Great book. That spring I wrote the book.
Three years later Peg and I got into genealogy for the fun of it. We spent hundreds of hours at the Wisconsin State Historical Society in Madison, digging through old records, genealogy books, and history books. Peg came across a rather unique book that was a collection of accounts written by women who had actually lived in the Old West. One that particularly caught her attention was written by the wife of a mining engineer who had actually lived in Harqua Hala in 1912 at the time of my story for PROSPECTING FOR MURDER.
Now keep this in mind. Peg found this story three years after I wrote the book. Much to her surprise and mine, the lady’s account of Harqua Hala included the story about the murder of the Yuma County Sheriff’s deputy who was the local representative of law and order. Somebody – nobody ever knew because the killer was never caught – dry-gulched the deputy in the middle of the night. The murder of the deputy in PROSPECTING FOR MURDER also took place in the middle of the night. Spooky enough for you?
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