And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolflike, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him.

Jack London, “The Call of the Wild”

Spirit Land: Stories from the Black Hills

In 1969, my dad got a job managing a sand-mining plant in the tiny town of Pringle, South Dakota. My dad had gone out to South Dakota to check it out and sent back a letter naming some aspect of the Black Hills that he thought would appeal to each of us. I still remember that for me, he wrote, “Annie will like the wildflowers here.” My dad built a frame for the bed of his pickup truck, and our horse Trigger and dogs Duke and Duchess rode out to South Dakota in the back of the pickup. A couple of my siblings rode out to our new home in the truck with my dad, while my mom drove the station wagon with the rest of us kids and our cats, who made the trip in a cat taxi made from two laundry baskets tied together.

In the Black Hills, we moved into a two-bedroom pink house that had a tin roof. It was the bunkhouse of a thousand-acre ranch called Mountain Ranch. My three sisters and I shared one bedroom, my parents had the other, and my three brothers slept on the screened porch on a triple bunk bed my dad had built out of PVC pipe and plywood. The house had no phone and no furnace, just a propane stove in the living room. We had to haul our water from a well. Once our water tasted really bad and my mom had to boil it before we could use it for drinking or cooking. My dad investigated and discovered a bunch of dead squirrels in our cistern.

My mom and siblings and me at the bunkhouse, Mountain Ranch, South Dakota, circa 1969. Left to right: Iris (on horse), Maggie, me, Randall, Betsy, my mom, Dan, and Thomas (on horse).

Although it must have been daunting for my mom to live in a place so rustic, for us kids, Mountain Ranch was a tremendously fun adventure. We felt like pioneers, and our house was deluxe compared to houses we visited. When we went to see some friends who were in the process of building their new house, someone had to use the bathroom. When my mom asked where the bathroom was, our friends pointed to an empty coffee can.

Lloyd and Marla, the ranchers who owned Mountain Ranch, told my dad that we could ride any of the horses that they kept at the ranch. The ranch had a bunch of outbuildings and, of course, a lot of land to explore. We were told to stay away from the root cellar and to be careful by the water cistern. Because there were rattlesnakes and sidewinders on the property, we had to wear cowboy boots when we were outside. We older kids also had to carry a jackknife with us. My dad taught us what to do if we saw a snake and also what to do if one of us was bitten by a rattlesnake. He said to make two small cuts around the bite, suck the venom out, and spit it on the ground. Then we were supposed to run for help. We never did see a snake at Mountain Ranch, although we did see sidewinder tracks in the sandy driveway when we made our nearly mile-long trek to get the mail, water canteens and sandwiches in tow. The scariest creature we encountered at Mountain Ranch was a huge spider on our bedroom wall that was the color of dust and had a body the size and texture of a milkweed pod.

My brothers and sisters and I spent the summer mostly outside, riding the horses, playing pioneer games, and prospecting for gold in the sandy driveway using an old pie pan. We discovered an injured magpie and nursed it back to health. Our dad told us magpies could learn to talk, and so we often went into the old building where we kept the bird and tried desperately to get it to say our names, hello, hi, or anything at all. The magpie recovered after a few weeks and flew away one day without saying a word.

My dad occasionally hunted on our land, shooting deer for us to eat. He shot a wild turkey for our first and last Thanksgiving in the house, right before we moved to town. And my mom and dad joined a square-dancing club while we lived at Mountain Ranch. They would bring my youngest siblings over to Lloyd and Marla’s. My mom’s dress was blue and white, with sparkly silver rickrack trim. My dad wore a new cowboy hat and a nice Western shirt. They taught us the square-dance moves they learned, and we had square dances and polkas in our living room to the music of the Chmielewski Funtime Band. We also said the rosary as a family while living at Mountain Ranch. I liked the drama and ritual of saying the rosary together, and I felt like I was getting a leg up on religion, which was good, as I would be making my first communion in the next school year. None of us experienced any ghostly activity at Mountain Ranch, but I did have occasional moments of luminescent happiness that I have been able to return to throughout my life, a transcendent awareness of how magical and good life is. I remember being struck by how cool it was to be exactly where I was in the world and in my life, with my family and our animals and the land. I was keenly aware of how sad it would be when things changed. We knew that we would have to leave Mountain Ranch and move into town before winter, and that probably made our summer there more poignant.

When school started that fall, we older kids rode into Pringle with our dad and then caught the school bus to Custer, which was the nearest town that had a school. There were five of us kids piled in the pickup truck, with the two youngest kids sitting on the laps of the older kids. We stayed at Mountain Ranch until right after Thanksgiving, then moved to Custer.

All of us in my family agree that the Black Hills have a spiritual power that is palpable. Over the last thirty years, any of us who have gone out to the Black Hills have made the pilgrimage to Mountain Ranch. In the early 1980s, I was still married to John, Molly and Jack’s dad, and we vacationed in the Black Hills. When we stopped at Mountain Ranch, a man carrying a shotgun met us in the driveway. He got a lot friendlier when we told him that I had lived in the house a decade earlier and even let us take a few pictures. I was dismayed to see a sewer pipe sticking straight out the bathroom window that apparently emptied into the driveway. But I didn’t mention that to the man with the gun.

My brother Thomas made a stop at Mountain Ranch on a long road trip he took after finishing pharmacy school in the summer of 1986. He stopped in to see Marla, and she mentioned that some cult people were living in the area. She told Thomas he could drive up to Mountain Ranch if he liked, as no one was living there. He said he remembers the driveway being very rutted and rough, and it was a bit of a struggle even for the big Catalina, a beast of a car that my dad had gotten at a police auction. According to Thomas:

The house looked rough—weeds grown up everywhere, and the door off the hinges. It was really hot and still, and I remember a lot of mosquitoes or gnats buzzing around, so it was kind of quiet and glum. There were no other vehicles parked anywhere. As I walked into the old house and entered the living room, right in the center of the floor I saw two new-looking sleeping bags side by side—turned open like someone had just jumped out of them. I never saw anyone and am not sure if anyone saw me. I decided not to stay long after that! It had a much different feel than I had for it in my memories—even the photos I took from the stop turned out depressed and mismatched. Guess I had in mind nostalgic and rustic and just found neglected and abandoned—perhaps not completely abandoned! I have such great memories of that summer we lived there (other than the longest week ever of church school in Pringle).

In 2006, my mom and dad, my son Jack, and I were out in the Black Hills to consult with a natural healer. When we finally found Mountain Ranch, it was almost unrecognizable, but in a good way, thankfully. There had been a lot of rain that spring, and everything was greener than it had ever been when we lived there. The land had been divvied up, but not too much. There were a few more rustic houses in what had been our thousand-acre paradise, but they looked like they belonged there. We drove by Lloyd and Marla’s old place and were surprised and delighted to find Marla out watering her flowers. She must have been in her eighties by then. She remembered my mom and dad and the square dancing. She told us Lloyd had passed away. My dad asked her if she ran her place all by herself, and she said, “Oh, all I’ve got now is a few cows, sheep, goats, chickens, cats, and a dog.” Weirdly, at the time, Warren Jeffs, the polygamist sect leader, had bought up a bunch of land behind Marla’s house. She told us the authorities had been out to talk to her, but she was unwilling to move at this point in her life. My dad asked her if she was worried, and she laughed and said, “Naw—what would they want with an old lady like me?” She said she believed that it would all work out all right. We were relieved when the FBI apprehended Jeffs in Las Vegas a few months later.

When we moved from Mountain Ranch into town, we had looked at a few unusual places before finding the house we bought in Custer. I love it that my mom and dad were open to nontraditional possibilities, like considering buying a one-room country schoolhouse for us to live in. My mom loved the schoolhouse because it had a loft with wooden steps leading up to it and a big blackboard on one wall. My dad decided it needed too much work to turn it into usable home space for our family of nine. Another house we looked at was an abandoned Victorian mansion at an intersection on Custer’s main street. My parents decided the location was too busy, so we kept looking. The people who did buy the mansion turned it into a haunted museum of terror, called Monster Mansion, which we toured. I got so scared during the tour I literally froze at the top of the staircase and could not move. The actor propped against the wall at the bottom of the steps had to take off his mask before I could come down the stairs and run past him. The house my parents ended up buying was on the edge of a Native American reservation. It had a circular driveway with a picnic area inside a teardrop-shaped fence. Inside the fence, someone had built a hexagonal picnic table around a pine tree. The driveway looked like a magical road. It had flakes of mica and both rose and white quartz that sparkled in the sunlight. My dad built an addition for the house and, using painted two-by-fours, he extended the roofline in a way that framed some pine trees and incorporated them right into our house design. Behind our house were pine tree woods with the black boulders for which South Dakota is known. In our horse pasture, there was a big gray rock that we called Elephant Rock. The small boulder beside it was Baby Elephant Rock. Back behind our house was a maze of boulders that created the effect of many rooms and hallways with dried pine-needle floors. That was Castle Rock. My brothers and sisters and I would ride our bikes to nearby French Creek, a small, hidden-away stream, and have picnic lunches. I believe the drama and beauty of the Black Hills and the freedom we had as kids to explore our surroundings opened me up and attuned me to the natural world.

The really creepy thing about our house in Custer was that there were spiders everywhere—in the sink, in the tub, on the walls, and on the ceilings. My dad said it was because the house didn’t have a basement, only a crawl space. Before my dad put the addition on the house, Iris, Betsy, Maggie, and I shared a bedroom. We three younger sisters had a triple bunk bed, and as the oldest, I had the top bunk, which was only about a foot and a half away from the ceiling. One morning, I woke up to a big black spider right above my face. I ducked down under the covers and called for help, but no one heard me. I finally had to work myself down to the far end of my bed while still under my blanket and escape that way.

I usually didn’t feel scared at our house in Custer, although it is where I had the first really dramatic ghost encounter of my life. I was home alone because I was sick and had stayed home from school. My mom had gone into town to pick up my brothers and sisters. I was dozing in my mom and dad’s bed when I heard noises that sounded like a big party was going on—talking and laughter, glasses clinking, the sounds of people moving around. I got scared, since I was pretty sure I was home alone, so there was no reason for the noises I was hearing. I got out of bed, but when I tried to open the bedroom door, it wouldn’t open. I went back to bed for a minute, then it occurred to me that maybe my mom had gotten home and everyone was in the kitchen, having an after-school snack without me. I jumped out of bed, and this time, my parent’s bedroom door opened easily. I walked past the bathroom and through the utility room, coming in the back way to join everyone in the kitchen, but when I opened the door, the kitchen was empty and silent. My stomach dropped. Just an instant before, it had sounded like there was a roomful of people on the other side of the door. I called out, “Mom?” There was no answer. Now really scared, I walked into our living room, which was sunny and bright at that time of day. I sat on the couch, looking all around me as I said the only prayer I could think of, “Jesus Loves Me.” There was a big picture window in our living room, from floor to ceiling, and in the afternoon, you could see the dust motes floating in the bright sunshine. I started watching the dust particles when I noticed something odd happening—the specks of dust were beginning to shake and shimmer and take a human form. At first, I thought it might be my guardian angel or Jesus coming to help me, but then I realized the shimmering figure looked like a man standing in the air about a foot above the ground. I ran outside and held on to our newest dog, Lobo, until my mom got home. Then I started to cry. I never saw or heard anything else that seemed ghostly at our house, but with our big family, I was probably never alone there either.

Iris saw a ghost at our house in Custer too, even before I did. She had gotten up early, while it was still dark, to try to finish a paper that was due that day. She was going to work at the kitchen table and turned on a light in the living room as she walked through. She didn’t turn on the kitchen light right away, though there was light in the table area shining through the doorway from the living room. She said she was still pretty sleepy, so the first thing she did was lie down on the bench and shut her eyes for a few minutes. (My dad made our kitchen table, and instead of chairs, he made long benches to go with it.) When Iris opened her eyes, she saw a large black cat with glowing orange eyes sitting under the table, about a foot and a half from her face, looking at her. She said that she and the cat stared at each other for three or four seconds, then it vanished. It didn’t seem like she was dreaming, because seeing the cat jolted her into a state of high alertness, and the cat was still very vividly there. Iris decided then to go back to bed. She said that, although the cat didn’t seem to have any threatening intentions, she didn’t feel like staying in the kitchen alone. Iris can’t remember the outcome of not getting her homework done.

My youngest brother Sam was born while we lived in the Black Hills. Iris and her friends had gotten hold of a Ouija board and used to play around with it, asking if certain boys at school liked them, which teachers they would get in the next school year, and things like that. My mom was expecting at the time, and so Iris and her friends inquired about the baby’s gender and name. The Ouija board said that the baby would be a boy and my parents would name him Sam. When they got the information, we all ran to my mom to see if they were going to name the baby Sam if it was a boy. My mom said no, they were thinking of Shannon for a girl, and they didn’t have a name picked out yet for a boy. A few months later, Sam was born. When we asked my mom about Sam’s name, she said she didn’t even remember us asking her about it and she wouldn’t name a baby something based on a Ouija-board prediction. She said that she and my dad had chosen the name because Sam’s birthday was close to the feast day for St. Samuel, a Catholic martyr.

The only other weird thing from Sam’s toddler years is that my mom got him a Bozo the Clown doll that none of us liked. I don’t know exactly why, but it seemed menacing—its face was too animated or something. Sam threw the doll in the closet and said he hated it. No one played with the doll for thirty years—it was in with all the other toys in my mom and dad’s toy closet, but all of the grandkids in our family, starting with Molly and Jack, had the same negative response to the clown doll that Sam did. Molly called it the devil doll. When I was helping my mom go through some closets at her house a few years ago, we decided to get rid of Bozo. We were going to give the doll to Goodwill, but after thinking about it, we decided to just throw it away—which is never done in my environmentally thrifty, reduce-reuse-recyle family. My mom and I just didn’t think some other kid should be saddled with such a creepy thing.

In 1971, my dad found a good job back in Minnesota. Although we were sad about leaving the Black Hills and our friends, we knew we’d be returning to both new adventures and familiar faces. So we packed up again and returned to St. Paul, the heart of family gatherings and Irish parties.