Gold! Gold was everywhere, some of it lying right on top of the ground, waiting for someone to shovel it up. By the spring of 1907, so many miners had flocked into Skidoo, they figured the population would reach 10,000 before long. Skidoo was on its way to being a real city, with honky-tonks and bathtubs and telegraph wires.
As the town grew, miners hammered together rickety wooden cabins or lived in tents close enough to the gold mine that they wouldn’t waste time getting there. All of them itched to make a big strike—fast! To be the first ones to hit that thick vein of gold ore. Surely the very next swing of their picks would uncover riches beyond imagining.
Two men from Wyoming arrived to set up the Skidoo News, the first newspaper ever printed in Death Valley. A banker showed up with $2,000 in his suitcase, and in a corner of the town’s grocery store he established the Southern California Bank of Skidoo. Water from mountain springs finally started to flow through that long, long pipeline to quench the thirst of the citizens and run the mining machinery. Skidoo even had entertainment—a herd of trained goats and a troupe of educated fleas.
But not everything was rosy in Skidoo. A man named Hootch Simpson liked to roar around town menacing people with his guns. The citizens of Skidoo—who called themselves Skidoovians—considered Hootch a troublemaker, a rascal, a scoundrel, and a dirty dog.
One day in April of 1908, Hootch Simpson entered that bank in the corner of the grocery store. He told the banker to hand over $20. The banker said that Hootch didn’t have that much in his bank account, but Hootch yelled, “I don’t care. I want it anyhow.” When he didn’t get the money, he made such a huge fuss that the grocery store owner, whose name was Jim Arnold, threw him out of the place.
Three hours passed. Hootch visited a saloon, where he got madder and madder. Soon he went back to the store and said to the owner, “Jim, what do you have against me?”
Jim Arnold answered, “Hootch, I have nothing against you except that when you’ve been drinking, you are intensely ugly.”
At that, Hootch pulled out his gun and shot Jim Arnold dead.
Now, Jim Arnold was well-liked in town, while Hootch Simpson was considered a very bad character. Skidoo was still a frontier town, with no real law enforcement (this was almost a century before Death Valley became a national park.) Soon a group of angry Skidoovians got together and asked one another, “Why should we waste time on a jury trial when we know dang well what the outcome will be? Hootch Simpson, this worthless, no-good snake in the grass, has killed our upstanding citizen Jim Arnold. Hootch is guilty as sin. Let’s just put a rope around his neck and hang him!”
So they pulled Hootch out of the makeshift jail and marched him to a telegraph pole, where they hanged him high, leaving him up there long enough to teach a good lesson to any other bad characters who might be tempted to commit a crime in Skidoo. After they cut Hootch down, they decided that a nice burial would be wasted on a scoundrel like him. So they put his body into a cheap coffin made of pine and dumped it into an old mine shaft. There are lots of abandoned mine shafts all around here.
That might have been the end of the story, but it wasn’t….
Two hundred miles away, a reporter for the Los Angeles Herald heard about the shooting—but not about the hanging. He thought he ought to go to Skidoo to cover the trial for his newspaper. The reporter took his camera so he could get some good pictures for his paper, but when he reached Skidoo, he discovered that he’d got there too late. The citizens had taken the law into their own hands and had already hanged Hootch Simpson from the telegraph pole.
The reporter felt bad that he had missed the big story, and the townspeople felt bad, too, that they’d disappointed a big-city reporter. Then someone had an idea. Why not pull Hootch’s coffin out of the mine shaft and hang him again? That way the reporter—who had come all the way from Los Angeles—could get his photographs.
And that’s just what they did. For the second time, Hootch Simpson got hanged from a pole, even though he was already dead. The happy reporter took his photographs and returned to Los Angeles.
And that might have been the end of the story. But it wasn’t….
The town doctor, whose name was McDonald, became curious about Hootch Simpson. What would make a man like Hootch turn so mean and nasty and dangerous, he wondered. To satisfy his curiosity, Dr. McDonald crept out of his house in the middle of the night. At the old mine hole, he pulled up Hootch Simpson’s body once more. Then, in the interest of science, Dr. McDonald took Hootch’s head home with him to study it. Just the head, that was all. The rest of Hootch was returned to his grave in the abandoned mine shaft.
For years, Dr. McDonald kept Hootch’s skull on display in his office, where any other doctor who was passing by could examine it. Later, when Skidoo became a ghost town, the skull disappeared. No one knows what became of it.
Now, all these years later, Hootch Simpson’s ghost still lives in the old mine shaft—during the day. But at night it wanders around Skidoo looking for its lost head. You can hear Hootch moaning and howling and calling out on the wind, “What do you people have against me? Give me back my head! Oooooooh! I’ve lost my head!”
Jack exclaimed, “That’s about the dumbest ghost story I ever heard.”
“Except that it happens to be true,” Ashley told him. “Well, actually, most of it is true, but some parts of it might not be entirely true since the story got turned into a legend over the years. But most of it’s true! The ranger told me you can find it in lots of books. Except…well….” She looked a little sheepish. “I did make up one small part of it. But I won’t tell you which part.”
“That’s easy,” Jack said. “You made up about Hootch Simpson wandering around here searching for his head.”
Wrinkling her nose, Ashley said, “What I really think is that he’s looking for another head—anyone’s head! Like yours, Jack.”
“Or maybe yours! Ooooooh,” Jack moaned, mocking Ashley. “I’m a ghost, and I want Ashley Landon’s head.” Then, oddly, they did hear a moan, as the desert breeze churned itself into a wind. It blew through the dried-out old boards with a sound like the low notes of a cello. Grains of sand danced across the surface of the ground, raising dust all around.
“Looks like more dust devils might be forming,” Steven said. “We’d better get back into the Cruiser.”
“Wait, Dad, please,” Ashley begged. “Give me a few minutes to really look around, to imagine where everything used to be in the story I just told. I didn’t have enough time to see stuff, and I love this old place. I love everything about Death Valley.”
“Five minutes,” Steven told her. “I’ll give you five minutes while I pack up the camera. If this dust gets worse, we might have trouble seeing the road on our way down the mountain.”
“Ashley, take one of Jack’s two-way radios,” Olivia instructed, “and leave the other one here with me. Jack, you go with Ashley.”
“Do I have to?” he complained.
“Never mind, I’ll go,” Leesa said. “I owe her one for telling the story. Only I didn’t know it would be so gruesome.”
“Thanks, Leesa,” Ashley said, grabbing her hand. “Dad, don’t start counting the five minutes till we get a head start, OK?”
“I’m starting right now. One Mississippi, two Mississippi….”
Ashley and Leesa dashed off, hand in hand. In her free hand, Ashley waved the yellow-and-black two-way radio to show Olivia that she’d taken it.
When they were gone, Jack helped his father collapse the tripod and blow dust off the camera lenses, then pack them into their cases. “I got a couple good shots of these old mining structures,” Steven said. “Good thing I took them before the wind blew up, while the sun was still bright enough to light up the streaks on all that weathered wood.”
“Whew, this dust!” Olivia exclaimed. “I’m going to get back into the Cruiser. The walkie-talkie will work from inside the car, won’t it, Jack?”
“Don’t call it a walkie-talkie. That’s what they used to be called a long time ago when they didn’t work as well. This is a two-way radio, Mom, and yes it will operate from inside the Cruiser. Just remember—push down the button when you want to talk, but don’t push any of the other buttons.” Jack felt protective of his dual radios, because he knew how expensive they were. He wasn’t too happy about Ashley having one of them out there wherever she was, but he supposed she couldn’t really hurt it in five minutes.
The wind seemed to be blowing harder, driving grains of sand against Jack’s bare legs. He wished he’d worn his jeans, but even in February Death Valley was warm enough for shorts. As Jack and his father opened the Cruiser to put the camera equipment in the tailgate, they could hear Olivia saying, “Your time’s almost up, Ashley. You better start back.”
Ashley’s electronic voice answered, crackling with a lot of static, “Just one more minute, Mom. I can see something over there, but I’m not sure what it is.”
“Where’s Leesa?” Olivia asked into the handset. She waited for half a minute, and when Ashley didn’t reply right away, she asked again, “Ashley, can you hear me? I said, where’s Leesa?”
Still no reply. Jack came around to the front of the car and told his mother, “You’re probably doing something wrong. If you hold down the talk button when the other person is saying something, you won’t hear a word.”
“I’m not holding down the button. She’s just not answering. Ashley, Ashley, do you hear me? Come in, Ashley.”
In the moment of silence that followed, Jack said, “Let me try. Ashley Landon, this is your big brother telling you that you better answer—now!—because Mom’s starting to worry. Over.”
Steven said, “If she’s not answering, it might mean the batteries have gone dead.”
“Impossible, Dad. I put in fresh batteries just before we left home.” At that moment they did hear a voice, but it wasn’t coming through the two-way radio. The shouts sounded so distant it was hard to tell which direction they came from, especially since the wind made noise blowing through the old rafters.
“Is that Ashley yelling?” Steven asked. After a minute a figure began to appear through the dust, slowly, like a shadow, barely visible at first and then….
“It’s Leesa!” Jack yelled. “Ashley must be right behind her.” But when Leesa came closer, they could see that she was alone.
“I lost her!” Leesa cried. “She just disappeared! I got a stone in my shoe, and when I stopped to take it out—she was gone!”
Steven shouted, “We’d better find her, fast, before this windstorm gets worse! Jack, keep trying that two-way radio. Olivia, get the binoculars—both pairs. You and I will climb to that rise over there so we can see better. Ashley can’t be very far away—she’s only been gone a few minutes.”
Jack, too, climbed onto higher ground so there’d be less interference while he tried to make contact with the other radio. Speaking with his mouth right next to the little holes that worked like a telephone mouthpiece, he said, “Ashley, come in. Ashley, if you’re playing games and jerking us around because of that stupid ghost story, I’m gonna clean your clock good when you get back. And if you’ve lost my radio handset—“
Leesa told Jack,” She didn’t lose it. She was talking into it the last time I saw her.”
“So give me an answer, Ashley. Now!” he said. “Mom and Dad are really getting freaked. This isn’t funny.”
Nothing. Not a word. In a shaking voice, Leesa said, “I’m sorry now I asked her to tell that ghost story. All about death. Maybe this is a bad place.”
Soon Jack saw his mother running down the slope toward the Cruiser, which made him think he’d better get down there too. “Come on,” he told Leesa. “Looks like something’s happening.”
Olivia had opened the compartment between the two front seats and was pulling out the Landons’ cell phone. She told Jack, “We can’t see her anywhere. I’m scared she might have fallen into one of the old mine shafts. I’m calling 911.” Since the cell phone was connected to a no-hands speaker, Jack could hear both sides of the conversation:
“This is 911 responding. Please state your name and the nature of your emergency.”
“I’m Olivia Landon and my daughter is lost. She’s only eleven—”
“Where are you calling from, Ms. Landon?”
“From the old ghost town of Skidoo in Death Valley. Ashley could have fallen into an abandoned mine shaft, and that’s why her two-way radio isn’t working—”
“Ma’am, you’ve reached 911 in Inyo County at the Independence, California, center. I’ll have to relay your call to the main dispatch in San Bernardino, and they will then call Death Valley National Park, so there’s going to be some lag time. I suggest that you dial the Federal Emergency Communications Center directly. I’ll give you the number.”
“All right, but hurry!” Frantically, Olivia dug through her purse to find a pen and paper. She scribbled down the number, repeated it, and then punched in the numbers again.
By then Steven had reached the Cruiser. “Did you get someone?” he asked.
At the same time Leesa began to sob, “It’s all my fault. I should have stayed right beside her.”
In the confusion, Jack missed most of what was being said between his mother and the person on the other end of the line, until he heard, “Stay calm, Mrs. Landon. We’ll get a search-and-rescue team there as quickly as possible.”
“Should we start looking in the mine shafts?” Steven shouted into the phone.
The voice answered, “Definitely not! You don’t want to endanger anyone else in your group. The best thing to do is wait there for the search-and-rescue team. Keep your cell phone on so we can communicate with you.”
That made it suddenly real to Jack—Ashley hadn’t been joking around. She really was in trouble! His two-way radio handset had fallen out of the car into the dirt. As he picked it up and rubbed it against his T-shirt to clean it, he thought at first that he was still hearing the voice from the emergency number his mother had called. Then he realized that the two-way radio in his hand had begun to crackle with static. “Mom, Dad!” he yelled. “I think it’s Ashley.”
Instead, it was a rough male voice. “We have your daughter,” the voice said.
There must be some mistake, Jack thought, someone else getting on the line from another channel. As he turned up the volume, the voice repeated.
“We have Ashley Landon, and we’ll keep her until Leesa Sherman is returned to us. Do not call the police. Understand? Do not call the police.”