Meadow Lake Gazette, Issue 4
January 1992
Happy New Year readers! It has been a few months since my last issue but something has been brought to my attention. Lately, local children have been playing out at the abandoned mine on the east side of town. I recommend extreme caution. The mines that were the original income for this town have been abandoned for a reason. Children today are too young to remember when the mines first closed, but the events that preceded were tragic and remain unexplained to this day.
My grandfather, who passed a few years ago, worked those mines. He left that work when the factory opened up in the next town over, preferring to drive the hour out and back each day. He vowed never to return, and made his children and grandchildren swear to stay away. If he caught any of us kids playing in or near those mines after they closed, our backsides would be redder then a fresh tomato. Shortly before he died I convinced him to tell me what had him so scared of those mines.
It started as a normal day. My grandfather woke up early, before the sun had risen. My grandmother had his lunch pail waiting on the kitchen table. He walked the two miles from his house to the mine. The mine had already been going for decades and was deep. Lately, his coworkers had been getting sick. More than usual, and more than the typical coughing fits and pneumonia symptoms common to mine workers.
Some of the men had reported seeing and hearing things. People down the mine shafts that shouldn’t be there, but when they went further to investigate the people were gone. A few of my grandfather’s friends had to be admitted to the hospital for insanity. Some of them were never released. That day, they were down a few men and my grandfather was expected to work faster to make up for it.
He had only been digging for an hour or so that morning when he started hearing whispers. A woman, he said, whispering for him to help her. He thought it was strange. If someone was lost or hurt, they would be yelling for help, now whispering. He told himself it was a trick of the mine. Echos in the cave hitting in strange ways. He did his best to ignore it.
The whispering continued for a couple of hours. He was the only one in that part of the mine and would be in trouble with the supervisor if he wandered off looking for the source. Then, he heard the scream. The blood curdling wail of a woman. The only other time he had heard a scream like that was when a neighbor woman found the body of her young son after he had been trampled by a horse.
My grandfather didn’t hesitate then. He sprinted toward the source of the sound. It should have only taken him a minute or so to reach the end of the shaft the sound came from, but somehow he felt much longer. Like the shaft had extended farther into the mountain. The wailing continued, and my grandfather kept running. Only when he couldn’t run any longer. When his lungs felt like they would burst from the lack of sufficient air and his legs felt like they would give out under him did the wailing stop.
What he saw before him should have been impossible. He should have been at the end of the shaft. The workers assigned to it had been hospitalized the day before and hadn’t made much progress. Instead, the mine seemed to continue forward. Though his lantern could only illuminate so far, he estimated another mile or so of a tunnel that only should have extended a few hundred feet.
He took a step forward, reaching for a wall that should be there but wasn’t. A chill ran through his body, starting at the tip of his outstretched fingers and extending down his arm, his torso, his legs. For a moment he was frozen. Then a woman appeared before him. She looked familiar. Dressed in the same plain clothing as the other women from the town, but she didn’t appear to be all there. Her image fluttered before him like smoke from a fire.
“Help me,” she whispered, reaching out to him. Just before their hands touched, my grandfather screamed. He sprinted away, back down the tunnel and out of the mine, never to return. The next day, the got a ride with a neighbor to the new factory in the next town over and got a job there, where he stayed a loyal employee for forty years.
He refused to explain why he left. Would only give vague answers about his health. Maybe he thought no one would believe him. I wouldn’t have believed him either, if I hadn’t seen the fear in his face. Heard the tremble in his voice as he described the woman.
The mine closed down a few years later after a collapsed shaft killed ten workers. Every few years a child goes missing down there. Lost in the labyrinth of tunnels. Most make it back out, but some don’t. I ask you, please, stay out of those mines. They are not safe. Whether it is just the structure or something more sinister I don’t know.
Board it up, cave it in. Whatever it takes to keep people out.
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Alicia Coast 