> File this under legend — but it ran as a true story in the 1903 Kemmerer Camera, and that's part of the fun.
The paper ran it under a headline you don't forget: "Ghost Helps a Prospector." The prospector was a man called Old John Willis, and his claim was this: a gold strike, rich and real, and he'd been led to it by the ghost of a woman named Lucy — a lost love who, he said, "has been with me in the spirit for more than twenty-five years."
He named the mine the Haunted Lucy. Naturally, folks figured he'd gone soft in the head. A ghost? A dead sweetheart pointing the way to gold?
And then he opened the sack. A big bag, nearly full of fat nuggets — the kind assayers up in Butte, Montana, examined and didn't laugh at. Willis had just come back from a long stay in the Blue Mountains of Oregon, and the gold was the gold.
Was it Lucy? Nobody can say, and that's the honest answer. The gold was real. The ghost is a story. The space between the two is exactly where a tale like this lives forever.