Sandon, Slocanada, 21 May 2018

It’s said that the ghost of a little girl haunts
The museum’s basement stairs. Daughter
Was a bit spooked herself the first time
I took her down there to see the recreation
Of the miners’ lives in the silver mines.
Mannequins still give her the jumps, especially
Mannequins in shadow. She was mistaken
For a ghost herself once, far from here,
Near Death Valley, at the age of three.
That, too, was at a former miners’ hotel,
Although one still run as a hotel as well
As a peculiar museum. The girl ghost there
Was said to haunt the columned portico
At dusk. Daughter came running down
Through the columns right at dusk, when
No one else was checked in but us, and scared
The bejeesus out of the janitor who looked up.
Here there’s hardly five buildings left standing
Of a boomtown that once crammed thousands.
The creek in which the silver was first found
Rips through rockfall and bare foundations.
It’s a fact that ghosts thrive in the absence
Of good record keeping, and most stories
Bear more resemblance to each other than
To any historical personage claimed to once
Have been them, but why a girl ghost here?
Scarcely any families ever here at all, and if
One checks the surviving graves, so to speak,
In the mossy, over-wooded cemetery, it’s all
A crowd of young men’s names, with a few
Middle-aged miners thrown in. If anyone
Would be expected to haunt this memorial,
You’d think it’d be the ghost of some young man,
Crushed by a slide, dead of disease, murdered
In a petty dispute. Plenty of candidates, then.
But a girl? People are just more spooked
By the plaintive, pathetic ghosts of children.
Still, on one other visit, daughter pointed
To one of the poorly focused archival photos,
A scene of the chaotic Main Street now a stream,
Circa the turn of the twentieth century, and
Asked, “Who is she, Papa?” Sure enough,
To the side of the muddy, horse-filled street
Of false front banks, saloons, and hotels,
Lined with hordes of dark-clothed men in caps
And hats, beards and mustaches, and beneath
The heavy hanging clusters of telegraph wires,
One girl in a white frock with a large white bow
On her dark hair looked toward the camera
From her perch on the rickety boardwalk.
Maybe one has to be singular to get to be a ghost.