A Ghost Story (among other things….)

Last week, our Sunday drive took us to an unexplored-yet-by-the-wallaces area of town.  It started when I complained to a neighbor that I can’t find anywhere to run around here and she asked if I had ever tried the old paved railway that leads up Spring Canyon.  This sounded curious indeed, so Sunday afternoon we drove the kids up to see what she was talking about.

Spring Canyon is just a mile or two outside of Helper, leading up one of the side canyons off of the main highway.  As it turned out, there used to be a mine up there, with a railroad that hauled coal to and from the mine.  Since it is no longer used, they paved over the tracks and made it into a great walking path to go exploring the canyon.  Perfect! It was actually a beautiful day for late February, so we headed on up.

Along the path we started noticing several really old remnants of structures that were probably old mining homes in the canyon.  So after our walk we got back in the car & decided to drive a little further up the canyon to do some exploring.  To our surprise, we stumbled upon a genuine ghost town  (or, after later research, several ghost towns).   There were TONS of old houses, buildings, sheds, bridges, all sorts of cool stuff. It was so much fun to explore.

This one is really hard to see (taken from Seth’s cell phone), but up on the hill there are at least 3 large homes or stores, or whatever they were once upon a time……)

An old staircase that leads to…….nowhere now :(

 

When we got home we looked online for information about Spring Canyon.  There was a lot of interesting stuff available.

This is a picture of the town of Rains, just one of several old mining towns that were located up the canyon. I found it on blog that belongs to a “ghost town chaser” if you will.  He travels around looking for old ghost towns to explore, and this was one they visited.  He did a fantastic write-up about the famous “White Lady”, apparently a well-known local ghost story.

Read it here.  Such a fun article.  I love a good ghost story.  I think most small towns have a White Lady somewhere in their history.  I remember as a child visiting the Logan Cemetery every year with my family and seeing the Weeping Woman statue.  She had a little “White Lady” tale of her own that my cousins and I loved to scare ourselves silly with.  And of course there was the White Lady of the Ogden cemetery that my friends and I tried to conjure up late one night in high school.  Oh dear…… the stuff kids do!

Anywho… if you have any interest in the history of this old town, or just want to hear a good ghost story, read that article I highlighted above.  Its super interesting stuff.

And that concludes our Sunday afternoon exploring for this week.  It was a good one I think.  I am loving learning so much and seeing so many new places that I would never have had the opportunity to explore had we not moved here.