Ghost Stories of Montana

Montana remains a wilderness paradise with a relatively small human population. History here witnessed gold fever draw thousands of prospectors up into the Rockies in the 1860s, their boom towns just as quickly turning into ghost towns once the gold ran out. At the same time, cattlemen carved out ranches in the valleys and out on the high plains. That hardy breed is still here. American Indians fought great battles against the invaders and marked some of their last stands in Montana. In the two short centuries of recorded history in the region, a surprising number of ghost stories have been told. This book shares some of them: -Long-standing legends of the restless dead persist in the halls of Helena''s Caroll College. The blood of a dead, once drunken student, will not wash from the bathroom sink in St. Charles Hall, no matter how hard the custodians scrub. The college is still haunted by the spirit of a troubled young scholar who jumped from the top floor. And the ghost of a kindly nun has been known to lend comfort to distraught women residing in St. Albert Hall. -A camper in the Lewis and Clark National Forest encounters a terrifying apparition in the middle of the night. -Tireless still, Old Judge Theodore Brantley still haunts the stately Victorian home where he worked late into most of his nights in the last century. -Out on the windswept ground of the Little Bighorn battlefield, long-dead combatants continue to linger over the place where they waged their bloody and momentous struggle. -And there''s more

Dan Asfar has written about the history of the Old West and also has published nine collections of regional ghost stories. Asfar, who has a university degree in history, has traveled extensively across North America and has visited Australia and Mexico in researching tales of the paranormal.