|
Legends Home
Site
Map
What's New!!

American History
Ghost Towns
Ghostly Legends
Historic People
Native Americans
The Old West
Photo
Galleries
Roadside
Attractions
Rocky Mtn Store
Route 66
Travel
Destinations
Treasure Tales
Legends Blog
Free E-Newsletter
Facebook
Fanpage
Twittering

Contact Us
Please report
broken links, missing pictures, or other problems online by clicking
HERE or send us an
email. Thanks!
| |
|
|
|
BLACK
HILLS LEGENDS
Banshee Of The Bad Lands |
|

|
|
By
Charles M. Skinner |
|
"Hell, with the fires out," is what the Bad Lands of
Dakota
have been called. The fearless Western nomenclature fits the place. It is
an ancient sea-bottom, with its clay strata worn by frost and flood into
forms like pagodas, pyramids, and terraced cities. Labyrinthine canons
wind among these fantastic peaks, which are brilliant in color, but bleak,
savage, and oppressive. Game courses over the castellated hills,
rattlesnakes bask at the edge of the crater above burning coal seams, and
wild men have made despairing stand here against advancing civilization.
It may have been the white victim of a red man's jealousy that haunts the
region of the butte called "Watch Dog," or it may have been an Indian
woman who was killed there, but there is a banshee in the desert whose
cries have chilled the blood that would not have cooled at the sight of a
bear or panther.
|

A bleached skull in the Bad Lands of
South Dakota.
This image available for
photographic prints and
downloads
HERE! |
|
By
moonlight, when the scenery is most suggestive and unearthly, and the
noises of wolves and owls inspire uneasy feelings, the ghost is seen
on a hill a mile south of the Watch Dog, her hair blowing, her arms
tossing in strange gestures.
If war parties,
emigrants,
cowboys, hunters, any who for good or ill are going through this
country, pass the haunted butte at night, the rocks are lighted with
phosphor flashes and the banshee sweeps upon them. As if wishing to
speak, or as if waiting a question that it has occurred to none to
ask, she stands beside them in an attitude of appeal, but if asked
what she wants she flings her arms aloft and with a shriek that echoes
through the blasted gulches for a mile she disappears and an instant
later is seen wringing her hands on her hill-top. Cattle will not
graze near the haunted butte and the
cowboys keep aloof from it, for the word has never been spoken
that will solve the mystery of the region or quiet the unhappy
banshee.
The creature has a companion, sometimes,
in an unfleshed skeleton that trudges about the ash and clay and
haunts the camps in a search for music. If he hears it he will sit
outside the door and nod in time to it, while a violin left within his
reach is eagerly seized and will be played on through half the night.
The music is wondrous: now as soft as the stir of wind in the sage,
anon as harsh as the cry of a wolf or startling as the stir of a
rattler. As the east begins to brighten the music grows fainter, and
when it is fairly light it has ceased altogether. But he who listens
to it must on no account follow the player if the skeleton moves away,
for not only will it lead him into rocky pitfalls, whence escape is
hopeless, but when there the music will intoxicate, madden, and will
finally charm his soul from his body.
|
|
|
|
About the Author: Charles M.
Skinner (1852-1907) authored the complete nine volume set of Myths and
Legends of Our Own Land in 1896. This tale is excerpted from
these excellent works, which are now in the public domain.
Also See:
Legends, Myths &
Campfire Tales of the American West
Ghostly Legends
Legends,
Myths & Tales of the Native Americans
|
|
|
From the Rocky Mountain General Store
Discoveries
America South Dakota DVD -
Black Hills, Mt. Rushmore,
Crazy Horse Memorial, Custer State Park and Buffalo Roundup, Wall Drug in
Wall, the Pioneer Auto Show in Murdo, Hansen Carriages in Letcher, Laura
Ingalls Wilder’s childhood home in De Smet, Terry Redlin Art Gallery in
Watertown and the Corn Palace in Mitchell, the World’s Largest Pheasant in
Huron also home to “the city of murals."
More ...
|
| |
|