BODIE, CA GHOST TOWN - Voice To Voice EVP #15

BODIE AND ITS OBLIGING MINERS

Bodie, CA is a public location and part of the National Park Service.  Recently a friend and I attended a paranormal event in Nevada, and on the way we stopped at this former gold mining camp, and now ghost town.

The town itself is in the state of ‘arrested development’, meaning the effort isn’t to preserve, so much as conserve the location.  To be honest, you really can’t restore and preserve a former gold rush town, you would end up replacing everything eventually, so the National Park Service has taken the angle that it is more important to maintain what was and show visitors how the town looked when it was abandoned.

Established in 1859, Bodie took a number of years before it was successful, and it wasn’t until 1879 that the gold mining boom took off around it and the population swelled to 5,000 to 7,000 residents.

At one point there were over 2,000 buildings including having maintained its own ‘Chinatown’ (along with several hundred Chinese miners), and even some opium dens!

A fire sometime after 1920 (and then the population was a mere 120) took out most of the buildings, leaving only a small amount that remain today in the park.

We decided to check out the town and see if any residents were still around and if they were loyal to Bodie and its history.

Looking around Bodie, one only has a few actual buildings that you are allowed inside, as frustrating as this is, I also understand the setup, all that traffic would eventually wear and tear on already 150 year old buildings.

One building that was open by default was Moyle’s storage, a stone building which used to have a basement level and was now a mere half structure with wasp nests adorning the rafters inside what remains of its roof.

Another was the church, which was surprisingly in good shape and you can see the craftsmanship on the outside of the building and the attention that went into it.  Here I was able to obtain an EVP that goes into a small and unusual category of recordings that sound unlike anything else.  It does not sound like a whisper or a growl, or even a faint vocal noise, this one sounds like someone connecting via telephone or some communication device, somewhere.  It is of a woman and I will not tell you what she says, that is for you to guess if you watch the video below, but she is clear and precise and answered my question as I stood inside the doorway of the church. There was a wire barricade to leave the church intact (dust and all and this made me happy; it shows the commitment by the NPS).  I have received a number of EVP’s that sound like this one over the last few years and lately more and more of them.  Another similar was recently in the old Tonopah Cemetery (Tonopah was a silver mining town in Nevada).

Moving onward we went into one small house called “The Miller House”, this was available to the public to enter and you could look in each room and see it left intact when the building was abandoned.  The kitchen and other smaller rooms were wire barricaded, but you could see each clearly.  Here I said hello and was greeted by a man who didn’t seem to mind that people were coming and going inside the small house.

We did scout the local cemetery, there are 3 total, and the park ranger or volunteer we spoke to said that they have been excavating Chinese graves up on the hills above the town, so this could mean another graveyard covered in time. There was a graveyard for Union miners, and non-Union miners, and also for regular townsfolk.  I asked a lot of questions, but nobody seemed to respond in this particular location.  I have my own personal doubts about doing EVP in cemeteries in general, if you are dead, why on earth would you hang out in a local cemetery?  Seems like overkill to me.  Then again, maybe they are looking for someone else’s grave, not their own, or just merely looking like we are?

So next time you are in the area, be sure and stop by Bodie, CA a quiet ghost town at the end of a long dirt road.

A. Anderson