Old newspapers are a great source of bizarre stories, and I’ve dug up a good few from the archives of local and regional dailies over the years. This story is a classic, and so I thought I'd share…I’d like to take you on a journey through time and space – specifically to the town of Beatty, Nevada, USA. The date is Saturday, December 21, 1907, and we’re standing outside the busy offices of The Beatty Bullfrog Miner, the town’s popular broadsheet newspaper. Both the editor and his chief reporter are shaking their heads in bewilderment.
Before we examine why, let me tell you something about the town of Beatty. It was founded in 1900 by the Bullfrog Mining District to accommodate the gold and silver miners flooding into the area during the Great Boom, as it was called. The mining company, the town and the newspaper were all named after the nearby Bullfrog Hills.
Although Beatty was a new town, it had already accumulated a wealth of spooky stories and eerie tales. Most of them relating the barren hills and mountains which locals often avoided – particularly after darkness fell. Many of these stories had been written up in The Bullfrog Miner, making the residents even more wary.
The headline in The Bullfrog Miner that day read, “Man Dragged 500 Ft”. The story gave a strange account – one of many – which had The Miner’s editors and reporters baffled.
Bill Keyes was an adventurer and prospector. During one trip in the hills he stopped at some "tule holes" for water. Tules are actually the large bulrushes that surround many pools and lakes in Nevada.
Keyes knew that the area was renowned for its paranormal happenings and had been so for the last three centuries. Still, he wasn’t superstitious and decided to pitch his tent for the night. It wasn’t long before a sequence of strange events captured his attention, the first being the mysterious appearance of strange, dancing lights in the adjacent valley. Keyes watched, fascinated, as they shot through the air, twisting and turning at bizarre angles.
Then he heard voices. The air became filled with unearthly moans and groans, bizarrely interspersed with the sounds of bullfrogs croaking, even though, despite the name of the mountain range, there were none in that vicinity. Eventually exhaustion forced him into a slumber
The next morning as Keyes yawned, blinked, stretched and opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was the sunrise. He was no longer in his tent. Alarmed, he jumped up and looked around him. He was amazed to see a furrow in the sand where both he and his bedroll had been dragged the distance of 500 feet whilst he slept.
Someone – or something – had managed to drag the sleeping prospector a large distance without rousing him. Who or what had done this, and why?
Keyes decided that discretion was the better part of valour and headed for the nearby town of Rhyolite. Here he bumped into the editor of The Bullfrog Miner, and blurted out his story. Seeing a good headline in the making, the editor quickly pulled out his notebook and pencil.
On December 21, the residents of Rhyolite, Bullfrog, Beatty and other towns of Nye County, Nevada read Keyes’s account.
"I am telling the truth when I say I was dragged across the Wash, and heard a bunch of unearthly and disturbing sounds”, he attested.
A visit to the nearby town of Rhyolite will uncover some other mysteries of the Wild West which are just as intriguing. Actually, the entire Bullfrog area was rumoured to be haunted. Rhyolite is now a shadowy ghost town, whereas a century ago it boasted a population of 10,000, an opera house, factories, saloons, restaurants and casinos. Now, the only things that move in Rhyolite are the dusty balls of tumbleweed that blow in from the desert.
Native Americans had been aware for centuries that paranormal events always seemed to take place around the aforementioned tule holes, and some avoided them. The bodies of prospectors and miners were regularly found around tule holes, often without any obvious signs as to why they had died.
On one occasion, the Bullfrog miner “Nevada” Henry Gould and some colleagues were returning from a prospecting expedition. They were heading for Rhyolite and had stopped at a tule hole to fill their canteens with water.
As they neared the waterhole they noticed a pack of coyotes acting strangely. They scattered the wild dogs and then saw the object of their morbid curiosity; the well-attired corpse of a fellow miner or prospector. How he died remains a mystery to this day. The next day, The Bullfrog Miner and other local papers carried the story, and both wives and mothers grew more uneasy when spouses and sons were out prospecting. Not until the Gold Rush ended did the body count begin to drop, I've been told, although how true this is I really don't know.
Rhyolite itself was finally abandoned, although Paramount Studios and other film companies have since used the old town as a backdrop for a number of films. The remains of the jailhouse are said to be haunted by the ghost of a murderer called Amargosa Jack, whose appearance is said to be preceded by the smell of stale whisky.
Rhyolite had a popular red light district, although city officials made sure it was strictly cordoned off from the more respectable streets and boulevards. To this day, visitors sometimes say they can hear the sound of a honky-tonk piano playing and laughter emanating from the now deserted taverns and saloons.
Several buildings in Rhyolite are in a reasonable state of repair, including the once grandiose railway station and the famous “Bottle House”. The Bottle House was a residence built by its owner. Instead of bricks or clapboard he utilised 50,000 empty beer bottles collected from nearby taverns. The Bottle House is currently under restoration.
Apart from these, however, the rest of the town consists of crumbling walls and creaking timbers. With every passing year a little bit more of Rhyolite quite literally bites the dust.
But the ghosts of Rhyolite remain. Echoing, clopping noises have been heard in the Main Street, as if the horses that trod there decades ago are still following the same rout in an eternal loop.
There is a glimmer of hope for Rhyolite, however. For the last thirteen years there has been a Rhyolite Resurrection Festival organised. It is hoped that more of the buildings can be restored, or at least preserved, and a visitors’ centre opened.
Who knows; one day people may move back to Rhyolite. Once again the bars may ring with the sounds of laughter and clinking glasses, and the ghosts of ages past may have living company. Till then, the current residents seem quite happy to stay there – even if they can’t always be seen.
The biggest mystery, however, is what dragged that old miner through the brush that day.
Know of any cryptids that fit the bill?
In response to a legal settlement won by the Center for Biological Diversity, this Monday the Interior Department sent a polar bear habitat-protection proposal to the White House for review. The proposal should be made public later this month and must by finalized by next June. We expect it will encompass millions of acres of sea-ice in Alaska threatened by global warming and oil and gas exploration.
In response to a Center for Biological Diversity lawsuit, this Wednesday the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service protected 5,855 square miles of Alaska's coastal waters as "critical habitat" for the endangered Alaskan sea otter. The resplendent-furred creature, federally protected thanks to a Center petition, has been declining fast due to global warming and overfishing, and it's threatened by proposals to open Bristol Bay in the Bering Sea to oil development. While the new habitat protections are a great step, they don't protect deeper waters and areas further from shore that the otter needs. The Center will make sure those areas are protected so the playful mammal can recover.
Showing anew the Clean Air Act's crucial role in fighting climate change, last week the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed another step toward curbing greenhouse gas pollution under the Act. The proposal will require big industrial facilities that annually emit more than 25,000 tons of greenhouse gas to get construction and operating permits covering those emissions -- which must show the use of the best emissions-control and energy-efficiency measures. This is a good step, but the administration should be moving more quickly to make full use of the Clean Air Act now. The Center for Biological Diversity (and you, our supporters) worked hard to tell the Senate to maintain the Clean Air Act in its climate legislation -- and it did. But the Act could still be gutted in the final version of the bill.
This week the Center for Biological Diversity and Turtle Island Restoration Network put the Interior Department on notice that we're soon to sue over its refusal to protect the emperor and rockhopper penguins. The emperor is threatened by the loss of its melting sea-ice habitat, as well as declining food availability in the warming ocean off Antarctica. Krill, an essential food source for both emperor and rockhopper penguins, has declined by as much as 80 percent since the 1970s. But after the Center petitioned to protect 12 of the world's most imperiled penguins -- including emperors and rockhoppers -- the Bush administration declared global warming impacts too "uncertain" to warrant emperor protection, also denying safeguards to the northern rockhopper and most southern rockhoppers.
Hours after California's Kern County Board of Supervisors approved the building of two new cities (that's right, entire cities) smack in the middle of essential condor habitat, the Center for Biological Diversity began preparing legal briefs to save the endangered California condor and one of the last unprotected wilderness areas in Southern California. 
One the biggest endangered species controversies of 2008 involved the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's efforts to keep enough water in the Chattahoochee and Apalachicola rivers to keep endangered species alive during an intense drought. The purple bankclimber mussel, fat threeridge mussel, and Gulf sturgeon have all been pushed to the edge of extinction by dams and water diversions. With water levels at a historic low in Lanier Reservoir, Georgia politicians went to the White House and Congress to exempt themselves from the Endangered Species Act in order to keep more water in the reservoir for urban use and very little in the river for endangered species.
Utah is now considering a program that would encourage hunters to use nonlead ammunition in habitat for the endangered California condor, whose biggest threat is lead poisoning from hunter-shot carcasses. Arizona already has such a program, complete with vouchers for free nonlead ammunition, and there's about a 70-percent compliance rate among the state's hunters. But the Center for Biological Diversity knows that's not good enough. Utah, Arizona -- and better yet, the whole country -- should go completely nonlead for the health of condors, golden eagles, other wildlife . . . and humans, too: A study has found that about a third of sampled deer burgers consumed by people were tainted with lead. 
A groundbreaking study on Southern California wildfire, co-authored by the Center for Biological Diversity's expert mapper Curt Bradley, shows that forests with trees killed naturally by beetles and drought won't burn any more severely than areas with fewer dead trees. The study directly counters claims by the timber industry and forestry officials that dead trees helped cause recent devastating Southern California fires. The study also challenges long-held assumptions that harvesting dead trees is necessary to reduce fire severity. 
