Part One Curse of the Silver Head Mine Part one : nosleep (reddit.com)
PART TWO:
When I sat down at the bar I noticed my glass was full. I was about to tell the bartender I did not order a drink, when the man next to me spoke, “Did I hear you correctly that you’re reopening the Silver Head Mine?”
“Yes I’am,” I said, very proud of the fact I was.
“You know that mine is cursed,” the man said.
I blew air out of my nostrils and replied with, “There are no such things as curses.” The man slammed his drink down on the bar in anger and frustration.
“Any miner worth their salt in this area knows the story of the Silver Head Mine, but you’re not from around here are you?” Before I could even reply to this man sitting next to me, he began the story, “It all started back in 1869,” I chuckled in my own head and thought, ‘69 nice.’
“A man by the name of George Ravenswood started that mine. The mine went down deep til it struck silver. Oh, things were good for a few years. Silver was flowing out of that mine like water from a tap. Now George, his wife, and his only daughter Melanie, were very rich and so was the town. Yes, life was good for everyone. One day the miners were digging out a huge deposit of silver, the biggest one they found yet. They dug this huge cavern in the shape of a dome about six football fields long and about four football fields high at their biggest points. Well there was a cave-in. Fortunately, everyone got out alive but the size of the cave-in caused the surface above to sink into the ground.
Shortly after that, a Native American chief and the tribe’s Shamen approached George and told him that the ground collapsed due to the fact that the mine was the site of their tribe’s burial grounds. They asked George to stop digging in that area and to leave their ancestors’ bones to rest. Henry, in his greed, refused to stop digging as there was a lot more silver to dig in that spot. Well, the Shamen cursed the mine and the Ravenwood family. He placed the curse of the Wiowalks. The Native Americans believe that the Wiowalks were demons from the afterlife, said to suck the soul out of any man, woman, or child at night and only the spirit of the Sun God could stop them.
George just laughed at all this. The collapse caused a delay and he lost profits. As a result he ordered the mine to be open 24 hours a day. As the day shift crew started to work, a powerful earthquake struck and trapped eighteen miners in the cavern they were clearing out. The rest of the day crew did their best to rescue the trapped men. When the sun dipped below the horizon, a shrieking sound could be heard coming from the area of the trapped miners followed by the sound of men calling out for help in pain and terror, then suddenly the cries stopped.
It took the rescue party almost another twelve hours to reach the trapped miners. All that was found were the shriveled up dry husks of the men. Their dark skin stretched tight over the bones, with a look of anguish on each one of their faces. The bodies were brought to the surface for the town doctor to look at. The bodies weighed no more than just a few pounds. When the first body was cut open for an exam, they found all the organs, blood, and even the bone marrow was gone, leaving only the hollow bones on the inside.
George gave the men one hour to grieve and then sent them back into the mine to dig. While the sun was up all was peaceful in the mine and work was normal, when the sun was setting the men came up and the night shift went down. That’s when everything changed. Twenty-eight men went down into the Silver Head Mine that night but only four made it back to the elevator and rode it up to the surface. There they spent the night cowering in fear as the Wiowalks crawled all over the elevator tower trying to get at the men. When dawn was approaching the Wiowalks crawled back into the cave. It was not until the sun was in the sky that the men left the safety of the elevator and ran into town to alert everyone. The Wiowalks were described to the town folks as the lower half of a praying mantis and the upper half of a man. A man with no face, just a wide mouth and no eyes. It has small slits for a nose, bat-like ears, all pale almost translucent white skin with a large tail and a snake rattle at the end that drags along the ground. It has long, rail-thin arms with hands double the size of any normal man. Their hiss is like that of an angry cat hissing at an intruder. The men said that the Wiowalks attacked the workers and that they only made it out because they were only a few steps form the elevator.
When George heard all this his blood began to boil. He gathered a dozen of the best shooters and hunters in town and formed a posse. Then they all went down into the mine, just before sundown. Some of the town folks gathered outside the mine as well. As the sun set, intense gunfire could be heard from inside the mine, then there was silence. They came crawling out of the darkness of the mineshaft like ants out of a nest attacking anyone on the surface. A few of the day shift miners and some town folks hid inside the cook shanty, staying quiet and out of sight as they watched the Wiowalks suck the soul out of each man. They saw the concentrated fire from six men armed with lever action repeating rifles take one of the Wiowalks down before they themself were overrun and taken down.
In the morning the survivors warned the surrounding towns. Well all the towns came together pooling their resources and built two heavy iron doors to seal the mine shut. George Ravenwoods wife was struck with grief over the loss of her husband. She died a few days later from a broken heart. The mine was closed til1972 when a father and son bought the land and began to modernize the place to reopen. They took out the steam generator and put a modern one in and hooked up lights and electricity to the mine and all the buildings. Before they could finish and open up the mine for mining, they went missing. Some say it was a lizard monster with purple eyes but who knows.’
I began to slow clap. “Wow, bravo, that’s a very good story,” I said in a sarcastic tone. “Question for you though. If this is true, then what happened to Melanie? Someone from that family must still be alive.
The man replied with, “Melanie became known as the Black Widow Bride. Some say it was the Native American curse stopping her from marrying or the phantom of Henry Ravenswood himself making sure no one got his wealth. Every person Melanie married ended up dead just a few days after the wedding. The Ravenwood Manor sits on top of the big hill far away from here, dilapidated and abandoned. As for Melanie, she was run out of town. Last anyone heard she changed her name to Constance and moved to New Orleans, but I bet the curse still followed her.”
“Well I guess my property is kinda not normal then,” I said.
The man replied with, “Naw, there’s this guy named Cole. He lives about ten miles from you. That guy’s property isn’t normal.”
“Well as much as I would love to hear that story,” I said as I stood up, “I’m going to take my $500 go buy a bottle of Jack and party back at my place. In a week or so I will open that mine.”
As I was walking out, the man shouted to me, “Hey Mark,” now this froze me mid step as I never gave this man my name. I turned and croaked out, “Yyyesss?”
The man took a shot of alcohol and said to me, “ Wealth doesn’t make you a successful man, it’s what a man does with his wealth that defines him. Now greed on the other hand; the need to be wealthy can make you make bad decisions, decisions that can cause death and not necessarily your own. You do your best to heed my advice and not to open that mine.”
I began walking back to my camper on my property. I stopped at the local liquor store and got a bottle of Jack and took long pulls from it as I walked. It took me over an hour to get home. Normally it’s a thirty minute walk. The difference tonight was staggering.
Half the bottle got drained when I stumbled back towards the mine, I walked onto the iron doors and just as the sun began to set I started jumping and stomping on them. I began to shout out loud in my inebriated state, “Wiowalks *hichup* CoMe HeRe Weiwalks *hichup* Wee wee walKs haahahaha wee wee hahaha, ballz hahaha” *hiccup.*
I fell onto the doors drunkenly laughing, my bottle of Jack landing next to the small crack between the doors. I bent down to grab it muttering, “Dang it, I spilled my booze.” I could just make out the faint sound of scratching like two rocks rubbing together when out of the darkness of the mine two bony, pale hands reached between the crack of the door and tried to force the doors open. The chain and lock clanged and they went taut. The doors slid about six inches open with such force that in my drunkenness I stumbled off the doors and onto the ground. I sat up and saw the two white, almost translucent hands, grab the bottle of Jack and pull it into the mine. “HeY ThaTS Me alcH *Hickup* Hol yoUr taking.” I put my hands up like an old timey boxer from the 1920s. “Il FigHt yoU for It CoMe *hickup* on You Wee wee.” That was the last thing I said before I fell back down and passed out.
I woke up to the sun high overhead. My mouth was dry, as if I had been eating cotton balls all night. My head was pounding like it had its own heart beat, my arms, legs, and face were so sunburned that I matched the color of a lobster. I rolled over onto my stomach and got on all fours and proceeded to vomit up the contents of my stomach. When I expelled the last of my wings and whisky from last night, I spit out the last of the thick abomination. I got up and staggered over to my trailer which I moved closer to the logging camp some time ago. I walked inside, grabbed a bottle of water and greedly chugged it down. I made that lip smacking ‘aaaa’ sound in satisfaction then promptly opened up the trailer door and vomited up the water and stomach acid concoction, the color closely resembling chicken noodle soup broth.
I spent the next few hours laying on my bed sipping water mixed with hangover powder. Anytime I’d pick my head up more then a few inches from my pillow it would feel like my brain was trying to force its way out of my skull. When the throbbing in my head got down to a more tolerable level, I started looking up numbers of mines to call to see if I could get anyone out here to look at the elevator and get it working.
I used the landline phone in the cabin and called well over a dozen mines. Most places said “sure” but when I told them it was the elevator at the old Silver Head Mine most of them quickly changed their answer to no. Some just laughed and two even hung up on me. I finally got a hold of someone who would look at the elevator. They said they do small commercial elevators but would give it a look over. They mentioned that it wouldn’t be for a few days. I spent the next couple of days cleaning up the logging camp, trying to make it look as presentable as possible, and thinking about what I saw. The old man’s story resounded in my mind. I finally convinced myself that in my state of drunkenness I’d imagine the doors moving and I just slipped and fell due to the fact that I was drunk. As for the old man’s warning, he was just trying to scare me with some urban legend.
I doused the rollers and tracks the iron doors sat on with WD-40 til the squeaking stopped and the doors rolled freely. The last thing to do was to cut the chain off the door but I was still hesitant to do so. The day before the elevator maintenance tech was going to show, I called my buddy who is a lawyer and had him write up a legal waiver for people who would go into the mine to sign. This was basically stating that no one could sue me if something bad happened. I also had him put a section in there about no one being allowed in the mine after sunset which he thought was weird but did not argue. After he emailed it to me he asked me a question I did not know the answer to. He asked how deep the mine is. I said I don’t know but I think I know how I’m going to find out.
I went to the construction site of the houses that I wanted to build. I grabbed two cinder blocks, a wooden rod and 2,000 yards of rope on a spool. It was the yellow plastic kind that everyone just seemed to have but no one can remember buying. I fired up the mine generator as it was getting close to sundown. ‘Man’ I thought to myself, ‘I really need to do this kind of crap during the day.’ I set up the cinder blocks parallel to each other. I put the wooden rod through the spool of rope and then put both ends of the wooden rod in the hole of each cinder block. It sort of resembles the winch on the front of a truck. I took a one pound kettlebell and tired it to the rope. Before I dropped it, I looked down the shaft and saw that there were lights on inside. Well the old man was telling the truth, they did put lights in the mine. Even with the lights, it was still too far down to see the bottom. I took a pull from my bottle of vodka and pushed the kettlebell down the opening in the door. In no time it hit terminal velocity and I used my shoe to slow it to a stop. Realizing that I can’t just let this thing free fall, I had one hand on the spool and the other on the vodka bottle and slowly lowered the weight down the shaft and took pulls from the bottle. All of a sudden the rope went slack. I pulled some rope up and released it a few times to make sure it was not hung up on something. A slight clang clang clang could be heard after I released the rope. Satisfied it was at the bottom of the shaft I looked around for something to mark that section of rope.
My thinking was that I can measure how deep the mine is and this will also allow me to make sure the mine was not flooded. I cursed my stupidity when I realized I left the marker in the trailer. I took a couple steps away from the spool when it started to move. It was slow at first then got faster and faster. Then BAM, it was off to the races. The rope was spooling out a lot faster than it was going in free fall. Smoke started to come out of the each end of the spool as friction between the spool and the rod was enough to burn the wood. The rope reached the end of the spool and went tight with a twang that echoed through the shaft. Wood smoke hung faintly in the air, followed by a cracking sound when the wooden rod snapped in two. The spool, now empty of its rope, except the end that was secured to the spool itself, clanged off the iron doors. Then came a sight that freaked me out. The spool began to slide to the left all the way to the end of the doors and then all the way to the right as if some unseen force was sliding it around.
The rope broke with a loud bang. I ran to push the doors closed. Closing what little gap between the doors there was, I stared at the two massive iron doors. I looked at the remaining vodka in the bottle and took one very long pull from it, letting the clear harsh liquid do its thing. I began walking back and forth trying to figure out what happened. “Think, think, think,” I said out loud. “Had to be a rock slide, yeah that’s it, some rock must have fallen off the side of the shaft, got entangled in the rope and pulled it down. Yeah, yeah that’s it. When the rock got caught it caused the rope to swing side to side.” I snapped my fingers. “Yep that’s it. Ain’t no Wiowalks. It’s all in your head,” I said and took another swig of vodka. “Oh man, maybe I can market this creepy story for Halloween. I can see the sign now ‘Come one, come all to the cursed Silver Head Mine! Scary tour available every weekend in October,’ Cheers to me,” I said and raised the bottle of vodka in the air and downed the rest of it.
The next day as I was nursing what little hangover I had, the elevator tech showed up. I walked him over to the small elevator shack next to the big metal tower. He looked around and got to work. He came out a few hours later looking very dirty and said, “Well I greased the bearing and the cable. They are in very good shape. The hydraulic brakes and the hoses look worse. Those will need to be replaced within a year or two.” He walked me into the control room and showed me a lever that said ‘up’ and ‘down’ and a red button that said ‘emergency stop.’ He pulled on the down lever and the generator, which was already on, growled a little louder under the load. With a whining noise, the elevator moved down and made a loud clang against the iron doors. The elevator tech moved the lever to up and the elevator moved up.
The tech explained how it all worked and I’m not going to explain it all. The short story is that the elevator runs on a track that goes all the way down and there are two ways to operate the elevator. The buttons on the inside are the override controls. When activated, the override controls located in the elevator shack override the controls in the elevator itself. There is also a big hydraulic brake similar to a car’s disk brakes but on a much bigger scale. The gravity breaks the two metal balls attached to a spinning shaft that when spun too fast it gets expanded out and activates the brakes. The tech told me that this part was missing. I looked at the big spool of cable. It read, ‘1,000 yards’ on the side.
“Hey, is there really 1,000 yards of cable on this?” I asked the tech.
The tech responded with, “Well no.” This caused me to relax. The tech went on. “There’s probably like 1,000 yards plus three to five yards of extra cable to account for shrinking and expanding in the cold and heat.” The tech wished me farewell and left me with the thought of how 2,000 yards of rope could possibly be all used up on a hole in the ground no more than 1,000 yards deep. I drowned my confusion in a bottle of coconut rum and stumbled my way into the old mining boss’s cabin. I then staggered my way up the stairs and passed out in the chair.
I woke up to darkness surrounding the cabin on all sides and the cracking glow of fire coming from the ground floor. I slowly rose from my seat and heard the ring of a telephone from below me. I quietly made my way down the steps and heard a voice yelling, “I don’t care how many men it takes to clear that cave-in, get it done and keep digging.” I could see the back of a man. He was wearing a cloak and a top hat. He slammed the yellow phone down on the receiver and then turned to look at me. His face was just a bleached white skull. As his dark eye holes looked up at me he let out a hellish laugh and flew towards me.
End of Part Two