amargosa opera house death valley haunted

Joe was soon arrested, but as he sat in jail he was forcefully rounded up by the enraged townsfolk, who had formed a roiling vigilante lynch mob, and hung the criminal up from a telephone pole, where they left his dead body swinging in the wind.Īpparently, after they finally took the body down and buried it a reporter from LA came through and they exhumed the corpse to hang up once again so that he could take a photo. At some point his gun went off, supposedly because he felt offended by Jim’s attitude, and killed the teller.

The story goes that he one day got hopelessly drunk and ordered a bank teller named Jim Arnold to hand over $20 for unclear reasons. In 1908 there was a deputy in town by the name of Joe Simson, also called “Hooch” due to his notorious and shameless consumption of alcohol. One of these was the mining camp of Skidoo, which started as a humble hodgepodge of tents and shacks, but which by the height of its prosperity in 1907 had bloomed into a town of 700, complete with its own bank, saloon, general store, school, newspaper, and brothel. To cater to these miners there were scattered camps built out in the harsh environment, and some of these evolved into small towns. In the early 1900s, this area of California was in the middle of a gold rush, with droves of miners from all over pouring through the unforgiving desert landscape on mad dash towards their dreams of gold and riches beyond their wildest dreams.

Many of the tales of ghostly occurrences in Death Valley revolve around certain places lying out in these badlands that have a dark history of death, and one of these is a long abandoned ghost town out in the middle of nowhere. With some of the highest land temperatures ever recorded on earth, this is a searing, parched, and forbidding land, a place that is at times seemingly as inhospitable and as some far away lifeless planet, and one well deserving of the name “Death Valley.” It a hostile environment, in a world unto its own, that one would not imagine to be inhabited by anything at all, let alone ghosts, but Death Valley certainly has its share of strange stories of the paranormal. Sprawled out over 3,000 square miles of Eastern California near the border with Nevada, in the United States, is the arid moonscape of Death Valley.

Amargosa opera house death valley haunted