The Lander Bar Ghost

Last summer (2004) my sister and I worked a graveyard shift as "cleaning crew" for what’s known here in Lander, Wyoming as the "Coalter Block" of Main street.

Coalter block is at the edge of downtown, nearer the Police station and McDonalds. There is on this particular side of the street, a fancy pants restaurant called "Cowfish", a microbrewery attached to that, "Snake River Brewery", then through a hops covered patio, to a huge deck covered with heated lamps and picnic tables, into the "Gannett Grill" (So named after one of our most fabulous mountain peaks), the "Gannett" is also attached by great big old sliding wood, barn doors, (same building) to sort of climber’s pub, named "The Lander Bar".

The Lander Bar has been a bar, a pub, a saloon, a drinking facility anyways for decades upon decades. It has been noted at the chamber of commerce here in Lander that we have had more than our fair share of outlaws up on those very same stools that the Lander Bar still uses to this very moment that I’m writing this.

My sister and I would generally arrive for work around ten-thirty at night, start with the Cowfish and by the time we’d be ready for the Lander Bar it would be somewhere around 2am. We would help stack stools with the bartender who would in turn usually thank us and leave us to clean up their mess, every night. We would each have our own "thing" to do, as she swept, I mopped behind her, we traded responsibilities. And as the interludes would become increasingly harder to withstand or to understand, at such a late hour, we would each night work closer and closer together in each task, in each room.

Every night something would happen, and after a few months we were pretty tense. We were doing everything we could think of to just get through another evening of work without something crazy interrupting our groove. One particular evening we read online somewhere that if you offer fresh flowers to a ghostly entity, they will appreciate it and leave you in peace. Well... I think one of the ghosts liked my sister’s flowers so much they shriveled up within seconds! before our very eyes! and it kept touching her lower back on several occasions. Turning on and off lights, strumming a guitar on the wall, muddy boot-prints over our freshly mopped floors, radio noise from midair, cold breezes in strange ares of the room... And then it began taunting her with the playing of a juke box song (all the power was OFF~ we checked) called "River’s Edge" by Johnny Cash. Yeah that was freaky, can you recall what the words are to that song? I most certainly can.

And then there was a door up at the top of a saloon style, sorta lofty stairwell. It would pop open after being locked, constantly. My sister went up to close it a few times. The last time I remember very well. She was scared, I was scared, She was taking each step back down from having closed the door saying, "There is now no condemnation..." (or some verse that basically told the entity to bUg~Off) and she was looking straight at me and I was looking back at her as she took each step down...with two shadows following her, but off in timing by about two seconds. I tried not to look at it, I tried so that my sister wouldn't try to run and fall down the stairs.

One night, I was between the two (Gannett and Lander Bar) in a hardwood floored dance area of the saloon. I was trying as usual to ignore some unexplainable stuff going on in my head, I was just wanting to FINISH so I could get out of there, when I heard something, looked up, and in the second I looked up I saw two green smokey blurs up hovering in the corner above a pool table, At first glance it was as if the two blurry, smokey things had a relationship, like one protected the other, Then a loud bark noise, (I cannot explain that noise, so I wont try) and a there he was, he musta been 8-9 feet tall. A man in an old duster and tall black cowboy hat is directing his howel at the two in the corner. I cannot tell a lie, I screamed so loud, and started crying. Sounds that we heard, unpleasant touching, pulling things out of our pockets right in front of our very eyes.

After further investigating the building history, we learned that hundreds of women lived in subjugation upstairs, bought and sold...black, AND white slavery. There was at one time a mass suicide on account of the women that longed for escape. There are photos still up there in the bar of people that lived and died there in that bar. There is an old vacant motel upstairs that is kept in it’s natural state with the exception of an office in one room and a few dozen extra chairs kept in another room. A man later hung himself upstairs in the same room the ladies took their lives at least 50 years after. In the 70’s a woman who was always complaining of the pestering ghosts in the basement, had a heart attach there, in that same basement. The locals have stories upon stories of their own accounts of these entities and they say it doesn't stop there. It’s in ALL the old buildings around town.

In my own heart I know they are there.